Galilee

PART FOUR. The Prodigal's Tide

Last night I had a visit from Marietta. She brought me some cocaine, which she said she'd acquired in Miami and was of the very best quality. She also brought me a bottle of Benedictine, along with instructions on how to dissolve the drug in the liquor, so as to make, she promised, a potent concoction. It was time we went out adventuring together, she said; and this would put me in the perfect mood. I told her I couldn't go anywhere. There were too many ideas in my head; threads of my story which I had to keep from becoming knotted up.

"You'll work better after a little play," she pointed out.

"I'm sure you're right, but I'm still going to say no."

"What's the real reason?" she demanded.

"Well," I said, "the fact is… I'm about to start writing about Galilee. And I'm afraid if I stop now-before I face the challenge-I may not want to start again."

"I don't understand why," Marietta remarked. "I would have thought it would be something wonderful to write about him."

"Well I find the prospect intimidating."

"Why?"

"He's been so many people in his life. He's done so much. I'm afraid I won't capture him. He'll just become a cluster of contradictions."

"Then maybe that's what he is," she remarked, sensibly enough.

"People will still think the error's mine," I protested.

"Oh Eddie, it's only a book."

"It is not… only a book. It's my book. And it's a chance to tell something nobody else has ever told."

"All right, all right," she said, showing her palms in surrender, "don't get yourself stirred up. I'm sure it's going to be brilliant. There."

"I don't want to hear that. You'll make me self-conscious."

"Oh Lord. Well then what can I say?"

"Absolutely nothing. You can just leave me to get on with it."

Even then I had not told her everything. Yes, I was fearful of the subject that lay before me-of Galilee-and was nervous that if I once lost the flow of my story I would not find it easy to return to it with the prospect of his appearance looming. But I was more fearful still of accompanying Marietta out beyond the perimeters of the house; of going back into the world after so many years. I was afraid, I suppose, of finding whatever lay out there now so overwhelming that I'd be like a lost child. I'd weep, I'd shake, I'd wet my pants. God knows, ridiculous as all these thoughts must seem to you, who live out there in the midst of things and presumably take all you see and experience for granted, they were very real concerns to me. I had been, you must remember, a kind of willing prisoner of L'Enfant for so long that I had become like a man who has passed the bulk of his life in a tiny cell, and when he is released-though he has dreamed of the open sky for decades-cowers at the sight of it, in terror of being unconcealed by his prison walls.

In short, Marietta left me in a foul mood, feeling as though there was no comfort anywhere tonight. If I stayed, I faced Galilee. If I went, I faced the world. (Which implies, now I read it back, that Galilee is all the world is not, and vice versa. Unintentionally, I may have said something true about him there.)

As much to put off the moment when I had to return to the text I decided to experiment with the makings of the aphrodisiac Marietta had left me. Just as she had instructed, I poured out a measure of Benedictine into a cordial glass, and then, opening the little bag of cocaine, some of which was powdery, some of which was lumpen, I selected a sizeable nugget and dropped it into the liquor, stirring it around with my pen. It didn't entirely dissolve; the result was a slightly cloudy liquor. I toasted my text, there on the desk before me, and downed the mixture. It burned my throat, and I instantly thought I'd made an error. I sat down, my eyes watering. I could feel the track of the liquor all the way down my esophagus, or so I imagined, then seeping over the wall of my stomach, still burning.

"Marietta …" I growled. Why did I ever listen to a word that damn dyke said? She was a liability. But I'd no sooner uttered her name than the drug began to take its effect. I felt a welcome enlivening of my limbs; and a kind of brightening of my thoughts, a quickening.

I got up from my desk, feeling a rush of strength in my lower limbs. I needed to get out of my room for a while, out into the balmy evening. I needed to stride awhile beneath the chestnut trees; fill my head with the scents of dusk. Then I could come back to my desk refreshed, ready to tackle the task of Galilee.

Before I went I mixed myself another cordial glass to brimming, with a somewhat larger pebble of cocaine dissolved therein. Rather than drink it down then and there I took it with me, down the stairs and out, via a side door, onto the lawn. It was a beautiful evening-calm and sweet. The mosquitoes were out in force, but the coke and brandy had rendered me indifferent to their assaults. I wandered through the trees to the place where the cultivation of the grounds is relinquished to the glorious disorder of the swamp. The honeyed smells of garden flowers give way here to ranker scents: to the mingled fragrances of rot and stagnancy.

My eyes gradually became better accustomed to the starlight and by the glitter of those distant suns I was able to see some considerable distance between the trees. I watched the alligators on the banks, or moving through the laval waters; I watched the bats passing overhead, weaving their way between the branches in great multitudes.

Please realize that the pleasure I took in all this-the night animals, the rotted trees, the general miasma-had nothing to do with the cocaine. I have always enjoyed sights and species that the common throng would think of as unsavory, even signs of evil. Some of this enjoyment is aesthetic; but part comes out of the kinship I feel with unprettified nature, being as I am, a good example of same. I smell more rank than sweet, I look more degenerate than newly budded.

So, anyway; there I was, wandering at the edge of the lawn, surveying the swamp before me, and taking no little pleasure in the sight. I had carried my cordial glass down thus far without sipping a drop from it (sometimes the best of a drug-as with so much else-lies not in the consumption, but in the anticipation of the consumption). Now I took a mouthful, and swallowed it down. It was quite considerably stronger than the first draught. Even as it slid down my throat I seemed to feel my body responding to its presence: the same agitation in my limbs as I'd felt before, the same quickening of my thoughts. I've heard it said that this quickening is purely an illusion; that all the cocaine is doing is tricking the mind into believing it's performing mental gymnastics, when all it's doing is tripping over itself. I beg to differ. I've enjoyed some fine intellectual sport riding the white powder, and I've come away from the exercise with ruminations that stood the test of straight study.

But tonight I could not have had an intellectual exchange with someone if my life had depended upon it. Perhaps it was the potent mixture of cocaine and Benedictine; perhaps it was the fact of being out here in the wilderness alone; perhaps it was simply a readiness in me, but I found myself aroused. My head throbbed pleasantly, my heart beat hard in my breast, as though preparing itself for something, and my cock, which, excepting the visit from Cesaria, had been quiescent for several months, had risen up in my baggy pants, and was nuzzling at my fly in the hope of release.

My desire had no object, let me say; real or imagined. Marietta's concoction had simply given my body a wake-up call, and its first thoughts, now that it was awake, were sexual. I laughed out loud, perfectly happy with my lot at that moment; not desiring anything more than what I had: the stars, the swamp, the glass in my hand; my heart, and a hard-on. All lovely; and laughable.

Maybe I should return to the desk now, I thought, while

I was still in such a positive frame of mind. If I was brave, and wrote on through my doubts, I could perhaps get the beginnings of Galilee on the page-his skeleton, so to speak-before the confidence the cocaine bestowed passed. I could flesh it out later. What mattered was to begin. And of course if I needed a little more courage along the way, I could always mix another glass of the concoction.

The plan pleased me. I decided to drain the cordial glass there and then, which I did, (tossing the empty glass into the brackish water) and then starting back toward the house. Or so I thought. What became apparent after fifty yards or so was that my mind, enamored of its own aroused state, had misled me, and instead of walking the safe, solid ground of the lawn I was getting deeper into the swamp. This was probably not a wise thing to do, some cautious corner of my mind muttered; but the greater part, being under the influence of powder and brandy, declared that if this was the way my instincts were taking me, then I should obey those instincts, and take pleasure in the journey. The earth was sodden beneath my feet, and relinquished my feet only with a comical sucking sound; the canopy had so thickened overhead that only a fraction of the starlight still made its way through to illuminate the path. And still my instincts took me on, deeper into the thicket. Even in my rush-headed state I knew very well I was daring disaster. This terrain was unsuitable for trekking through in broad daylight, much less at such an hour as this. At any moment the glaucous mud underfoot might give way and I'd be up to my neck in wicked waters, foul and full of alligators.

But what the hell? I had a hard-on to comfort me in extremis; and I would take my death as God's way of telling me I was not the writer I imagined myself to be.

Then, a strange thing. A certainty rose in me that I was not alone here. There was another human presence nearby; I could feel a curious gaze brushing the back of my neck. I stopped walking, and glanced back over my shoulder.

"Who's there?" I said, speaking softly.

I didn't expect a reply (one who comes after a traveler in near total darkness does not usually reply to an inquiry); but to my surprise I got one. It was not in the form of speech however, at least not at first. It came as a kind of fluttering in the murk, as though my unseen companion carried birds in his coat, like a magician. I stared at the motion, trying to make sense of it, and as I was staring I became unaccountably certain that I knew who this was. After decades of exile L'Enfant's sorrowful son, Galilee the wanderer, had come home.

I said his name, barely raising my voice to audibility this time. Again, there came the fluttering, and because my gaze knew where to look I seemed to see him there. He was shaped out of shadow rather than starlight; shadow on shadow. But it was him, no doubt. There are not two faces as beautiful as his on the planet. I wish there were. I wish he were not without equal. But he is, damn him. He's an order of nature unto himself, and the rest of us have to take what little comfort we can from the fact of his unhappiness.

"Are you really here?" I said to him. It would be a strange question, I realize, to ask most people; but Galilee inherited from his mother the ability to send his image where he wishes and having for a moment believed he was here in the flesh I now suspected this agitated form was not the man himself, but a message that he'd willed my way.

This time, I comprehended words in the midst of the flutterings. "No," he said. "I'm a long way off."

"Still at sea?"

"Still at sea."

"So to what do I owe the honor? Are you thinking of coming back home?"

The fluttering became laughter; laughter, but bitter.

"Home?" he said. "Why would I come home? I'm not .welcome there."

"I'd welcome you," I said. "So would Marietta." Galilee grunted. He was plainly unconvinced. "I wish I could see you better," I said to him.

"That's your fault, not mine," the shadow-in-shadow replied.

"What do you mean by that?" I replied, a little testily.

"Brother, I appear to you as clearly as you can bear me to be," Galilee replied. "No more, no less." I assumed he was telling the truth. There was no purpose in his lying to me. "But this is as close to home as I will be getting anytime soon."

"Where are you?"

"Somewhere off the coast of Madagascar. The sea's calm; not a breath of wind. And there are flying fish all around the boat. I put my frying pan over the side and they just jump on into it…" His eyes shone in the murk, as though reflecting back at me some portion of the sunlit sea upon which he was gazing.

"Is it strange?" I asked him.

"Is what strange?"

"Being in two places at one time?"

"I do it all the time," he said. "I let my mind slip away and I go walking round the world."

"What if something were to happen to your boat while your thoughts were off walking?"

"I'd know," he said. "Me and my Samarkand, we understand one another. But there isn't any danger of that happening tonight. It's as calm as a baby's bath. You'd like it out here, Maddox. Once you get out here you have a different perspective on things. You start to let your dreams take over, start to forget the hurts you were done, start not to care about life and death and the riddles of the universe…"

"You missed out love," I said.

"Ah, well, yes… love's another matter." He looked away from me, into the darkness. "It doesn't matter how far you sail, there's always going to be love isn't there? It comes after you, wherever you go."

"You don't sound very happy about that."

"Well, brother, the truth is it doesn't matter whether I'm happy or not. There's no escape for me and that's all there is to it." He reached out his hand. "Do you have a cigarette?"

"No, I don't."

"Damn. Talking about love always makes me want to smoke."

"I'm a little confused," I said. "Suppose I had been in possession of a cigarette…"

"Could I have taken it from you and smoked it? Is that the question?"

"Yes."

"No. I couldn't. But I could have watched you smoke it, and been almost as satisfied. You know how much I enjoy experiences by proxy." He laughed again. This time there was no bitterness, just amusement. "In fact, the older I get-and I feel old, brother, I feel very, very old-the more it seems to me all the best experiences are secondhand, third-hand even. I'd prefer to tell a story about love, or hear one, than be in love myself."

"And you prefer to watch a cigarette being smoked than actually to smoke it?"

"Well… not quite," he sighed. "But I'm almost there. So, to business, brother of mine. Why did you call me?"

"I didn't call you."

"I beg to differ."

"No, truly. I didn't call you. I wouldn't even know how to."

"Maddox," he said, with just a touch of condescension. "You're not listening to me-"

"I'm listening, damn it-"

"Don't raise your voice."

"I'm not raising-"

"Yes you are. You're shouting at me."

"You accused me of not listening," I replied, attempting to keep my tone reasonable even though I wasn't feeling particularly reasonable. I never did in Galilee's presence; that was the simple truth of the matter. Even in the balmy days before the war, before Galilee ran off to seek his fortune in the world, before the calamities of his return, and the death of my wife, and the undoing of Nicodemus, even then-when we'd lived in a place that comes to look paradisiacal in hindsight-we had fought often, and bitterly, over the most insignificant things. All I would have to do was hear a certain tone in his voice-or he hear some unwelcome nuance in mine-and we'd be at one another's throats. The subject at hand was usually an irrelevance. We fought because we were at some profound level antithetical to one another. The passage of years had not, it seemed, mellowed that antipathy. We had only to exchange a few sentences and the old defenses were up, the old anger escalating.

"Let's change the subject," I suggested.

"Fine. How's Luman?"

"As crazy as ever."

"And Marietta? Is she well?"

"Better than well."

"In love?"

"Not at the moment."

"Tell her I asked after her."

"Of course."

"I was always fond of Marietta. I see her face in dreams all the time."

"She'll be flattered."

"And yours," Galilee said. "I see yours too."

"And you curse me."

"No, brother, I don't. I dream we're all back together again, before all the foolishness."

This seemed a particularly inappropriate word for him to use-almost insulting in its lack of gravity. I couldn't help but comment.

"It may have seemed foolishness to you," I said, "but it was a lot more to the rest of us."

