Household Gods

2

Nicole sat staring at the phone. After a while, when it didn’t ring, she picked it up. Work was a lost cause even if she’d given a damn. But the kids weren’t going to go away, the way her partnership had, and Josefina, and Frank, and most of the rest of her life. She had to do something about them, find someone to take care of them tomorrow.

She paused with the receiver in her hand, ignoring its monotone buzz.

No, she could not quit. She could not go tramping back upstairs and tell Sheldon Rosenthal to take his crummy little salaried job and shove it. She could not take the kids, the Honda, and the assets she didn’t have, and run back to Indianapolis. The world didn’t work that way. She didn’t work that way. She had to do it right. She’d hunker down, grit her teeth, and let them put it to her here, till she could find something else somewhere else. Never mind where.

Meanwhile, Josefina was off to Mexico tonight, and Kimberley and Justin weren’t going to take care of themselves. There wasn’t any help for it. She had to talk to Frank.

She dialed the UCLA number. She didn’t expect to get him, not right away. Frank had always despised phone calls. They interrupted. They disrupted. They interfered with the thinking of wise thoughts.

Horny thoughts, more likely, Nicole thought sourly. But he wasn’t too bad about answering his voice mail — when he got around to it.

She had the message all ready in her mind, set to give to the machine. But the phone cut off at the first ring, leaving her wondering briefly if she’d dialed a wrong number. Then Frank’s voice said cheerily, “Hi, Dawn, darlin’, how you doin?”

“This isn’t Dawn darlin’,” Nicole said, cold as black ice in a Midwest February. “Sorry to disappoint you. It’s your ex-wife. ‘

“Oh. Nicole.” Frank Perrin’s voice dropped about forty degrees. “I didn’t think it would be you. “

“Obviously. ‘Dawn darlin’.’ “ Nicole imitated his eager tone again, as nastily as she could. Goddamn blond California bimbo, fresh out of college and raring to go after the prof. Dawn — Dawn Soderstrom, how was that for a nice sexy Nordic name? — had been Frank’s editor at the University of California Press. She’d been just wild, like totally jazzed, she said, about his book on industrial espionage and the Internet. In Nicole’s day, busty blondes had got the hots for cuter topics, volumes of deeply angst-ridden poetry, say, or passionate monographs on Derrida or Thomas Pynchon. Dawn’s hots were the wave of the future.

She hadn’t been the only one, either. Frank had got lucky. After he turned in the book but before it saw print, the topic caught fire. To everybody’s surprise — most of all Nicole’s, but obviously not Dawn’s — Spy by Wire took off, and even made a couple of nonfiction bestseller lists. And then, a few weeks later, Frank took off, too — with Dawn.

Frank couldn’t have been aware of Nicole’s train of thought, but he couldn’t have missed the direction it was going in. He exhaled through his nose the way he always did when he was angry. “Just tell me what you want, okay?”

“What do I want?” Nicole shot back. “This month’s check would be nice. Last month’s check would be even nicer.” The other thing Nicole wanted, the thing she couldn’t say, was to understand what Frank saw in an airhead more than ten years younger than he was. She’d seen enough of Dawn both before Frank left that note on her pillow and in the time since, dropping off and picking up kids on weekend visitations, to be sure her only visible asset (aside from the nicely rounded ones in her bra) was the ability to listen to Frank go on about encryption algorithms for hours at a time without her blue, blue eyes glazing over.

Frank snorted again. He sounded like an irritated mule. “Is that why you called? To nag me again? I’ll get ‘em to you as fast as I can. I’m not made of money, you know.”

Thanks to Spy by Wire, he had a very nice little pile. If he thought Nicole didn’t know that, he was bone stupid. Stupider than somebody who’d run off with a twenty-two-year-old golden girl when his son was just starting to crawl. Nicole had been listing all the payments he’d been late on or skipped. One day, in court…

But she didn’t need the list now. She needed cash — cash and a place for Kimberley and Justin to stay.

Her grip on the telephone tightened. If only it were his neck. But she couldn’t afford to lose her temper. She couldn’t afford anything right now, least of all an ex-husband more annoyed with her than he already was. “No, that isn’t why I called.” She didn’t apologize — she never apologized when she was right. “I called to ask if you could take the kids tomorrow. Your hours are a lot more flexible than mine. If you could just — ”

“What’s the matter with Josefina?” Frank broke in. “Immigration finally catch up with her?”