"I didn't mean-"

"You went away to have your adventures, Galilee. And I'm sure that's given you a lot of joy."

"Less than you'd imagine."

"You had responsibilities," I pointed out. "You were the eldest. You should have been setting an example, instead of pleasuring yourself."

"Since when was that a crime?" Galilee countered. "It's in the blood, brother. We're a hedonistic family."

(There was no gainsaying this. Our father had been a sensualist of heroic proportions from his earliest childhood. I myself had found in a book of anthropology a story about his first sexual exploits recounted by Kurdish horsemen. They claim proudly that all seventeen of their tribe's founding fathers were sired by my father while he was still too young to walk. Make what you will of that.)

Galilee, meanwhile, had moved onto another matter.

"My mother…"

"What about her?"

"Is she well?"

"It's hard to tell," I said. "I see very little of her."

"Was it she who healed you?" Galilee said, looking down at my legs. Last time he'd seen me I had been an invalid, raging at him.

"I think she'd probably say it was both of us did the work together."

"That's unlike her."

"She's mellowed."

"Enough to forgive me?" I said nothing to this. "Do I take that to mean no?"

"Perhaps you should ask her yourself," I suggested. "If you like I could talk to her for you. Tell her we've spoken. Prepare her."

For the first time in this exchange I saw something more than Galilee's shadow-self. A luminescence seemed to move up through his flesh, casting a cool brightness out toward me, and delineating his form as it did so. I seemed to see the curve of his torso lit from within; up through his throbbing neck to the cave of his mouth.

"You'd help me?" he said.

"Of course."

"I thought you hated me. You had reason enough."

"I never hated you, Galilee. I swear."

The light was in his eyes now; and spilling down his cheeks.

"Lord, brother…" he said softly "… it's a long time since I cried."

"Does it mean so much to you to come home?"

"To have her forgive me," he said. "That's what I want, more than anything. Just to be forgiven."

"I can't intercede for you there," I said.

"I know."

"All I can do is tell her you'd like to see her, and then bring you her answer."

"That's more than I could have expected," Galilee said, wiping away his tears with the back of his hand. "And don't think I don't know that I have to ask your forgiveness too. Your sweet lady Chiyojo-"

I raised my hand to ward off whatever he was going to say next. "I'd prefer we didn't…"

"I'm sorry."

"Anyway, it isn't a question of forgiveness," I replied. "Both of us made errors. Believe me, I made as many as you did."

"I doubt that," Galilee replied, the sourness that had first marked his speech returning. He hates himself, I thought. Lord, this man hates himself. "What are you thinking?" he said to me.

I was too confounded to admit the truth. "Oh…" I said. "Nothing important."

"You think I'm ridiculous."

"What?"

"You heard me. You think I'm ridiculous. You imagine I've been strutting around the world for the last God knows how many years fucking like a barnyard cock. What else? Oh yes, you think I never grew up. That I'm heartless. Stupid probably." He stared at me with those sealit eyes. "Go on. I've said it for you now. You may as well admit it."

"All right. Some of that's true. I thought you didn't care. That's what I was going to write: that you were heartless and-"

"Write?" he said, breaking in. "Where?"

"In a book."

"What book?"

"My book," I said, feeling a little shiver of pride.

"Is this a book about me?"

"It's about us all," I said. "You and me and Marietta, and Luman and Zabrina-"

"Mother and Father?"

"Of course."

"Do they all know you're writing about them?" I nodded. "And are you telling the truth?"

"It's not a novel, if that's what you mean. I'm telling the truth as best I can."

He mused on this for a moment. The news of my work had clearly unsettled him. Perhaps he feared what I would uncover; or already had.

"Before you ask," I said, "it's not just our family I'm writing about."

By the expression on his face it was clear that this went to the heart of his anxiety. "Oh Christ," he murmured. "So that's why I'm here."

"I suppose it must be," I said. "I was thinking about you and-"

"What's it called?" he said to me. I looked at him blankly. "Your book, dummy. What's it called?"

"Oh… well, I'm toying with a number of titles," I said, pretending my best literary tone. "There's nothing definite yet."

"You realize I know a lot of details that you could use."'

"I'm sure you do."

"Stuff you really can't do without. Not if it's to be a true account."

"Such as?"

He gave me a sly smile. "What's it worth?" he said. It was the first time in this meeting I'd seen a glimpse of the Galilee I remembered; the creature whose confidence in his own charms had once been inviolate.

"I'm going to Mama for you, remember?"

"And you think that's worth all the information I could give you?" he countered. "Oh no, brother. You have to do better than that."

"So what do you want?"

"First, you have to agree."

I just said, "To what?"

"Just agree, will you?"

"This is going round in circles."

Galilee shrugged. "All right," he said. "If you don't want to know what T. know, then don't. But your book's going to be the poorer for it, I'm warning you."

"I think we'd better stop this conversation here and now," I said. "Before it goes bad on us."

Galilee regarded me with great gravity, a frown biting into his brow. "You're right. I'm sorry."

"So am I," I said.

"We were doing so well, and I got carried away."

"So did I."

"No, no, it was entirely my fault. I've lost a lot of social graces over the years. I spend too much time on my own. That's my problem. It's no excuse but…" The sentence trailed away. "Well, shall we agree to talk again?"

"I'd like that."

"Maybe around this time tomorrow? Will that give you sufficient opportunity to talk to Mama?"

"I'll do what I can," I said.

"Thank you," Galilee said softly. "I do think of her, you know. Of late, I've thought of her all the time. And the house. I think of the house."

"Have you visited?"

"Visited?"

"I mean, you could come looking and nobody would know."

"She'd know," he said. Of course she would, I thought. "So no," he went on. "I haven't dared."

"I don't think you'll find it's changed."

"That's good," he said, with a tentative smile. "So much else… almost everything, in fact… everywhere I go… things change. And never for the better. Places I used to love. Secret places, you know? Corners of the world where nobody ever went. Now there's pink hotels and pleasure cruises. Once in a while I've tried to scare people off." His shape shuddered as he spoke, and in the midst of his beauty I saw another form, far less attractive. Silver slits for eyes, and leathery lips drawn back from teeth like needles. Even knowing that he meant me no harm, the sight distressed me. I looked away. "See, it works," he said, not without pride. "But then as soon as my back's turned the rot creeps in again." I glanced up at him; his rabidity was in retreat. "And before you know it…"

"Pink hotels-"

"-and pleasure cruises." He sighed. "And everything's spoiled." He glanced up at the sky. "Well I should let you go. It won't be long till morning, and you've got a day's work ahead of you."

"And you?"

"Oh I don't sleep that much," he replied. "I'm not sure that divinities ever do."

"Is that what you are?"

He shrugged, as though the issue of his godhood were neither here nor there. "I suppose so. Ma and Pa are as pure a form of deity as this world will ever see, don't you think? Which makes you a demigod, if that makes you feel any better." I laughed out loud. "Goodnight then, brother," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

He started to turn from me, and in so doing seemed to eclipse himself. "Wait," I said. He glanced back at me.

"What?"

"I know what you were going to ask for," I said.

"Oh do you?" he said with a little smile. "And what was that?"

"If you gave me information for the book you were going to demand some kind of control over what I wrote."

"Wrong, brother," he said, pivoting back on his heel and eclipsing himself again. "I was only going to ask you to call the book Galilee." His eyes glittered. "But you'll do that anyway," he said. "Won't you?"

And then he was gone, back to whatever sea glittered in his eyes.

Need I tell you that Galilee did not come back the following night as he'd promised? This despite the fact that I spent most of the day seeking an audience with Cesaria in order to plead his case. In fact, I failed to find her (I suspect she knew my purpose, and was deliberately avoiding me). But anyway, he didn't turn up, which I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at. He always had an unreliable nature, except in matters of the heart, where everyone else is unreliable. There he was divinely constant.

I told Marietta what had transpired, but she already knew. From Luman, who had happened to see me there by the swamp, apparently having a conversation with a shadow, and passing through so many moods, he said, that he knew I could only be talking to one person.

"He guessed it was Galilee?" I said.

"No, he didn't guess," Marietta said. "He knew because he had conversations like that himself."

"You mean Galilee's been here before?" I said.

"So it seems," she said. "Many times, in fact."

"At Luman's invitation?"

"I assume so. He wouldn't confirm it either way. You know how he gets when he thinks he's being interrogated. Anyway it doesn't really matter whether Luman invited him or not, does it? The point is, he was here."

"Not in the house though," I said. "He was too afraid of mother to go near the house."

"He told you that?"

"You don't believe it?"

"I think it's perfectly possible he's been spying on us all for years without our knowing it. The little shit."

"I think he prefers the word divinity."

"How about divine little shit?" Marietta said.

"Do you really dislike him so much?"

"I don't dislike him at all. It's nothing so simple. But we both know our lives would have been a damn sight happier if he'd never come home that night."

That night. I must tell you about that night, sometime soon. I'm not being deliberately coy, you understand. But it's not easy. I'm not entirely certain I know what happened the night Galilee came home. There were more visions and fevers and acts of delirium at work that night than had been unleashed on this continent since the arrival of the Pilgrims. I could not tell you with any certainty what was real and what was illusion.

No, that's a lie. There are some things I'm certain of. I know who died that night, for one thing: the desperate men who made the mistake of accompanying Galilee onto this sacred ground, and paid the price of trespass. I could take you to their graves right now, though I haven't ventured near them in a hundred and thirty years. (Even as I write this the face of one of these men, a man called Captain Holt, comes into my mind's eye. I can see him in his grave, his form in such disarray it seemed every bone in his body, even to the littlest, had been shattered.)

What else am I certain of? That I lost the love of my life that night. That I saw her in my father's arms-oh Lord, that's a sight that I've prayed to have removed from me; but who listens to the prayers of a man sinned against by God?-and that she looked at me in her last moments and I knew she'd loved me, and I would never be loved with such ferocity again. All this I know is incontestably true. If you like, it's history.

But the rest? I couldn't tell you whether it was real or not. There was so much high emotion unleashed that night, and in a place such as this rage and love and sorrow do not remain invisible. They exist here as they existed at the beginning of the world, as those primal forces from which we lesser things take our purpose and our shape.

That night-with senses raw and skins stripped-we moved in a flood of visible feeling, which made itself into a thousand fantastic forms. I don't expect to see such a spectacle ever again; nor do I particularly want to. For every part of my being that comes from my father, and takes pleasure in chaos for its own sake, there is a part that makes me my mother's child, and wants tranquillity; a place to write and think and dream of heaven. (Did I tell you that my mother was a poet? No, I don't believe Idid. I must quote you some of her work, later.)

So, after all my claiming I could not find the courage to describe that night, I just gave you a taste of it. There's so much more to tell, of course, and I'll tell it as time goes by. But not just yet. These things have to be done by degrees.

Trust me; when you know all there is to know, you'll wonder that I was even able to begin.

V i

Where did I last leave Rachel? On the road, was it?, heading back into Manhattan contemplating the relative merits of Neil Wilkens and her husband?

Oh yes, and then thinking that they were both in their secret hearts sad men, and wondering why. (My own theory is that Neil and Mitch were in no way unusual; that they were unhappy in their souls because many men, perhaps even most, are unhappy in their souls. We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.)

Anyway, she came back into Manhattan determined to tell her husband that she could not bear to live as his wife a moment longer, and it was time for them to part. She hadn't worked out the exact words she'd use; she preferred to trust to the moment.

That moment was delayed by a day. Mitchell had left for Boston the night before, she was told by Ellen, one of Mitchell's phalanx of secretaries. Rachel felt a twinge of anger that he'd departed this way; wholly irrational, of course, given that she'd done precisely the same thing a few days earlier. She called the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, where he always stayed. Yes, he was a guest there, she was informed; but no, he wasn't in. She left a short message, telling him she was back at the apartment. He was obsessive about messages, she knew, usually picking them up on the hour, every hour. The fact that he didn't call back could only mean that he was choosing not to speak to her; punishing her, in other words. She resisted the temptation to call him again. She didn't want to give him the satisfaction of imagining her doing exactly what she was doing, sitting by the phone waiting for him to call her back.

About two in the morning, just as she'd finally fallen asleep, he returned the call. His manner was suspiciously convivial.

"Have you been partying?" she asked him.

"Just a few friends," he replied. "Nobody you'd know. Harvard guys."

"When are you coming home?"

"I'm not quite sure yet. Thursday or Friday."

"Is Garrison with you?"

"No. Why?"

"I just wondered."

"I'm having some fun if that's what you're getting at," Mitch said, his tone losing its warmth, "I'm sick of being a workhorse, just so that everybody stays rich."

"Don't do it for me," she said.

"Oh don't start that-"

"I mean it. I-"

"-was quite happy with nothing," he said, doing a squeaky imitation of her voice.

"Well I was."

"Oh for Christ's sake, Rachel. All I said was, I was working too hard…"

"So that we could all stay rich, you said."

"Don't be so fucking sensitive."

"Don't swear at me."

"Oh Jesus."

"You're drunk, aren't you?"

"I told you, I've been partying. I don't have to apologize for that. Look, I don't want to have this conversation any more. We'll talk when I get back."

"Come back tomorrow."

"I said I'd come Thursday or Friday."

"We've got to have a proper conversation, Mitch, and we've got to have it sooner rather than later."

"A conversation about what?"

"About us. About what we do. We can't go on like this."

There was a long, long silence. "I'll come back tomorrow," he said finally.

While Rachel and Mitchell played out their melancholy domestic drama, there were other events occurring, none of them so superficially noteworthy as the separation of lovers, which would in the long term prove to have far more tragic consequences.

You'll remember, perhaps, that I made mention in passing of Loretta's astrologer? I don't know whether the fellow was a fake or not (though I have to think that any man who sells his services as a prophet to rich women is not driven by any visionary ambition). I do know, however, that his predictions proved-after a labyrinthine fashion that will become apparent over the course of the next several chapters-to become true. Would they have done so had he kept them to himself? Or was his very speaking of them part of the great plot fate was laying against the Gearys? Again, I cannot say. All I can do is tell you what happened, and leave the rest to your good judgment.

Let me begin with Cadmus. The week Rachel returned from Dansky was good for the old man. He managed a short car trip out to Long Island, and had spent a couple of hours sitting on the beach there, looking out at the ocean. Two days later one of his old enemies, a congressman by the name of Ashfield who had attempted to start an investigation into the Gearys' business practices in the forties, had died of pneumonia, which had quite brightened Cadmus's day. The illness had been painful, sources reported, and Ashfield's final hours excruciating. Hearing this, Cadmus had laughed out loud. The next day he announced to Loretta that he intended to make a list of all the people who'd attempted to get in his way over the years whom he'd now outlived. Then he wanted her to send it into The Times, for the obituary column: a collective in memoriam for those who would never cross his path again. The conceit had gone out of his head an hour later, but his lively mood remained. He stayed up well past his usual bedtime of ten, and demanded a vodka martini as a nightcap. It was as he sipped it, sitting in his wheelchair looking out on the city, that he said:

"I heard a rumor…"

"What about?" Loretta said.

"You saw that astrologer of yours."

"Yes."

"What did he have to say?"

"Are you sure you should finish that martini, Cadmus? You're not supposed to drink on your medications."

"Actually, it's rather a pleasant feeling," he said, his voice a little slurred. "You were telling me about the astrologer. He told you something grim, I gather."

"You don't believe any of that stuff anyway," Loretta said. "So why the hell does it matter?"

"Was it that terrible?" Cadmus inquired. He studied his wife's face woozOy. "What in God's name did he say, Loretta?"

She sighed. "I don't think-"

"Tell me!" he roared.

Loretta stared at him, amazed that a sound so solid could emanate from a body so frail.

"He said something was about to change all our lives," Loretta replied. "And that I should be ready for the worst."

"The worst being what exactly?"

"I suppose death."

"Mine?"

"He didn't say."

"Because if it's mine…" he reached out and took her hand "… that's not the end of the world. I feel quite ready to be off somewhere restful." His hand went up to her face. "My only concern is you. I know how you hate to be alone."

"I won't be long following you," Loretta said softly.

"Oh now hush. I won't hear that. You've got a good long life ahead of you."

"Not without you I don't."

"There's nothing to be afraid of. I've made very good financial arrangements for you. You'll never want for anything."

"It's not money I'm worried about."

"What then?"

She reached for her cigarettes, fumbling with the packet a moment. "Is there something about this family you've never told me?" she said.

"Oh I'm sure there's a thousand things," Cadmus remarked blithely.

"I'm not talking about a thousand things, Cadmus," Loretta said. "I'm talking about something important. Something you've kept from me. And don't lie to me, Cadmus. It's too late for lies."

"I'm not lying to you," he said. "I meant what I said: there are a thousand things I haven't told you about this family, but none of them, sweet, I swear, none of them is very terrible." Loretta looked somewhat placated. Smiling and stroking her hand, Cadmus quickly capitalized on his success. "Every family has a few unfortunates in its midst. We've got those. My own mother died miserably. But you know that. There was some business done in the Depression that doesn't reflect well on me, but-" he shrugged "-the Good Lord seems to have forgiven me. He granted me beautiful children and grandchildren, and a longer, healthier life than I ever dared hope I'd have. And most of all, He gave me you." He tenderly kissed Loretta's hand. "And believe me, darling, when I tell you there's not a day goes by without my thanking Him for His generosity."

That was more or less the end of the conversation. But it was only the beginning of the consequences of the astrologer's prediction.

The following day, when Loretta was out at her monthly lunch with several philanthropic widows of Manhattan, the old man wheeled himself into the library, locked the door, and took from a certain hiding place behind the rows of leather-bound tomes, all undisturbed by any curious reader, a small metal box, bound with a thin leather thong. His fingers were too weak to untie the knot, so he took a pair of scissors to it, and then lifted the lid. If anyone had witnessed him doing this they would have assumed the box contained some priceless treasure, his manner was so reverential. They would have been disappointed. There was nothing glorious in the box. Just a small book that smelled brown with age, its cover stained, its pages stained, the handwritten lines upon those stained pages faded with the years. And between the pages, here and there, loose sheets of paper, a small fragment of blue cloth, a skeletal leaf that went to motes of grey dust when he tried to pick it up.

He roved back and forth through the book perhaps half a dozen times, pausing for a moment to study the contents of a page, then moving on.

Only when he'd examined it this way did he return to one of the pieces of loose paper and remove it, unfolding it with such delicacy it might have been a living thing-a butterfly perhaps, whose wings he wanted to admire without doing the creature harm.

It was a letter. The hand it was written in was elegant, but the mind shaping the words more eloquent still, the thoughts so compressed it read less like prose than poetry.

My dearest brother, it said. The great griefs of the day have passed, and through the twilight, all pink and gold, I hear the tender music of sleep.

The philosophers are misled, I have come to believe, when they teach us that sleep is death's similitude. It is rather a nightward journey back into our mother's arms, where we may be blessed to hear the lovely rhythm of a slumber song.

I hear it now, even as I write these words to you. And though our mother has been dead a decade, I am returned to her, and she to me, and the world is good again.

Tomorrow, we do battle at Bentonville, and are so greatly outnumbered there is no hope of victory. So forgive me if I do not tell you 1 long to embrace you, for I entertain no such hope, at least in this world.

Pray for me, brother, for the worst is yet to come. And if your prayers are answered, perhaps also the best.

I have ever loved thee.

The letter was signed Charles.

Cadmus studied it for more than a little time; especially the penultimate paragraph. The words made him shake. Pray for me, brother, for the worst is yet to come. There was nothing in this library, in all the great, grim masterworks of the world, that had the power to distress him that these words possessed. He'd not known the letter-writer personally, of course-the battle of Bentonville had been fought in 1865-but he felt a powerful empathy with him nonetheless. When he read the page it was as though he was sitting beside the man as he sat in his tent before that calamitous battle, listening to the rain beating on the canvas, and the forlorn songs of the infantrymen as they huddled about their smoky fires, knowing that the following day a vastly superior force would be upon them.

Earlier in his life, when he'd first become familiar with the journal, and particularly with this letter, Cadmus had made it his business to discover as best he could the circumstances in which it had been written. What he discovered was this: that in March of 1865 the depleted forces of the Rebel States, led by Generals Johnston and Bragg, had been driven across North Carolina, and at a place called Bentonville, exhausted, hungry and despairing, they had dug in to face the might of the North. Sherman had the scent of victory; he knew his opponents would not last much longer. The previous November, he had overseen the burning of Atlanta, and Charleston-brave, besieged Charleston-would very soon fall beneath his assault. There was no hope of victory for the South, and surely every man who made up the forces at Bentonville knew it.

The battle would last three days; and by the standards of that war there was not a great loss of life. A thousand and some soldiers of the Union perished, two thousand and some Confederates. But such numbers mean nothing to a soldier in battle, for he need only die one death.

Cadmus had often thought about going to visit the battleground, which had been left, he'd been told, relatively untouched by time. The Harper house, a modest domicile that stood close by the field, and had been turned into a makeshift surgery during the conflict, still stood; the trenches where the Confederate soldiers had waited for the army of the North could still be lain in. With a little research he could probably have discovered where the officers' tents had been pitched; and sat himself down dose to the place where the letter he held in his hand had been penned.

Why had he never gone? Had he simply been afraid that the threads binding his destiny to that of the melancholy Captain Charles Holt would have been strengthened by such a visit? If so, then he'd denied himself in vain: those threads were getting stronger by the moment. He could feel them wrapped around him now-tightening, tightening-as if to draw his fate and that of the captain into some final embrace. He might not have been so troubled had it only been his life which was affected, but of course that wasn't the case. Loretta's damned astrologer knew more than he realized, with his insinuations of Geary family secrets and predictions of apocalypse. The intervention of almost a hundred and forty years could not provide asylum from what was in the wind; its message carried like a contagion from that distant battlefield.

Pray for me, brother, the captain had written, for the worst is yet to come.

No doubt those words had been true enough when they were written, Cadmus thought, but the passage of time had made them truer still. Crime had mounted upon crime over the generations, sin mounted on sin, and God help them all-every Geary, and child of a Geary, and wife and mistress and servant of a Geary-it was time for the sinners to come to judgment.

The conversation between Rachel and Mitch was surprisingly civilized. There were no raised voices; no tears on either side; no accusations. They simply exchanged disappointments in hushed voices, and agreed, after an hour or so, that they were failing to give one another joy, and that it would be best to part. Their only difference of opinion lay in this: Rachel had come to believe that there was no chance of reviving the marriage, and it would be best to start divorce proceedings immediately, while Mitch begged that they give one another a grace period of a few weeks to turn the decision over and be certain they were doing the right thing. After a little discussion, she said she'd go along with this. What was a few weeks? In the meantime they agreed to keep any discussion of the matter to a very small circle, and not consult lawyers. The moment a lawyer was brought into the picture, Mitch argued, any hope of reconciliation would be at an end. As to living arrangements, they would keep it very simple. Rachel would stay in the Central Park apartment; Mitch would either go back to the mansion or take a suite at a hotel.

They parted with a tentative embrace, like two people made of glass.

The following day, Rachel got a call from Margie. How about lunch, she said; somewhere grotesquely expensive, where they could linger so long over dessert that they could go straight on to cocktails?

"Just as long as we don't talk about Mitch," Rachel said.

"Oh no," Margie said, with a faint air of mystery in her voice, "I've got something much more interesting than him to talk about."

The restaurant Margie had chosen had been open only a few months, but it had already won a spate of four-star reviews, so it was packed, with a line of people all vainly hoping they'd get themselves a table. Inevitably, Margie knew the maitre d' (in a much earlier incarnation, she later explained, he'd been a barman at a little dive she'd frequented in Soho). He treated them both royally, taking them to a table which offered a full view of the room.

"Plenty of people to gossip about," Margie said, surveying the faces before them. Rachel knew a few of them by sight; a couple by name.

"Something for you to drink?" the waiter wanted to know.

"How many martinis do you have?"

"We have sixteen on our list," the waiter replied, proffering the document, "but if you have some particular request…"

"Bring us two very dry martinis to start. Straight up. No olives. And we'll look at the list while you're bringing them."

"I didn't know you could mix so many martinis," Rachel said.

"Well I'm quite sure after the third or fourth you can't tell the difference," Margie said. "Oh look… the table by the window… isn't that Cecil?"

"Yes it is."

The Gearys' lawyer, who was a man in his early sixties, was leaning across the table gazing at a blonde, decorative woman a third his age.

"That's not his wife, I presume?" Rachel said.

"Absolutely not. His wife-what's her name? Phyllis, I believe-looks like our maitre d' in bad drag. No, that's one of his mistresses."

"He has more than one?"

Margie rolled her eyes. "When Cedl shuffles off to heaven, there will be more women at the graveside than are walking Fifth Avenue right now."

"Why?" said Rachel. "I mean, he's so unattractive."

Margie cocked her head a little. "Is he?" she said. "I think he's quite well preserved for his age. And he's fabulously wealthy, which is all a woman like that cares about. She's going to get a little sparkly something before lunch is over. You just watch. She's counting the minutes. Every time his hand gets near his pocket she salivates."

"If he's so rich, why does he go on working? Couldn't he just retire?"

"He only has the family as clients now. And I think he does that out of loyalty to the old man. Garrison says he's very smart. Could have been the best of the best, Garrison says."

"So what happened?"

"The same thing that happened to you and me. He got dragged into the Geary family. And once you're in there's really no way out."

"You promised, Margie. No talking about Mitchell."

"I'm not going to talk about Mitchell. You asked me what happened to Cecil. I'm telling you."

The waiter was back at the table with the martinis. Margie was intrigued to know what a Cajun Martini-number thirteen on the list-was like. The waiter began to describe the recipe, but she stopped him after half a florid phrase.

"Just bring us two," she said.

"You'll have me drunk," Rachel said.

"I need you a little tipsy," Margie said, "for what I'm going to tell you about."

"Oh my Lord."

"What?"

"You were right," Rachel said, nodding across the room in the direction of Cecil's table. Just as Margie had pre- dieted the lawyer had taken out a slim box from his pocket, and was opening it to let the blonde see her reward.

"Didn't I say?" Margie murmured. "Sparkly."

"It used to happen all the time in Boston," Rachel said.

"Oh that's right, you worked in a jewelry store."

"These men would come in and they'd ask me to choose something for their wives. At least they'd say wives, but I got the picture after a few weeks. These were older men, you know-forties, fifties-and they'd always want something for a younger woman. That's why they'd ask me. It was like they were saying: if you were my mistress, what would you like? That's how I met Mitchell."

"Now who's talking about Mitchell? I thought he was verboten."

Rachel drained her martini. "I don't mind. In a way I'd sort of like to talk about him."

"You would?"

"Don't sound so surprised."

"What's to talk about?" Margie said, "He's your husband. If you love him, that's fine. If you don't, that's fine too. Just don't depend on him for anything. Get your own life. That way he hasn't got any power over you. Oh, look, that's a pretty sight." The waiter, who'd appeared with the next round of martinis, thought she meant him, and smiled dazzlingly. "I meant the drinks, honey," Margie said. The smile decayed somewhat. "But you're sweet. What's your name?"

"Stefano."

"Stefano. What do you recommend? Rachel's very hungry, and I'm on a diet."

"The chef's specialty is the sea bass. It's lightly sauteed in pure olive oil with a little cilantro-"

"I think that sounds fine for me. Rachel?"

"I'm in the mood for meat."