Nicole took a deep breath and counted to five — counting to ten, right then, was beyond her. When she could trust her voice, she said “No” and explained in words of one syllable, with a minimum of sarcasm, about Josefina’s mother. “I know it’s impossibly short notice” — for that, she could apologize; her pride wasn’t so sticky — ”but she didn’t give me any warning at all, just hit me with it when I dropped the children off this morning. I’ll find somebody else as fast as I can. I’m sure it won’t be past this weekend. By that time I’ll — ”

Frank interrupted again: “I can’t.” She’d always had a knack for knowing when he was lying — except, of course, about Dawn, but that wasn’t the issue now. She was sure, down in her bones, that he was telling the truth. “It is impossibly short notice,” he said. “I’ve got way too much stuff going on to take ‘em now. I’m sorry, Nicole. I wish I could.”

He was telling the truth about that, too. She could feel it much too clearly for comfort. Dammit.

“Please, Frank,” she said — never mind if she had to get down on her knees and beg, this was critical. “Have I ever asked you for anything like this before?”

“No, you haven’t,” he admitted, but there wasn’t any give in his voice. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t do it.”

Nicole rolled all her frustrated fury into a bullet — rage at Josefina, rage at Sheldon Rosenthal, years’ worth of rage at Frank — and sighted it dead center on her ex-husband. “Why not? They’re your children, too, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I can’t take them tomorrow,” Frank said again. He not only snorted like a mule, he could dig in his heels like one. He wasn’t budging now.

Nicole didn’t care if he grew roots to China. “Why not? What are you doing that’s so important?”

“Nicole…” There it came, the tone of sweet reason driven to desperation, with the edge of temper that threatened but hadn’t quite, yet, blown up. “Look, I’m not on the witness stand. You don’t get to cross-examine me anymore.”

“What do you mean, ‘anymore’?” Nicole couldn’t manage sweet reason, or desperation, either. She was plain, flat angry.

“Just what I said,” Frank said. “If you’re done, will you kindly get off the line? I’m expecting a call.”

“Go to hell,” she said crisply, and hung up.

The rush of gratified fury died away, leaving her shaking too hard to do anything more useful than stare at the telephone. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It had been her idea to move to L.A. from Indianapolis. She’d always been the dynamic one, the go-getter, the one who’d make her mark on life in capital letters, while he’d messed around in grad school playing with computers because they were easier for him to deal with than people. And now, somehow, he was happily shacked up with Ms. Young-Blonde, with a big name that was likely to grow bigger, while her life and her career headed the wrong way down a one-way street, head-on into a phalanx of trucks.

She swiveled her chair to glare at the framed law degree on the wall. Indiana University Law School. In Indianapolis, it would have stamped her forever as second-rate: if you weren’t Ivy League, you weren’t anybody. In Los Angeles, she’d found, it was unusual, even exotic. That still bemused her, after half a dozen years.

“There ain’t no justice,” she said to the wall. The wall didn’t deign to answer.

Nicole was still sitting there, still glowering at the diploma, when Cyndi came into the office and plopped the day’s mail on the desk. “Doesn’t look like anything you have to handle right away,” she said. She was trying to sound normal — trying a little too hard.

Nicole didn’t snap at her for it. Much. “Good,” she said. “The way this day is going, I’m not up for handling much of anything anyway.”

Cyndi bit her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said, and hesitated, visibly wondering whether to go on. At last she decided to go for it: “It should have been you, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”

“It wasn’t.” Nicole’s voice came out flat. “That’s all there is to it.”

Cyndi couldn’t say anything to that. She shook her head and left for the relative safety of her desk.

Nicole hardly noticed. Opening envelopes gave her hands something to do but let her mind stay disengaged: perfect. If she worked hard enough at it, she might just disconnect altogether. Once the envelopes were open, she shuffled the papers they’d held, looking busy without doing much till she could escape to lunch.

Yang Chow, over on Topanga Canyon, was hands down the best Chinese place in the west half of the San Fernando Valley. That wasn’t why Nicole drove there. The restaurant was also a couple of miles away from her Warner Center office building, far enough that, with luck, she’d be the only one from the firm there today. Shop talk and gossip were the last things she wanted.