"Oh," Margie said, with a cocked eyebrow. "Stefano. The lady wants meat. Any suggestions?"

The waiter momentarily lost his cool. "Um… well we have…"

"Maybe just a steak?" Margie suggested to Rachel.

Stefano looked flustered. "We don't actually serve a straightforward steak. We don't have it on the menu."

"Good Lord," Margie said, thoroughly relishing the young man's discomfort. "This is New York and you don't serve a simple steak?"

"I don't really want steak," Rachel said.

"Well that's not the point," Margie said, perversely. "It's the principle of the thing. Well… do you have anything that can be served rare?"

"We have lamb cutlets which the chef offers with almonds and ginger."

"That's fine," Rachel told him. Grateful to have the problem resolved, Stefano beat a hasty retreat.

"You're mean," Rachel said to Margie once he'd gone.

"Oh, he enjoyed it. Men secretly love to be humiliated. As long as it isn't too public."

"Have you ever thought of writing all this down?"

"All what?"

"Your pithy observations."

"They don't stand up to close scrutiny, honey," she said. "Like me, really. I'm very impressive as long as you don't look too closely." She guffawed at this. "So now, drink up. Number thirteen's really rather good."

Rachel declined. "My head's already spinning," she said. "Will you stop teasing me and tell me what all this is about?"

"Well… it's very simple, really. You need to take a vacation, honey."

"I just came back from-"

"I don't mean a trip home, for God's sake. That's not a vacation, it's a sentence. You need to go somewhere you can be yourself, and you can't be yourself with family."

"Why do I think you've already got something planned?"

"Have you ever been to Hawaii?"

"I stopped over in Honolulu with Mitch, on our way to Australia."

"Horrible," Margie said.

"Australia or Honolulu?"

"Well, actually both. But I'm not talking about Honolulu. I'm talking about Kaua'i. The Garden Island."

"I've never heard of it."

"Oh honey, it's simply the most beautiful place on earth. It's paradise. I swear. Paradise." She sipped her martini. "And it so happens that I know a little house in a little bay on the North Shore which is fifty yards from the water, if that. It's so perfect. Oh you can't imagine. Truly, you can't imagine. I mean I could tell you about it and it'd sound idyllic, but… it's more than that."

"How so?"

Margie's voice had become sultry as- she talked about the house; now it was so quiet Rachel had to lean in to catch what she was saying. "I know this is going to sound silly, but it's a place where there's still just a chance that something… oh shit, I don't know… something magical might happen."

"It sounds wonderful," Rachel said. She'd never seen Margie this way before, and found it strangely moving. Margie the cynic, Margie the lush, talking like a little gkl who'd thought she'd seen wonderland. It almost made Rachel believe she had.

"Who does the house belong to?"

"Ah," she said, raising her index finger over the rim of her glass, and giving Rachel a narrow-eyed smile. "That's the thing. It belongs to us."

"Us."

"The Geary women."

"Really?"

"The men are forbidden to go anywhere near the place. It's an ancient Geary tradition."

"Who started it?"

"Cadmus's mother I believe. She was quite the feminist, in her time. Or it may have been a generation earlier, I don't know. The point is, the house isn't used very much any longer. There's a couple of local people who go every other month and mow the lawn and trim the palm trees, dust a little, but basically the place is left empty."

"Loretta doesn't go?"

"She went just after she and Cadmus first got married. So she said. But now she just stays right here with him, night and day. I think she's afraid he's going to start changing the will behind her back. Oh… speaking of legal matters…" She nodded across the restaurant. Cecil and the blonde were rising from the table. "He's going to have a busy afternoon. She looks like the acrobatic type."

"Maybe she'll just lay back and let him get it over with," Rachel said.

"I know how that feels," Margie replied.

"I hope he doesn't look in our direction," Rachel said as Cecil headed for the door.

"I rather hope he does," Margie said, and as luck would have it at that very instant Cecil glanced back across the restaurant and laid eyes on them. Rachel froze, still hoping Cecil wouldn't recognize them. But Margie, murmuring oh good under her breath, raised her arm, replete with empty martini glass, above her head.

"Now look what you've done," Rachel said. "He's coming over to talk to us."

"Just don't mention Kaua'i," Margie said. "That's our little secret."

"Ladies," Cecil was saying. He'd left the blonde at the door. "I almost missed you, tucked away in the corner."

"Oh you know us," Margie said. "We're the shy, retiring types. Unlike…" she glanced back toward Cecil's girlfriend "… what's her name?"

"Ambrosina."

"Well that's a bit of a mouthful for such a precious little thing," Margie said.

Cecil glanced back at his conquest. "She is precious," he said, with surprising sincerity.

"And extremely blonde," Margie replied, without any apparent irony. "Actress, is she?"

"Model."

"Of course she is. You're helping her get started. How sweet you are."

Cecil's smile had faded. "I must get back to her," he said. He looked over at Rachel. "I heard from Mitchell this morning…" he said. "I'm sorry things aren't going well." He reached up and oh-so-lightly wrapped his hand around Rachel's wrist. "But we'll sort it all out, eh?" Rachel glanced down at his encircling fingers. He removed his hand, his manner effortlessly shifting into the paternal mode. "If there's anything you^ieed, Rachel. Anything at all, to make things easier."

"I'll be fine."

"Oh I know," he said, as though he were a doctor reassuring a dying patient. "You'll be just dandy. But if you need anything…"

"I think she gets the message, Cecil," Margie remarked.

"Yes… well, it's lovely to see you, Rachel… and Margie, always wonderful…"

"Really?"

"Really," Cecil replied, and headed back to his girlfriend, who was looking decidedly pouty.

"I think the drinking's finally catching up with me," Margie said, staring after the lawyer as he put his arm around the blonde and escorted her out.

"Why?"

"I was just looking at Cecil's face, and I thought: I wonder what he's going to look like when he's dead?"

"Oh, that's not very nice."

"Then I thought: well I just hope I'm there to find out." vn i

Rachel called Mitch that evening and told him she'd seen Cecil, pointing out that he'd broken the terms of their agreement by talking to a lawyer. Mitch protested that he hadn't been seeking legal advice. He thought of Cecil as a surrogate father, he said. They'd talked about love, not about the law; to which Rachel couldn't help but observe that she doubted Cecil knew a damn thing about love.

"Don't be mad at me," Mitchell begged. "It was a genuine mistake. I'm sorry. I know it must look like I was going behind your back, but I wasn't. I swear I wasn't."

His whining apology only irritated her further. She wanted to tell him he could take his apology and his lawyer and his whole damn family and go to hell. Instead, she found herself saying something she hadn't planned to say.

"I'm going away for a while," she told him.

The statement surprised her almost as much as it surprised Mitchell; she'd not been aware of making a decision either way about going to Kaua'i.

Mitchell asked her if she was going back home. She said no. Where then? he asked her. Just away, she said. Away from me, you mean, he said. No, she replied, I'm not running away from you.

"Well where the hell are you running?" he demanded.

There was an answer, right there on her tongue, ready to be spoken, but this time she governed herself and said nothing. It was only when the exchange with Mitchell was over, and she was sitting on the balcony, looking over the park and thinking about nothing in particular that the unspoken reply came onto her lips.

"I'm not running away," she murmured to herself, "I'm running toward something…"

She shared this thought with no one, not even Margie. It was silly, on the face of it. She was going off to an island she'd never heard of before, on the suggestion of a woman whose blood was seventy percent alcohol. There was no reason for her to be going, much less to sense any purpose in the journey. And yet she felt it, indisputably, and the feeling made her happy. So what did it matter if the source of the feeling was a mystery? She was grateful to have some measure of lightness back in her heart, and content to take the pleasure in it while it lasted. She knew from experience it could be gone without warning, like love.

Margie made all the arrangements for the trip. All Rachel had to do was be ready to leave the following Thursday, with all her business in New York done and dusted. Once she got to the island, Margie predicted, she wouldn't want to be talking on the telephone. She wouldn't even want to think about the city, or even her friends. There was a different rhythm there; a different perspective.

"I almost feel as though I have to say goodbye to the old Rachel," Margie said, "because believe me, she's not coming back."

"Now you're exaggerating," Rachel said.

"I am not," Margie said. "You'll see. The first couple of days, you'll be restless, and thinking there's nothing to do, there's nobody to gossip about. And then it'll slowly dawn on you that you don't need any of that. You'll be sitting watching the clouds on the mountains, or a whale out at sea, or just listening to the rain on the roof-oh my Lord,

Rachel, it's so beautiful when it rains-and you'll think: I don't need anything I haven't got right now."

It seemed to Rachel each time Margie talked about the place she spoke more lovingly of it.

"How many times have you been there?" she asked.

"Just twice," Margie replied. "But I should never have gone back the second time. That was a mistake. I went for the wrong reasons the second time."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, it's a long story," Margie said. "And it's not important. You've got the first time ahead of you, and that's all that matters."

"So I get to be a virgin again," Rachel said.

"You know, honey, that's exactly right. You're going to be a virgin again."

If Rachel had entertained any last doubts about taking the trip, they evaporated once she got on the plane, settled back in her seat in the first class cabin and took a sip of champagne. Even if the island wasn't all that Margie had advertised it as being-and in truth nothing short of Eden would match up to the promises-it was still good to be going away where she wasn't known; where she could quietly and quirkily be herself.

The first leg of the journey, to Los Angeles, was unremarkable. A couple of glasses of alcohol and she began to feel pleasantly sleepy, and dozed through most of the flight. There was a two-hour stopover in Los Angeles, and she got off the plane to stretch her legs and get herself a cup of coffee. The airport was frenetic, and she watched the parade of people-rushing, sweating, tearful, frustrated-like a visitor from another world, interested but unmoved. When she got back on the plane there was a delay. A minor mechanical problem, the captain explained; nothing that would keep them on the ground for long. For once, the prediction from the flight deck was correct. After twenty, perhaps twenty-five minutes, the captain duly announced that the flight was now ready for departure. Rachel stayed awake for the second flight. A little tick of anticipation had begun in her. She found herself turning over in her head things that Margie had said about the island and the house. What was it she'd said at the lunch table? Something about it being a place where magic still happened, miracles still happened?

If only, Rachel thought; if only she could get back to the beginning again; back to the Rachel she'd been before the hurt, before the disappointment. But when had that been, exactly? The careless Rachel, who'd had some faith in the essential goodness of things; where was she? It was years since she'd seen that brazen, happy creature in the mirror. Life in Dansky-especially after the death of her father-had knocked that girl to the ground and kept her from getting up again. She'd lost hope by and by; hope that she'd ever be unburdened again, ever be blithe, ever be wild. Even when Mitchell had come into her life, and turned her into a princess, she'd not been able to shake her doubts. In fact for the first two or three months, even after he'd confessed his love for her, she'd been expecting him to tell her she needed to brighten her outlook a little. But he seemed not to notice what a quietly despairing partner he had. Or perhaps he had noticed, he'd just assumed he could rescue her from her doubts with a touch of Geary largesse.

Thinking about him, she became sad. Poor Mitchell; poor optimistic Mitchell. In parting from him, she had done both of them a kindness.

Honolulu Airport was much as she remembered it. Stores selling hula-hula girls crudely carved from coconuts, and bars advertising tropical cocktails, parties of lei-draped travelers being led about by escorts carrying notices on sticks. And everywhere that preeminent symbol of the crass American tourist: the Hawaiian print shirt. Was it possible that the paradise Margie had described lay just a twenty-minute flight from this? It was hard to believe.

But her doubts started to fall away once she stepped outside to catch the charmingly dubbed Wikki-Wikki Shuttle that ferried her to the terminal from which her flight would depart. The air was balmy and fragrant. Though it came off the sea, it came with the scent of blossom.

The plane was small, but it was still less than half full. A good sign, she thought. She was leaving the Hawaiian-shirted vacationers behind. The plane rose more suddenly and more steeply than its bulkier brethren, and in what seemed seconds she was looking down on the turquoise ocean, and the high-rises of Honolulu were gone from sight.

The flight that carries the traveler from the high-rises of Honolulu to the Garden Island is short; less than twenty-five minutes. But while Rachel's in the air let me describe to you a scene that occurred almost two weeks before.

The place is a small, raffish town called Puerto Bueno, a community which probably takes the prize as the most unfrequented in this book. It is located on one of the outlying islands of the province of Magallanes, which lies in Chile, at the tip of South America. Not a place people go to take relaxing vacations; the islands are wind-scoured and charmless, many of them so desolate they are completely uninhabited. In such a region, a town'like Puerto Bueno, which boasts seven hundred citizens, represents a sizable community, but nobody on the neighboring islands talks about the place much. It is a town where the rule of law is only loosely observed, which fact has over the years attracted a motley collection of men and women who have lived their lives at, or sometimes beyond, the limits of permissible behavior. People who have escaped justice or revenge in their own countries, who have gone from one place to another looking for a place of refuge. A few have even enjoyed a certain notoriety in the outside world. There was a man who'd laundered fortunes for the Vatican; and a woman who'd murdered her husband in Adelaide, and who still kept a snapshot of the body in her purse. But most of the citizens are unimportant felons-abusers of substances and forgers of

banknotes-whose capture is not of great significance to their pursuers.

Strange to say, given its populace, Puerto Bueno is a curiously civilized little place. There is no crime, nor is the subject of crime ever raised in conversation. The townspeople have turned their backs on their pasts, and want only to live out their remaining years in peace. Puerto Bueno isn't the most comfortable of places to retire (it has only two stores, and the electricity supply is tetchy) but it is preferable to a prison cell or the grave. And on certain days it is possible to sit on the crumbling harbor wall and-viewing a sky unmarked by the trails of aircraft-think that even this charmless spot is proof of God's charity.

Very few boats come to drop anchor here. Occasionally a fishing vessel, plying its way up and down the coast, takes shelter from a squall, and even more occasionally a pleasure boat, its captain hopelessly lost, will appear, only to disappear again just as soon as its passengers get a glimpse of the town. Other than these, the harbor is a hospice for a handful of small boats, none of which look healthy enough to put out to sea again. In the winter, at least one of them will sink there in the harbor, and rot.

But there was one vessel that fell into none of these categories: a vessel, called The Samarkand, more practical than any of the fishing boats and yet more beautiful than any of the pleasure boats. It was a yacht, of sorts, the timbers of its hull not painted but stained and varnished. Its cabin, wheel and two masts were likewise deeply stained, so that in certain lights the grain of the wood was uncannily clear, as though the vessel had been etched by a master draughtsman. As for the sails, they were of course white, but they'd been repaired many times over the years, and the patches were apparent; irregular shapes of canvas that were slightly paler or darker.

Perhaps to most eyes it was not as remarkable a vessel as I'm making it out to be. In one of the fancier marinas of the world, in Florida or San Diego, it would have not looked particularly fine a thing, I suppose. But here in Puerto Bueno, its arrival on a gray, cold day seemed like the visitation of something from a realm of dreams. Even though its captain (who was also its first mate and bosun and sole passenger) had been bringing the vessel to Puerto Bueno for far longer than any citizen could remember, its appearance on the horizon always brought folks down to the quay to watch its approach. There was a certain right-ness to its coming-like the return of spring birds after a season of ice-that made even these hard hearts a little more pliant.

Once the vessel was safely within the arms of the harbor, however, the spectators would hurry away. They knew better than to watch the actual docking, or worse still spy on the solitary black man who captained this boat as he disembarked. Indeed something very like a superstition had occurred over the years that anyone watching the captain of The Samarkand set foot on terra firma would die before a year or so had passed and the vessel came back again. All eyes were therefore averted when the man known by just one name made his way up the hill to the house he kept high above the harbor. The name, of course, you already know. It was Galilee.

How, you may well ask, did my half brother come to be keeping a residence in a criminal community somewhere in the back of beyond? Chance, is the answer. He had been sailing down the coast when-like one of those fishing boats I made mention of earlier-he was driven to seek refuge from a storm or be drowned. Believe it or not, this was not an easy decision at the time. He had been passing through a period of profound depression, and when the storm came he was of half a mind to let The Samarkand be driven before it and turned to timberwood. He had decided against this course not for his own sake but for that of his vessel, which he considered his only true friend. It was no decent fate for a boat as noble as his to have its entrails washed up on the shores of this coast and picked over by peasants. He had promised The Samarkand that when the time came he'd make certain it died a good death, somewhere far, far from land.

So he took shelter in Puerto Bueno-which at that time was a quarter of its present size, or less, its harbor newly built, and almost entirely unused. The man who'd founded the construction was one Arturo Higgins, a man of English descent who had lost all his money in the endeavor, and had taken his own life the year before. His house stood unoccupied at the top of the hill, and Galilee, out of some perverse desire to see the place of suicide, had gone up the hill and entered. Nobody had visited the house since the body had been removed: gulls had come to roost in its bedrooms, and there were rats' nests in the fireplace, but its desolation suited the trespasser mightily. He purchased the house the next day, from Higgins's daughter, and moved a few belongings in. The view, on dear days, was peaceful, and he came to think of it as his second home; his first, of course, being the vessel moored in the harbor.

After a couple of weeks he'd departed, locking the house up behind him and making it quietly known that anyone who ventured over the threshold would regret it.

He'd not come back for thirteen months, but come back he did, sometimes three or four times in a single year, sometimes with several years intervening. He became a mystery of some note, and there's force to the argument that the felons and the fugitives who came to the town thereafter did so because they'd heard of him. If this is so, you may ask, then why did the tale of the voyager, a man with divine blood running in his veins, not also attract a few finer spirits? It's a reasonable question. Why didn't saints come to Puerto Bueno, and Galilee's presence turn it into a town where the lame skipped and the dumb sang patter songs?

I have only this answer: he was too crippled. How could his legend inspire healing saints when he was incapable of healing himself?

So there you have the way things were, until a week or so before Rachel departed for Hawaii.

It happened that Galilee was not out at sea at that time, but resident in the house on the hill. He'd brought The Samarkand into Puerto Bueno because it was in need of repairs, and for the last few weeks he'd been back and forth between the harbor and the house daily, laboring from dawn to dusk on repairing the boat, and spending the hours of darkness sitting at the window of the Higgins house looking out over the Pacific. He would not let anybody set foot on The Samarkand to help him. He was a perfectionist: no other hand but his could be put to the tasks of nailing and planing and staining. Occasionally some inquisitive soul would idle along the quayside and watch him at work, but his glare was enough to drive them away after a little while. Only once did he engage in any social activity in the town, and that was one windy night-just a few days before his departure-when he appeared at the little bar on the hill where it seemed half of Puerto Bueno's citizens came to drink on any given evening, and downed enough brandy to have poleaxed any man in the bar. All it did was make Galilee a little merry, and he became quite loquacious-at least by previous standards. Those who talked with him came away with the flattering impression that he'd opened up to them: shared a few intimacies. The following morning, however, when they came to repeat what he'd said, they could recall very little that had pertained to Galilee himself. His conversation, it seemed, had been a form of listening; and when he had chimed in with something it had invariably been a fragment of somebody else's life he'd been recounting.

Two days later, his work on The Samarkand seemed suddenly to become much more intensive. He worked the next seventy-two hours without a break, his nightly labors lit by hurricane lamps set all about the boat. It was as though he'd suddenly been given sailing orders, and was obliged to depart sooner than he'd expected.

Sure enough, he was at the general store in the late afternoon of the third day of his labors, ordering supplies. His manner was brusque, his expression thunderous: nobody dared ask him where he was headed this time. The supplies were delivered to the boat by Hernandez, the son of the owner of the store; Galilee paid him extravagantly for his efforts, and asked the young man if he'd apologize to Hernandez Sr. on Galilee's behalf; that he knew he'd been less than civil earlier in the day, and he'd meant to cause no offense by it.

That was the last conversation anyone in Puerto Bueno had with their fellow citizen during his visit. Galilee weighed anchor as the night fell, and The Samarkand slipped out of the tiny harbor on the evening tide, to destinations much speculated upon, but unknown.

Nicodemus, as I've already indicated, was a man of prodigious sexual energies. He loved all things erotic (except books, of course): I doubt more than two consecutive minutes ever passed without his thinking some sexual thought. Nor was his interest limited to human, or superhuman, congress. He enjoyed the spectacle of an unleashed libido in whatever skin it showed itself. His horses especially, of course. He loved to watch his horses fuck. Many times he'd be right there with them, in a fine old sweat himself, whispering now to the stallion, now to the mare, encouraging them in the act. And if things weren't going well, he'd have his hands in the heat of things, helping it all along. Masturbating the stallion if need be, and guiding him home if he was clumsy; touching the mare with such tenderness she'd be calmed and accepting.

I remember one such incident with particular clarity; it happened perhaps two years before his death. He had a horse called Dumuzzi, of which he was particularly proud. And with reason. This was a stallion in the genes of which I'm certain my father had divinely meddled, for I never saw, nor expect to ever see again, so remarkable a horse. Forget all you've heard of Arabian stallions, or of the warrior steeds of the Kazak. Dumuzzi was another order of animal, preternaturally intelligent, exquisitely proportioned and magnificently formed. His bloodline, if it had survived, would have redefined what we understand by the word "horse." I've sometimes wondered if my father hadn't been sculpting this splendor as a kind of inspiration to the human world; a species of such perfection it would make all who witnessed its strength and beauty meditate on the sublimity of creation. (Then again: perhaps it was merely a selfish indulgence and he intended to keep Dumuzzi's son and daughters at L'Enfant; I will probably never know.)

The point is: the night of which I speak there was a thunderstorm of majestic scale, which had been moving in since the late afternoon. Darkness had fallen prematurely, as great bruise-and-iron clouds covered the last of the sun. Even at several miles distance the thunder was so deep it made the ground shake.

The horses were panicky, of course; in no mood to be fucking. Especially Dumuzzi, whose only real frailty was temperamental: he seemed to know he was a special creature and was wont to behave operatically. That night he was feeling particularly difficult: when my father came to the stable to prepare him Dumuzzi stamped and kicked and refused every calming word. I remember suggesting to Nicodemus that we try again the following morning, when the storm had passed, but there was a battle of wills here that no suggestion of mine was going to pacify. Nicodemus addressed Dumuzzi as he might have spoken to an inebriated and volatile friend; told him that he was in no mood for this drama, and the sooner Dumuzzi calmed down and began to behave sensibly, the better for all concerned. Dumuzzi ignored the warning; if anything his shenanigans escalated. He kicked his trough to splinters, and then kicked a hole in the stable wall-just punched out a dozen bricks as though they were so much papier-mache'. I wasn't afraid for my father-at that time I believed him immune from harm-but I was certainly anxious for my own safety. In my various travels on behalf of Nicodemus, in search of great horses, I'd seen what harm they could do. I'd visited the grave of a breeder in Limoges who'd had his brain kicked to mush two days before I arrived (by the very horse I'd come to view); I'd seen another fellow, in the Tian Shan mountains, who'd lost his hands to an irate mare, just had them bitten off: one! two! And I'd seen horses fight among themselves until there was more blood on their flanks and the ground beneath their hooves than in their veins. So there I was, afraid for my limbs and my life, but unable to take my eyes off the spectacle before me. The storm was almost overhead by now, and Dumuzzi was in an eye-rolling frenzy. Sparks of static electricity ran up and down his mane, and leapt between his hooves and the ground; his complaints were so loud they cut through the thunder.

Nicodemus was undismayed. He'd dealt with countless fractious animals in his time; for all Dumuzzi's heroic strength and size, he was just one more. After some struggle, my father bridled the beast and dragged him out of the stable to the open ground where he had the mare tethered. As I describe this now my heart has quickened, the scene is so vivid in my mind's eye: the lightning erupting in the clouds overhead, the horses shrieking in their hysteria, foamy lips curled back from lethal teeth; Nicodemus yelling at his beauties against the din of the storm, the front of his trousers showing plainly how much this scene aroused him.

I swear he looked half-bestial himself, by the glare of the lightning; his hair, which hung to his waist when he was standing still, roiling around him, his face cracked in half by a rabid smile, his skin iridescent. If he'd lost all trace of his human form then and there-convulsed and stretched and cracked his spine to become some other thing (a horse, a storm; a little of both)-I wouldn't have been surprised. I was more astonished that his humanity held in the midst of this; that he didn't unleash himself. Perhaps it excited him better to be confined by his anatomy in such circumstances; to have to sweat and fight.

There he was-divinity made flesh, and that flesh halfway to becoming animal-hauling the protesting Dumuzzi into the presence of the mare. I thought the last thing the stallion would want to do was fuck, but I was wrong. Nicodemus insinuated himself between the two horses and proceeded to arouse them: rubbing their flanks, their bellies, their heads, and all the while talking to them. Despite his agitation, Dumuzzi became hot for the mare. His massive phallus was unsheathed, and he promptly threw himself up on her. Still talking, still patting and rubbing, my father took hold of the stallion's rod and put it at the mare's opening. Dumuzzi needed no help with the rest. He covered the mare with the efficiency of one born to the task.

My father stood back and let them couple. His entire body seemed to be bristling: I swear to have touched him then would have proved fatal to my common heart. He was no longer laughing. His head had drooped, his shoulders were hunched: he seemed like a stalking predator, ready to tear out the throats of these creatures should they fail him.

They didn't. Though the storm continued to rage around-the lightning so frequent it visited a ghastly vivid day upon this midnight, the thunder so loud its reverberations shook down several trees and cracked a dozen windows in the house-the animals fucked and fucked and fucked, their panic subsumed into the frenzy of their mating.

The foal that came of this coupling was a male. Nicodemus called him Temujin, the birth name of Genghis Khan. As for Dumuzzi, he seemed to dote on my father thereafter; as though that night they'd become brothers. I say seemed because I suspect the animal's devotion was a sham. Why do I think that? Because the night my father died the panicked charge that trampled him to death was led by Dumuzzi, whose eyes carried in them-I swear-a flicker of revenge.

I've told you all this in part to give you a better picture of my father, whose presence in this story must necessarily be anecdotal, and in part because it serves as a reminder to me of the capacities that lie dormant in my nature.

As I said at the opening of the chapter, my own libido is a pitiful echo of Nicodemus's sexual appetites. My entire life has never been particularly complex or interesting, except for a short period in Japan, when I was courting, in the most formal fashion, Chiyojo, the woman who would become my wife, while nightly sharing the bed of her brother Takeda, who was a Kabuki actor of some renown (an onagatta, to be precise; that is to say, he only played women). Otherwise, the scandals of my sexual life would not fill a small pamphlet.

And yet-as I prepare to enter the portion of this story dedicated to the act of love, I can't help wondering where my father's fire went to when it flowed into me. Is there a lover in me somewhere, waiting for his moment to show his skills? Or has that energy been turned to less frenetic purpose? Is it what fuels my laying these very words on the page? Have the juices of Nicodemus' desire become the ink in my pen?

I've taken the analogy too far. Ah well. It's written, and I'm not going to abort it now, after so much effort.

I have to move on. Leave the memories of my father, and the storm, and the horses. I only hope that if the passion which drives me to my desk (obsessively now; every waking moment I'm thinking about what I've written, or about to write) isn't as blind and confused as love can be. I need clarity. Oh Lord, how I need clarity!

You see there are times now, often, when I think to myself: I've lost my way. I've got all these tantalizing pieces laid out, but I don't know how to put them together. They seem so utterly disparate: the fishermen at Atva, the hanged monks, Zelim in Samarkand; a letter from a man facing death on a Civil War battlefield; a silent movie star pursued to Germany, loved by a man too rich to know his true worth; George Geary dead in a car on a Long Island shore, and Loretta's astrologer predicting catastrophe; Rachel Pallenberg, out of love with love, and Galilee Barba-rossa, out of love with life itself. How the hell do all these pieces belong in one coherent pattern?