She sat alone at a table in the casual elegance of the restaurant — no storefront fast-food ambience here — eating soup, drinking tea, and going after chili shrimp with chopsticks. Yang Chow’s were of hard, smooth plastic, and didn’t give as good a grip as the disposable wooden kind. She counted herself lucky not to end up with a shrimp in her lap.

That’s what my luck’s come down to, she thought, splashing soy sauce onto steamed rice: I don’t spill food on myself. All around her, businessmen chattered happily in English, Chinese, Spanish, and some other language she didn’t recognize.

Why shouldn’t they be happy? They were men.

One of them caught her looking. She saw what she’d come to call The Progression: widened eyes, Who-Me? glance, broad come-hither grin. He was wearing a wedding ring, a broad gold band. He didn’t bother to hide it. Without that, she would simply have ignored him. As it was, the look she sent suggested he had a glob of snot in his mustache. He hastily went back to his pork chow mein.

Nicole took her time finishing her lunch. Going back to the office had all the appeal of a root canal. She stared out the window at the traffic whooshing past on Topanga. She was aware, rather remotely, of the busboy taking her dishes. Only after the waiter came by to ask for the third time, in increasingly pointed tones, whether she wanted anything else did she admit to herself that she couldn’t stay there all afternoon. She threw a five and a couple of singles on the table and walked out to her car.

When she drove into the lot, she had to park a long way from the building. She’d expected that; most people had been back from lunch for half an hour, maybe more. As she trudged wearily across the gray asphalt, someone called, “Nicole!”

She looked around a little wildly, wondering if she was having a flashback to the morning. But it wasn’t Gary Ogarkov this time, smoking his blasted cigar and blowing up her hopes till they couldn’t do anything but explode. Tony Gallagher, who’d just got out of his Lincoln Town Car a few spaces away from where she’d parked, waved and called her name again. When she paused, he caught up with her at a ponderous trot, belly lapping over the waistband of his slacks.

She didn’t have much gladness to spare for anyone, but, thanks to that Midwestern upbringing, she could still be polite. “Hello, Mr. Gallagher,” she said. Of all the senior partners, she liked him best — not that that said much right now. But Gallagher had more juice in him than the rest of them put together. He was a vigorous sixty, his hair dyed a red close to the color it must have been when he was younger. He’d probably grown his bushy muttonchops when they were cool, back about 1971, and then never bothered shaving them off. Whoever had made his jacket had killed and skinned a particularly repulsive plaid sofa for the fabric. Nicole doubted it had ever been cool, but Gallagher didn’t care. He wore it with panache.

“I just want to tell you, I personally think you got a raw deal today,” he said, breathing whiskey fumes into her face. Half of her wanted to hug him for even such a small kindness. The other half wanted to run. When she was little, her father had come home from the factory — or rather, from the bar after the factory — reeking just like that. Then he’d stopped coming home at all. Then, in very short order, her mother had divorced him. One, two, three. Nicole still hated the smell of alcohol on a man’s breath, the strong sour-sweet reek that, her mother had told her, signified everything bad about a man.

Now that Nicole thought back on it, her father hadn’t kept up with his child-support payments, either. He’d poured them down his throat instead, one shot at a time. Frank didn’t do that. No, Nicole thought — he spends the money on Dawn. Some improvement.

“Like I say, Nicole,” Tony Gallagher said, just a little unsteady on his feet, “I did what I could for you.” He held the door of the office building open so she could go in to the lobby ahead of him. “I got outvoted. You know how it is with some people — can’t see the nose in front of their face. It’s a goddamn shame, pardon my French.”

A couple of paces away from the elevator, she turned toward him. “Thank you for what you tried to do. Believe me, it’s nice to know someone here thinks I’ve been doing a good job. I guess it just didn’t work out.” It sounded lame, but it was the best she could manage. She felt she owed it to him.

“Damn shame,” Gallagher said again, vehemently. The odor of stale Scotch came off him in waves. What had he had, a six-drink lunch? He patted her on the back, heavily: between her shoulder blades at first, but slipping lower with each pat, till his hand came to rest a bare inch above her panty line.

When the hand didn’t move after that, Nicole did, away from Gallagher and toward the elevator buttons. She punched UP with unnecessary violence. Was he being sympathetic or trying to feel her up? Did he know the difference? With that much Scotch sloshing around in him, did he even care?