Perhaps (this thought nauseates me, but I have to entertain it) they don't belong together. Perhaps I lost my bearings some while ago, and I've simply been gathering up pieces that for all their individual prettiness can never be made to fit together.

Well, it's too late to do anything about it now. I can't stop writing; I've got too much momentum. I have to forge on, using whatever little part of my father's genius I've inherited to interpret the scenes of human need which are about to come before me, and hope that in their interpreting I'll discover some way to make sense of all that I've described hitherto.

One last thing. I can't let another chapter go by without making mention of the conversation I had with Luman.

I don't want you to think I'm a coward; I'm not. I fully realize that at some point I have to address the accusations my half brother flung at me; both face to face with him, and face to face with myself (which is to say: here, in this book). He said my devotion to Nicodemus was in some measure the reason for my wife's death; that if I'd been the loving husband I claimed I would not have turned a blind eye to Chiyojo's seduction. I would have told Nicodemus she was mine, and he was to keep his hands off her. I didn't. I let him work his wiles upon her, and she paid the price.

I'm guilty as charged.

There; I've admitted it. Now what? It's too late to make amends to Chiyojo. At least I can't do so here; if her ghost still walks the mundane realm-which I suspect it does-then she's at home in the hills above Ichinoseki, waiting for the cherry trees to blossom.

The only peace I can make here in L'Enfant is with Luman, who I don't doubt stirred up this trouble between us out of perfectly innocent motives. He's not a man who knows how to conceal his thoughts. He had an opinion and he spat it out. Not only that, but what he said was right, though it agonizes me to admit the fact. I should go down to the Smoke House (with a conciliatory offering of cigars) and tell him that I'm sorry for my outburst; that I want us to start talking again.

But I fear the thought of venturing down that overgrown path to the Smoke House door makes my head ache: I can't do it. At least not yet. The time will come, I'm sure, when I have no excuses left-when I haven't got a character suspended in the air-and I'll go make my apologies. Maybe I'll go tomorrow, or the day after. When I've written about the island, that's when I'll go. Yes, that's it. Once I've cleared my head of all that I have to tell you about the island, and what happened to Rachel there, I'll be in a better state to sit and talk with him. He deserves my full attention, after all, and I can't possibly give it to him when I'm so distracted.

I feel a little better now. I've confessed my guilt, and that's oddly comforting. I won't undermine that confession by attempting to justify what I did. I was weak, and too eager to please. But I can't leave this passage without returning to the image of Nicodemus, the night of the storm. He was a rare creature, no question of that; I think many sons would have put their service to such a father before their duties as a husband. The irony is this: that if I hoped to be like him, as I did, and that in letting him have Chiyojo I would gain his approbation, and come closer to him, I worked against my own interests with heroic thorough ness. In one night I lost my idol, I lost my wife, and-let this be said, once and for all-I lost myself. What little there was of me-a self separate from my desire to please my father-was trampled under the same hooves that took his life. It's only been in the last few weeks, as I've been writing this history, that my sense of a soul called Maddox, alive in my flesh and worthy of preservation, has appeared. I suppose the moment of my rebirth was the moment I walked out of the skyroom, leaving the wheelchair behind me.

Another irony, of course: the strength to do that was ignited in me by my stepmother; she's the architect of my resurrection. Even if she doesn't want payment for that service-beyond the words I'm writing-I know there's a debt to be paid; and with every sentence, every paragraph, the Maddox who will make that payment comes into clearer focus.

This is what I see: a man who has just confessed his guilt, and will make amends, in time. A man who loves telling stories, and will find a way to understand what he's telling, in time. And a man who is capable of love, and who will find somebody to love again-oh please God yes; in time, in time.

Rachel's first view of Kaua'i was tantalizingly brief; just enough to glimpse a series of bright scalloped beaches, and lush, rolling hills. Then the plane was making its steep descent into the airport at Lihu'e, and moments later a bumpy landing. The airport was small and quiet. She wandered through to pick up her bags, keeping her eyes open for the manager of the house where she'd be staying. And there he was, dutifully standing by the tiny baggage carousel, with a cart for her luggage. They recognized one another at the same moment.

"Mrs. Geary…" he said, forsaking his cart to come and present himself before her. "I'm Jimmy Hornbeck."

"Yes. I thought it must be you. Margie told me to look out for the best-pressed clothes on Kaua'i."

Jimmy laughed. "So that's my reputation," he said. "Well, I suppose it could be worse."

They exchanged a few pleasantries about the flights until the baggage arrived, then he led the way out into the sunshine.

"If you'd like to wait here," he said, "I'll go and fetch the car and bring it round for you. It saves you the walk to the parking lot."

She didn't protest this; she was perfectly happy to stand on the sidewalk and feel the ocean breeze on her face. It seemed as she stood there she could feel the grime and anxiety of New York ooze out of her pores. Soon, she'd wash it all away.

Hornbeck was back with the vehicle-which looked robust enough for jungle exploration-in two or three minutes. Another minute to load Rachel's bags, and then they were out of the little maze of roads around the airport and onto the closest thing the island had to a highway.

"I'm sorry about the transport, by the way," he said. "I had intended to pick you up in something a bit more civilized, but the road to the house has deteriorated so badly in the last couple of months-"

"Oh, really?"

"We've had a lot of rain recently, which is why the island looks particularly lush at the moment."

Lush was an understatement. Off to the left of the highway, toward the island's interior, were fields of rich red earth and green sugar cane. Beyond them, velvety hills, rising in ambition as they receded, until they became steep peaks whose heights were draped with sumptuous cloud.

"The problem is that the little backroads just aren't being taken care of the way they should be," Hornbeck was saying. "And there's a little tussle going on right now about who's actually responsible for the road to the house. The local council says it's really part of the property, and so I should be getting money from your people to get it fixed. But that's nonsense. It's public property. The council should be filling in the holes, not a private contractor."

Rachel was only half-attending to this. The beauty of the fields and mountains-and on the other side of the highway, the blue, pounding ocean-had claimed her attentions.

"So this argument has been going on for two years," Hornbeck went on. "Two years! And of course nothing's going to be done about the road until it's resolved. Which means it just deteriorates whenever there's rain. It's very frustrating so I apologize-"

"There's really no need…" Rachel said dreamily.

"-for the vehicle."

"Really," she said, "it's fine."

"Well just as long as you understand. I don't want you thinking I'm neglecting my duties."

"Hm?"

"When you see the road."

She glanced at the man, and saw by his fretful demeanor, and the whiteness of his knuckles, that he was genuinely concerned that his job was in jeopardy. As far as he was concerned she was a visiting potentate; he was afraid of making a mistake.

"Don't worry, James. Do people call you James or Jim?"

"Usually Jimmy," he said.

"You're English, yes?"

"I was born and raised in London. But then I came here. It'll be thirty years ago next November. And I said to myself: this is perfect. So I never went back."

"And you still think it's perfect?"

"Sometimes I get a little stir-crazy," Jimmy admitted. "But then you get a day like today and you think: where else would I want to be? I mean, look at it."

Rachel looked back toward the mountains. The clouds had parted on the heights, and the sun was breaking through.

"Can you see the waterfalls?" Jimmy said. She could. Silvery threads of water plummeting down from cracks in the mountainside. "Up there's the wettest place on earth," Jimmy informed her. "Mount Waialeale gets about forty feet of rain a year. It's raining right now."

"Have you been up?"

"I've taken a helicopter trip once or twice. It's spectacular. If you like I'll organize a flight for you. One of my best friends runs a little operation down in Po'ipu. He and his brother-in-law pilot these little choppers."

"I don't know that I trust helicopters."

"It's really the best way to see the island. And if you ask Tom he'll take you out over the ocean whale-spotting."

"Oh that I'd like to see."

"You like whales?"

"I've never seen any up close."

"I can arrange that too," Jimmy said. "I can have a boat organized for you at a day's notice."

"That's kind, Jimmy. Thank you."

"No problem. That's what I'm here for. If there's anything you need, just ask."

They were coming into a little town-Kapa'a, Jimmy informed her-where there were some regrettable signs of mainland influence. Beside the small stores of well-weathered clapboard stood the ubiquitous hamburger franchise, its gaud somewhat suppressed by island ordinance or corporate shame, but still ugly.

"There's a wonderful restaurant here in Kapa'a which is always booked up, but-"

"Let me guess. You have a friend-"

Jimmy laughed. "I do indeed. They always keep a prime table open each night, for special guests. Actually, I think your husband's stepmother invested some money in the place."

"Loretta?"

"That's right."

"When was she last here?"

"Oh… it must be ten years, maybe more."

"Did she come with Cadmus?"

"No, no. On her own. She's quite a lady."

"She is indeed."

He looked over at Rachel. Clearly he had more to say on the subject, but was afraid to say anything out of place.

"Go on…" Rachel said.

"I was just thinking that… well, you're different from the other ladies I've met. I mean, the other members of the family."

"How so?"

"Well, you're just less… how should I put it?"

"Imperious."

He chuckled. "Yes. That's good. Imperious. That's perfect."

They had emerged from Kapa'a by now, and the road, which still hugged the coastline, became narrower and more serpentine. There was very little traffic. A few of the locals passed by in rusted trucks, there was a small group of bicyclists sweating on one of the inclines, and now and then they were overtaken by a slicker vehicle-tourists, Jimmy remarked, a little contemptuously. There were however several long stretches when they were the only travelers on the road.

Nor was there much evidence of a human presence beyond the highway. Occasionally there'd be a house visible between the trees, sometimes a church (most so small they could only have served a tiny congregation), and on the beaches a handful of fishermen.

"Is it always this quiet?" Rachel asked.

"No, it's off-season right now," Jimmy said. "And we're only slowly recovering from the last hurricane. It closed a lot of the hotels and some of them still haven't reopened."

"But they will?"

"Of course. You can't hold back the rule of Mammon for ever."

"The rule of what?"

"Mammon. The demon of acquisitiveness? I mean commerce. People exploiting the island for profit."

She looked back at the mountain, which in the ten minutes since she'd last glanced toward the interior had transformed yet again. "It seems such a pity," she said, picturing the Hawaiian-shirted tourists she'd seen in Honolulu traipsing through this Eden, leaving trails of Coke cans and half-eaten hamburgers.

"Of course he wasn't always a demon," Jimmy went on. "I think originally he was a she: Mammetun, the mother of desires. She's Sumer-Babylonian. And with a name like that she probably had a lot of breasts. It's the same root as mammary. And Mama, of course." All this he said in an uninflected voice, almost as though he were talking to himself. "Don't mind me," he said.

"No, it's interesting," she said.

"I was a student of comparative religion in my younger days."

"What made you study that?"

"Oh… I don't know. Mysteries, I suppose. Things I couldn't explain. There's a lot of that here."

Rachel glanced again at the clouded mountains. "Maybe that's why it's so beautiful," she said.

"Oh, I like that," Jimmy murmured. "No beauty without mystery. I hadn't really thought about it that way before, but that's nice. Elegant."

"I'm sorry?"

"The thought," he said. "It's elegant."

They drove on in silence for a time, while Rachel pondered the notion that a thought, of all things, could be elegant. It was a new idea for her. People were sometimes elegant, clothes could of course be elegant, even an age; but a thought? Her musings were interrupted by Jimmy.

"You see the cliff straight ahead of us? The house is half a mile from there."

"Margie said it was right on the beach."

"Fifty yards from the ocean, if that. You can practically fish from your bedroom window."

Despite this promise the road now took them out of sight of the water, descending by a winding route to a bridge. They were now in the shadow of the crag which Jimmy had pointed out earlier, the origins of the river which the bridge spanned, a torrent of water that cascaded down the rock face above.

"Hang on," Jimmy said, once they were over the bridge, "we're going on to that lousy road I was telling you about."

Moments later they made a hard right and just as Jimmy had warned, the road deteriorated rapidly, the hard asphalt of the highway replaced by a pitted, puddled track that wound back and forth between trees that had obviously not been trimmed for many years, their lower branches, heavy with blossom and foliage, brushing the top of Jimmy's vehicle.

"Watch out for the dog!" Rachel yelled over the din of the revved engine.

"I see him," Jimmy said, and leaning out of the window, yelled at the yellow mutt, who continued to sit in the middle of the track until the last possible moment, when it lazily raised its flea-bitten rump and sauntered to safety.

There was other animal traffic on the track: a fine-looking cockerel strutted about while his wives pecked in the ruts of the road. This time Jimmy didn't need to yell. They were up in a flurry of aborted little flights, and into the dense foliage of what had once perhaps been hedgerows. Here and there, when there was a break in the greenery, she saw signs of habitation. A small house, in an advanced state of disrepair; a piece of farm machinery, rusted beyond reclamation, in a field that had mutinied many seasons before.

"Are there people living around here?"

"Very few," he said. "There was a flood about four years ago. Terrible rains; disastrous. In maybe two or three hours the river washed out the bridge we crossed, and washed a lot of houses away at the same time. A few people came back to rebuild. But a lot more decided to go somewhere less risky."

"Was anybody hurt?"

"Three people drowned, including a little kiddie. But the waters never came as far as the Geary house. So you're quite safe."

During this conversation the track had deteriorated yet further, if that were possible, the thicket to the left and right so fecund it threatened to obliterate the track completely. Now the birds that rose before the vehicle were not wild chickens but species Rachel had never seen before, winged flashes of scarlet and iridescent blue.

"Almost there," Jimmy promised, as the track threw the vehicle back and forth. "I hope you didn't pack any fine china." There was one last kink in the rutted track, which Jimmy took a little too fast. The vehicle tipped sideways, and for a few moments it seemed they'd overturn. Rachel let out a little shout of alarm.

"Sorry," Jimmy said.' The vehicle righted itself with a thump and a squeak. He applied the brakes, and brought them to a halt perhaps ten or twelve yards from a pair of large wooden gates. "We're here," he announced.

He turned off the engine, and there was a sudden flood of music from the birds in the trees and thicket, and from somewhere out of sight, the thump and draw of the ocean.

"Do you want to go in alone, or shall I show you around?"

"I wouldn't mind just a couple of minutes on my own," she said.

"Of course," he said. "Take your time. I'll just unload the baggage, and have a cigarette."

She got out of the vehicle.

"I wouldn't mind one of those," she said, as Jimmy lit up.

He proffered the packet. "I'm sorry, I should have offered. So few folks smoke these days."

"I don't usually. But it's a special occasion."

She took a cigarette. He lit it for her. She drew a lungful of tobacco smoke. It was the first cigarette she'd had in a while, and the rush made her feel pleasantly light-headed: a perfect state, in fact, to enter the house.

She went to the gate, stepping gingerly between the frogs squatting in the long, damp grass, and lifted the latch. The gate opened without her needing to push it. She glanced back at Hornbeck. He was sitting with his back to her, staring up at the sky. Comforted that he was as good as his word, and would not be interrupting her, she stepped through the gate and into the presence of the house.

It was not magnificent; not by any stretch of the imagination. It was a modest structure, built in the plantation style, a veranda running around it, shuttered windows and pale pink walls. For perhaps two-thirds of its length it was a single story, but at one end a second floor had been added, giving the whole structure a lopsided look. The tiles on this portion of the roof were ocher rather than reddish brown, as they were elsewhere, and the windows were mismatched, but none of this robbed the place of its charm. Quite the reverse. She was so used to environments that had been designed by protofascists, polished and grandiose, that it was a relief to discover the house was so quirky.

All of this would have been beguiling enough had it stood in isolation, but it did not. The house was entirely swathed in greenery and blossom. Giddy palms swayed languidly over its roof and vines crept over its veranda and along the eaves.

She lingered at the gate for a minute or so to take all this in. Then she took a last drag of the cigarette, put it out beneath her heel, and wandered up the front path to the door. Vivid green geckos darted ahead of her like a nervous welcoming committee, ushering her to the threshold.

She opened the front door. Before her was an extraordinary sight. The interior doors stood open, and by some conceit of the architect were so aligned that standing on the doorstep a visitor might see through the house and out the other side, as far as the glittering ocean. The rooms themselves were dark-especially by contrast with the sunny pathway-so for a few enchanted moments it seemed she was staring into a dark maze in which a sliver of sky and sea had been caught.

She paused there on the threshold to admire the illusion, then stepped inside. The impression she'd had from the exterior-that this was by no means as luxurious a property as the rest the Gearys owned-was quickly confirmed. The place smelt pleasantly musty; not the must of neglect, perhaps, but rather of walls dampened by the sea air, or by the humidity of the island. She wandered from room to room to get some general sense of the layout of the place. The house was furnished eclectically, almost as though it had been at some time a repository of items that had some sentimental attachment. None of it matched. Around the dining table-which was itself scored and nicked and stained-were five distinctively different wooden chairs, and one pair. In the sizable kitchen the pots and pans that hung overhead were refugees from a dozen mismatched sets. The cushions that were heaped in hedonistic excess on the sofa were similarly unlike. Only the pictures on the walls showed any sign of homogeny. By contrast with the austere modernist pieces Mitchell had chosen for Rachel's apartment, or the vast American West paintings Cadmus collected (he owned a Bierstadt the size of a wall), there were modest little watercolors and pencil sketches hung everywhere-all renderings of the island: bays and boats; studies of blossoms or of butterflies. On the stairs was a series of drawings of the house, which though unsigned and undated had obviously been made many years before: the paper was yellowed, the pencil marks fading.

The furniture upstairs was every bit as odd as that below. One of the beds looked spartan enough for a barracks, but shared its room with a chaise longue that would not have shamed a boudoir, while the master bedroom contained furniture which had been carved and painted with bowers of strange flora, in the midst of which naked men and women lay in blissful sleep. The paint had been worn to flecks of color over the years, and the carving itself was crude, but the presence of these pieces rendered the room strangely magical.

She thought again of what Margie had said about the place. It was proving to be true. She'd been on the island perhaps two hours and already she had felt its enchantment at work.

She went to the window. From it she had a view across the small unkempt lawn to a patch of low-lying scrub, on the other side of which lay the beach, its sand bright in the sunlight; and a little way beyond that the glittering turquoise water.

There was no doubt which bedroom she was going to use, she thought, throwing herself back on the bed like a ten-year-old. "Oh God-" she said, throwing her eyes up to the ceiling, "-thank you for this. Thank you so much."

By the time she came back downstairs Jimmy had her bags on the doorstep, and was dutifully standing among them, lighting up another cigarette.

"Bring them in," she told him. He went to toss the cigarette aside. "No, you can smoke inside the house, Jimmy."

"Are you sure?"

"I will be," she said. "I'll be smoking and drinking and-" She halted there: what else would she be doing? "And eating everything I shouldn't."

"Speaking of which…" Jimmy said, "the cook's name is Heidi, and she lives a couple of miles from here. Her sister comes in to clean four times a week, but you can have her come in every day if you'd prefer, to change the bed-"

"No, that's fine."

"I took the liberty of stocking up the fridge and the freezer with food. Oh, and there's a few bottles of wine and so forth in one of the kitchen cabinets. Just send Heidi into Kapa'a for whatever else you need. I presume you're taking the larger bedroom?"

"Yes, please."

"I'll take the luggage up."

He went to his task, leaving Rachel to finish her exploration of the house. She wandered to the French windows through which she'd first glimpsed the beach, unlocked them and stepped out into the veranda. There were some weather-beaten chairs and a small wrought iron table out here; along witli more vines, more blossoms, more geckos and butterflies. The wind had deposited an enormous desiccated palm frond on the stairs. She stepped over it and went down to the lawn, her sights set on the beach itself. The water looked wonderfully inviting, the waves breaking like soft, creamy thunder.

"Mrs. Geary?"

Jimmy was calling, but it wasn't until he'd done so three times that she snapped out of her mesmerized state and remembered that she was the Mrs. Geary he was calling to. She turned back toward the house. It was even more beautiful from this direction than from the front. The wind and rain coming off the sea had battered it a little more fiercely on this side; and the vegetation, as though to compensate for its wounds, cradled it more lushly. I could live here forever, she thought.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mrs. Geary-"

"Please call me Rachel."

"Thank you. Rachel it'll be. I put your bags up in your room, and I've left a list with my telephone number and Heidi's number, on the kitchen counter. Oh by the way-

I almost forgot-there's a jeep in the garage. If you want something fancier I'll rent something for you. I'm sorry I've got to rush away, but I have a church meeting…"

"No, that's fine," Rachel said. "You've done more than enough."

"I'll be off then," he said, heading back into the house. "If there's anything you need… anything at all."

"Thank you. I'm sure I'll be fine."

"Then I'll see you soon," he said, waving as he departed for the front door.

She heard it slam, then listened for the sound of the vehicle as he drove away. At last, it faded completely, leaving her with birdsong and sea.

"Perfect," she said to herself, imitating Jimmy's slightly clipped English pronunciation. It wasn't a word she would have thought of using until she'd heard it on Jimmy's lips; but was there any place on earth, or any time in her life, when it had seemed more appropriate?

No; this was perfect, perfect.

She decided, now that Jimmy was gone and she had the house to herself, to delay her visit to the beach and instead shower and make herself a drink. He'd stocked the kitchen with wonderful thoroughness. When she'd cleaned up and changed out of her traveling clothes into a light summer dress, she went in search of the makings of a Bloody Mary and to her delight found all she needed. A bottle of vodka, tomato juice, Tabasco sauce, a little horseradish; even celery. Drink in hand she made one telephone call to Margie, to tell her that she'd arrived safely. Margie wasn't home, so she left a message, and then headed out to the beach.

The balmy afternoon had mellowed into a lovely evening; the last of the sun catching the heads of the palms, and gilding the clouds as they sailed on south. A couple of hundred yards from her a trio of local boys were surfing, shouting to one another as they plowed up and over the waves to catch a ride. Otherwise, the vast crescent of the beach was deserted. She set her glass in the sand and walked down to the water, venturing in until she was calf-deep. The shallows were warm, passing over sand heated by a day of sun. She let the waves break against her legs, the spray splashing her torso, her neck, her face. The trio of surfers had meanwhile given up their sport for the night and had built a small fire at the top of the beach, which they were feeding with driftwood. Rachel was starting to feel somewhat chilly, so she left the water and went back up the sand to fetch her drink. It was Jess than twenty minutes since she'd stepped out of the house, but the short, tropical dusk was already almost over. The clouds and palms had lost their gold, and there were eager stars overhead.

She drained the spicy dregs of her Bloody Mary, and went back to the house. In her haste to be out on the beach she'd neglected to turn any lights on, and once she got onto the path that wound through the scrub she was stumbling in near darkness. But the house, even in this murk, looked beautiful, Its pale walls and white paintwork all bluish in the deepening night. She'd forgotten what it was like to be in a place where there were no street lights nor car lights; not even a distant city glow to taint the sky. It made her aware of the world in a new way; or rather, a very old way that she was suddenly rediscovering. She heard nuances in the air around her she would normally have missed, in the voices of frogs and nightbirds, in the subtle shifting of palm and bough; smelled a dozen different scents: up out of the dewy earth beneath her feet, and from blooms the night was hiding.

Eventually she got back to the house, and after some fumbling around switched on a couple of lamps. Then she went upstairs to change out of her damp clothes. As she did so she caught sight of herself in the long dressing mirror in the bedroom. What she saw made her laugh out loud: in the space of a few minutes the combined effects of wind and sea-spray had made a wild woman of her: tangled her hair and reddened her cheeks; undone any pretensions to chicness she might have entertained. No matter; she liked what she saw. Perhaps she hadn't been entirely tamed by sorrow and the Gearys. Perhaps the Rachel she'd been in the easy years before Daddy's death, before the disappointment of Cincinnati and all that came after, was still alive in her. Yes, there! There! Smiling at her out of the mirror: the unrepentant wildling of her youth, the scourge of schoolmistress and sheriffs, the girl who'd loved nothing more than to make mischief; there she was.

"Where the hell have you been?" she said to herself.

I never left, that smile seemed to say. I was just waiting until the time was right to show myself again.

She made herself a light supper of cold cuts and cheese, and opened a bottle of wine-red, not white, for a change; something with a bit of body to it. Then she curled up on the sofa, and ate. There was a small television in the living room, but she had no desire to watch it. If the stock market had crashed, or the White House gone up in flames, so what? The rest of the world and its problems could go to hell, at least for now.

Halfway through her leisurely meal, the phone rang. She was sorely tempted to let it ring out, but thinking it was probably Jimmy Hornbeck checking to see that she was comfortable she picked up. It wasn't Hornbeck, it was Margie, returning her call. She sounded weary.

"What time is it in New York?"

"I don't know: two, two-thirty," Margie said. "Are you all settled in?"

"I'm perfect," Rachel said. "It's even better than you said it would be."

"It's just beginning, honey," Margie said. "You'll be amazed what happens when you get into the rhythm of the place. Did you take the big bedroom?"

"With all of the carved furniture…"

"Isn't that place amazing?"

"The whole house is amazing," Rachel replied. "I felt right at home as soon as I stepped inside."

"You'll never guess where I've been," Margie said.

"Where?"

"With Cadmus."

"Loretta had a dinner party?"

"No, just the two of us."

"What did he want?"

"It was weird. He swore me to secrecy. But I'll tell you when you get back." She laughed. "I don't know," she said. "This family."

"What about it?"

"All the men are crazy," Margie said. "And I think we must be even crazier, because we fell in love with the bastards." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I've got to go, honey. I hear Garrison. Love you."

Without waiting for a reply, she put down the phone.

The call unsettled Rachel slightly, putting back into her head a notion she didn't want there: that until she divorced Mitchell she was a part of the Geary story.

She was too tired for the uneasiness to keep her from sleep, however. The bed was a joy to lie in, when she got there; the pillows deep, the sheets fragrant. She had scarcely pulled the cover up over her body then she was gone into a place where the Gearys-their crazy men, their sad women, their secrets and all-could not come after her.

She woke at first light, got up, went to the window, admired the way the world was looking, and went straight back to bed for another three blissful hours. Only then did she clamber out of bed and go down to brew herself some coffee. The feeling of rediscovery she'd experienced the night before-dead senses awakened, the wildling Rachel in the mirror-had not deserted her; nor did the morning light diminish the charms of the house. She was as happy wandering around as she'd been the afternoon before; every shelf and nook carried some new interesting item. She'd even missed a couple of rooms in her previous explorations: one a little writing room facing out to a side yard, with a desk, some old, comfortable chairs and several shelves of well-thumbed books, the other a much smaller room, which seemed to have been used as a depository for items found on the beach: pieces of sea-smoothed timber, shells, fragments of coral, lengths of unraveling rope, even a cardboard box filled with stones that had caught some beachcomber's eye. The most promising discovery however was in a cupboard in the living room: a collection of old phonograph records, still neatly sleeved; and on the shelf above a player. The last time she'd seen either was at the house in Caleb's Creek, although these recordings looked to be much older than anything in George's treasured collection. Later, she promised herself, she'd select a few tunes and see if she could get the phonograph up and running. That would be her one and only project for the day.

Toward noon, having made herself some brunch (and devoured it; she was surprised at how hungry she was, given how little she'd done) she went back down to the beach, this time intending to take a walk along its entire length. Halfway along the path a brown hen suddenly darted in front of her, panicking to join her three chicks, who were waiting for her on the other side. Clucking to them, the mother led them away through the debris of dead palm fronds and rotting coconut husks.

This time the beach was completely deserted. The waves were smaller than they'd been the night before; too small to tempt even the most cautious surfer. She wandered down the beach as she'd planned-wishing after a few minutes she'd had the forethought to look for a wider-brimmed hat in the house; the sun was fierce-until she came to the place where the waters that cascaded from the crag emptied themselves into the sea. Red-brown with the freight of silt they had picked up on their way, they spread once they reached the beach, and though the waters didn't look treacherous, she didn't want to risk wading the fifty yards to get to the other side, so she turned back. On the return journey she kept her eyes on the horizon. Jimmy had said this was whale-spotting season; if she was lucky perhaps she'd see one of the humpbacks breaching. She was out of luck however; there were no whales to be seen. Just a couple of small fishing boats bobbing around not far from the shore, and much, much further off, a white sail. She paused to watch it for a minute or two as it flickered there at the limit of her gaze, bright against the sky one moment, gone the next. At last she tired of watching and headed back to the house, parched and a little sunburned.

There was a visitor waiting at the front door. A dark-skinned, broad-shouldered man of perhaps thirty-five, who introduced himself as Niolopua.

"I'm here to take care of some stuff around the house," he said.

"Like what?" Rachel said. She didn't remember Jimmy mentioning this man, and despite his open expression and his easy manner, she'd brought her New, York suspicion of strangers with her.

"The lawn," he said, nodding towards the back of the house. "The plants."

"Oh… you mean outside the house?"

"Yeah."

"No problem," she said, stepping aside to let him in.

"I'll go around the side," he said, looking at her more intensely now. "I just wanted to introduce myself."

"Well thank you," she said. There was something about the way he looked at her that made Rachel think maybe there was some subtext to this; but then his body language contradicted the suspicion. He stood a respectful distance from her, his hands behind his back, simply looking. She returned his gaze, fully expecting him to look away, but he didn't. He kept staring, with almost childlike frankness until she said:

"Is there anything else?"

"No," he said. "It's fine. Everything's fine." He spoke as though to reassure her.

"Good," she said. "Then I'll let you go." With that she turned from him and closed the door.

Later, she heard the drone of the lawnmower, and went to the living room window to glance out at him. He was shirtless now, his back the color of the silted river. If this were one of the trashy novels Margie so adored, Rachel thought, then all she'd have to do was invite him in for a glass of ice water and a minute later she'd be backed up against the door with his tongue down her throat. She smiled to herself, feeling wicked. Maybe she'd try it, in a couple of days; see how reality matched up to the fantasy.

A little later, as she was attempting to get the phono graph to work, she realized the sound of the mower had ceased, and glanced up to see that Niolopua had left off his labors and had wandered down to the bottom of the lawn. There he was standing, staring out to sea, one hand shading his eyes from the blaze of the sky.

There was no doubt as to what he was watching. The boat with the white sail had come closer to shore, close enough for her to see that it had not one sail, but at least two. She watched for a little time as the vessel rose and fell against the dark blue waters. It was mesmeric; like watching the hands of a clock, the motion so subtle it was impossible to catch. Yet there was no doubt that even as she watched the boat, it had come a little closer to the shore.

There was a sudden eruption of squawking in the palms off to the right of the house, which drew her gaze. Several house finches were involved in a bitter dispute among the fronds; feathers drifted down. By the time the argument had been settled, and she again looked toward the lawn, Niolopua had forsaken his watch and returned to his lawn-mower. The boat had meanwhile passed out of sight, the wind or the currents or both carrying it down the coast, and she felt mildly disappointed. She'd been looking forward to watching the boat's progress while she sipped her cocktail. No matter, she said to herself. There'd surely be plenty of other vessels plying their way between the islands in the next few days.

The wind rose in strength as the day progressed, shaking the palms around the house and whipping the ocean, which had looked so benign at daybreak, into a white-headed frenzy. It made her uneasy; it always had. Even as a child she'd become fractious when the wind blew; heard voices in it, sometimes, crying and sobbing. Lost souls, her grandmother had explained, which had of course done nothing to soothe her unease.

She decided not to stay in the house but to take the jeep and drive along the coast. It turned out to be a fine idea. After driving around for a while she found herself on a narrow spit of land, at the end of which sat a tiny white church, with thirty or so graves around it. The building itself was only partially intact: a victim, perhaps, of the hurricane Jimmy Hornbeck had mentioned. Its roof tiles had been entirely stripped away, as had many of the ceiling timbers. Only three of the four walls were still standing; the seaward wall was missing. So was the altar. All that remained inside were a few plain wooden chairs, which for some reason nobody had claimed.

She wandered among the graves, most of which were at least thirty or forty years old, and some, to judge by their eroded and sunken state, considerably older. A few of those buried here had names she could pronounce-a Robertson, a Montgomery, even a Schmutz-but several were beyond her. How was Kaohelaulii said aloud she wondered; or Hokunohoaupuni?

After spending maybe ten minutes examining the names she started to realize she'd come out underdressed for the elements. Though the sun still appeared now and then between the speeding clouds, the wind was chilling her to the bone. She was reluctant to get back into the jeep and drive home, however, so she took refuge in what remained of the church. The wooden walls creaked whenever a strong gust of wind came along. It would only take one more heavy storm, she thought, and the whole structure would come crashing down. In the meantime it provided her with exactly what she needed; protection from the worst of the bluster, while still offering her a clear view of both sky and sea.

She sat in one of the battered chairs and listened to the changing notes of the wind as it whistled between the boards. Perhaps her grandmother had been right after all.

It certainly wasn't hard to imagine, in such a place as this, that the departed were indeed voicing their grief in the wind. Perhaps the souls of men and women buried on this headland-Montgomerys and Kaohelauliis-came back off the sea to the spot where their bones lay. It was a melancholy thought; but it didn't unsettle her. Perhaps they'd see her sitting calmly here, unafraid of their voices, and when they returned to the wastes be comforted by the memory.

She felt a spatter of rain on her face. Getting up out of her chair she stepped back out onto the headland and saw that a great mass of dark cloud was moving toward the island, its gloomy offspring driven ahead to sprinkle a warning shower or two. It was time to go. She pulled up the collar of her blouse and started to pick her way through the graves back to the jeep. The rain was coming quickly; before she was halfway to the vehicle it was coming down hard, and getting harder. It was cold; cold enough to take her breath away.

She got into the car, fumbling for the ignition key. The rain was beating hard on the roof, its din drowning out the noise of the wind. As she put the car into reverse she glanced back at the ocean, and through the rain-smeared windshield saw a white shape in the dark sea. She turned on the windshield wipers, clearing the glass.

There, out in the bay, was the boat she'd seen earlier in the day; the two-masted vessel which had been the object of Niolopua's scrutiny. It was foolish to get back out of the car to look, but for some reason she felt the need to do so.

Out she got, the rain so heavy it soaked her to the skin in five seconds. But she didn't care. It was worth the soaking to see her boat braving the swell, its sails fat with wind, its bows cutting a white swath through the gray-green water. Satisfied that this was without a doubt the vessel she'd seen earlier, and that its master and crew were in no danger, she ducked back into the car, slammed the doer, and started the homeward journey.

Of late when I write I find myself gripping my pen so tightly that I can feel the tick of my pulse in my thumb and forefinger. My grip is more and more an obsessive's grip. I swear if I were to die at this moment, writing these very words, it would take several strong men to part me from my pen.

You'll remember I confessed a few chapters back that I was lost; that I didn't know how all the pieces of the story I have fitted together. In the last few nights of writing that unease is beginning to lift. Perhaps it's self-deception, but it seems to me I can see the connections more clearly than before: the grand scheme of what I'm telling is slowly becoming apparent to me. And as it comes clear I feel myself drawn deeper into the tale I'm telling, the way a worshipper is drawn to the altar steps, and-dare I venture this?-for much the same reason. I am hoping to ascend to a place of revelation.

Meanwhile, I keep the company of my characters as though they were dear friends. I have only to dose my eyes, and there they are.

Rachel, for instance? I can see her in my mind's eye right now, sipping her evening's Bloody Mary before she goes to bed; not remotely suspecting that the night of her life lies before her. I can picture Cadmus just as clearly. There he is, sitting in his wheelchair in front of his sixty-inch television, his eyes glazed as he contemplates a scene remote from him in years yet closer than the liver spots on the back of his hand. I can bring Garrison before me-poor, sick Garrison, who has such harm in his heart, and knows it-and Margie, in her cups; and Loretta, plotting successions; and my father's wife, busy with plots of her own; and Luman and Marietta and Galilee.

Oh, my Galilee. I see him more clearly tonight than ever I've seen him in my life, even when he was standing before me in the flesh. Does that sound absurd, that he should appear in my imagination more completely than he ever did before my eyes? However it sounds, it's true. Dreaming of Galilee as I do, conjuring him not as a thing of flesh and personality, but as a creature half gone into myth, I believe I am in the presence of a truer soul than that phantom man whom I lately met.

You may say: what nonsense. We live in flesh and blood, you may say. To which I reply: yes, but we die into spirit. Even divinities like Galilee give up the limitations of the flesh eventually, and unbounded swell into legend. So imagining him in his mythic form-as a wanderer, as a lover, as a brute-am I not closer to the Galilee with whom my soul will spend eternity?

I just made the mistake of proudly reading the preceding paragraphs to Marietta. She snorted at them; called them "pretentious claptrap" (that was the mildest epithet); told me I should strike all such ruminations from my text and get on with doing my job, which is-as far as she's concerned-rsimply to report what I know about the history of the Barbarossas and the Gearys in as clear and concise a fashion as I can.

So I've decided I'm not going to share any more of what I'm writing with Marietta. If she wants a book about the rise and fall of the Geary dynasty, then she can damn well write it herself. I'm making something entirely different. It'll be a ragtag thing, no question, sewn together from mismatched parts, but I find that just as beautiful in its way as a small, nicely formed tale. And, by the way, more like life.

Oh, there were two other things Marietta said that day which bear reporting here, if only because they both contain more than a measure of truth. One, she accused me of liking words because of their music. I pleaded guilty to this, which infuriated her. "You put music before meaning!" she said. (This was just spiteful; I don't. But I think meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later, ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.)

Which brings me to her second remark: something to the effect that I was no better than a village storyteller. I smiled from ear to ear at this, and told her that nothing would give me more pleasure than to have my book by heart, and to tell it aloud. Then she'd see how much pleasure there was to be had from my bag of tales. You don't like what I'm telling you, sir? Don't worry. It'll change in two minutes. You don't like scandal? I'll tell you something about God. You hate God? I'll recite you a love scene. You're a puritan? Have patience; the lovers will suffer. Lovers always suffer.

Marietta's response to all this was inevitably sour.

"You're no better than a crowd-pleaser then, are you?" Marietta replied. "Pandering to whatever people want to hear. Why don't you just slather the thing in sex and have done with it?"

"Have you quite finished?"

"No."

"Well I'd really like you to leave. You just came in here to have an argument, and I've got better things to be doing."

"Ha!" she said, snatching one of the sheets I'd been reading from off my desk. "This is one of your better things? We live in flesh and blood, you may say-" I retrieved the page from her hand before she could go any further. "Just… go away," I said, very firmly. "You're being a philistine."

"Oh so now I'm too stupid to appreciate your artistic ambitions, is that it?"

I contemplated this for a moment. "Well, as you put it that way…" I said. "Yes."

"Fine. Then we both know where we stand don't we? I think this work is wretched crap and you think I'm stupid."

"That seems to be a fair summary."

"No," she said, as though I was about to change my mind (which I wasn't). "You've said it now. And that's the end of it."

"I'm agreeing with you, Marietta."

"I won't be coming back in here," she warned.

"Good," I said.

"You'll get no more support from me."

"I just said: good."

She was red-faced with rage by now. "I mean it, Mad-dox," she said.

"I know you mean it. Marietta," I said, quietly. "And believe me, it's tearing me apart. It may not appear that way, but I am in agonies at the prospect." I pointed to the door. "That's the way out."

"God, Maddox," she said. "Sometimes you can be such a dickhead."

That was, as best I remember it, the entire exchange. I haven't seen her since. Of course, she'll come crawling back sooner or later, probably pretending that the conversation never happened. Meanwhile, I'm undisturbed, which suits me fine. I have to write what may be the most important passages of my story so far. The less distraction I have the better I can focus upon it.

There's only one portion of the conversation that I have returned to muse over: and that's the part about being a village storyteller. I realize she meant it as a form of condemnation, but in truth I can see nothing undesirable about being thus employed. Indeed I have imagined myself many, many times sitting beneath an ancient tree in some dusty square-in Samarkand, perhaps; yes! in Samarkand-telling my epic in pieces, for the price of bread and opium. I would have had a fine time doing that: get myself fat and flying by parceling my tale out, day after day. I would have had my audience wrapped around my little finger; coming back every afternoon to visit me in the blue shadows, and asking me to sell them another piece of the family saga.

My father was a great improviser of stories. In fact, it's one of the few truly fond memories I have of him. My sitting at his feet when I was a child, while he wove wonderful fictions for me. There were often malevolent stories, by the way: violent, blood-thirsty tales about the way the world was in some uncalendared time. When he was young, perhaps; if indeed he ever was.

A lot later, when I was approaching adulthood and about ready to go out looking for female company, he told me that I shouldn't underestimate the potency of stories in the art of seduction. He had not seduced my mother with kisses or compliments, he said (and he certainly hadn't got her drunk and raped her, as Cesaria had told me); he'd brought her to his lap, and thence to his bed, with a story.

Which brings us back (though you do not yet see why, you will) to that night on Kaua'i, and to Rachel.