The elevator door slid open. Nicole got on. So, of course, did Tony Gallagher. She eyed him with more than a little apprehension as she pressed the button for the sixth floor. But, as etiquette demanded, he took his place on the opposite side of the elevator after hitting the seventh-floor button.

With a thump, the car started up. Gallagher said, “Why don’t you come up to my office with me, Nicole? We ought to talk about ways to make sure this doesn’t happen the next time the opportunity rolls around.”

She didn’t answer for a second. And he said he’d been on her side. Was he thinking of closing the door to his office and trying to get her clothes off? If he did, she’d scream and knee him in the nuts. Then she’d sue him and the firm for every nickel they had. Which added up to a lot of nickels.

She shook her head a tiny fraction. No. He might be a lush, but he was still an attorney.

She grasped at the one straw he’d offered — and if that was desperate, so be it. So was she. He’d talked about a next time — about another partnership. Sheldon Rosenthal had been notably silent on the subject. “All right,” she said, hoping he hadn’t noticed the length of her hesitation. “I’ll come up.”

The elevator stopped at the sixth floor. Nicole let the door open and close, but didn’t get off. On the seventh floor, Gallagher stood back with courtly manners, and held the door for her to get off. Somewhat encouraged, holding her breath against his effluvium of Scotch, she walked with him down the long carpeted hallway. His secretary didn’t look up from her computer when the two of them went by into his inner office.

He did shut the door behind him, but, instead of trying to grope her, he went over to a coffee machine like the one in Mr. Rosenthal’s office. Next to it he had a little refrigerator, atop which stood several bottles and a neat row of crystal tumblers. “Coffee?” he asked. “Or can I fix you a drink? Sounds like you’ve earned one today.”

You don’t know the half of it. But Nicole said, “Coffee — black, please. I don’t use alcohol.”

The frost in her voice only made him grin disarmingly. “You know what they say. Drink — and die; don’t drink — and die anyway. But suit yourself.” He poured her the coffee, then splashed a good jolt of Johnnie Walker Black over ice for himself. He carried it to his desk and sat down, leaning back in the big mahogany leather chair: leopard on a tree branch, Nicole caught herself thinking, or lion on the veldt, waiting in lordly ease for his wives to bring him dinner. “Sit down,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

Nicole sat. This wasn’t the sort of place that she’d have wanted for home or office, not with those gaudy LeRoy Neiman prints — a redundancy if ever there was one — on the wall, but it fit the flamboyant Gallagher perfectly. The only thing missing was a lava lamp.

He knocked back the Scotch, then held up a well-manicured forefinger. “Cooperation,” he intoned, giving the word the same mystic emphasis with which the fellow in The Graduate had informed plastic. “That’s what we’ve got to see.”

Nicole tensed. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said, “I’ve been cooperative in every way I know how. I’ve worked as hard as I can for this firm. The Butler Ranch report is only one example. I’ve also — ”

Gallagher waggled that forefinger. “Not exactly what I meant.” He wasn’t looking at her face as he spoke. He was, she realized, trying to look up her skirt, which was a little above the knee when she stood and a good deal shorter than that when she sat down. She crossed her legs as tight as she could, and hooked one ankle behind the other for good measure.

Cooperation? Sleep your way to the top, he meant. He couldn’t mean anything else, though he hadn’t been so blatant as to leave himself in trouble if she wanted to make something of it. Nicole damned herself for having been right the first time — and also for having been so stupid as to miss the fact that there was another way than the obvious and actionable.

Here it was, almost the turn of the millennium, and a woman couldn’t get a damned thing on her own merits. Why not forget about degrees and credentials and qualifications? Why not just demand that every female applicant submit her bra size and her body measurements, and never mind pretending that anything else mattered?

Her teeth were clenched so tight her jaw ached. Outrageous, unjust, hypocritical — When was any society so unfair? Not in any time I ever heard of. Not in any, ever. I d bet.

While she stewed in silence, Gallagher got up and made himself another drink. “More coffee?” he asked. Nicole shook her head stiffly. Gallagher’s Adam’s apple worked as he swallowed half the Scotch he’d poured into the tumbler. He filled it again and set the bottle down on the refrigerator with a sigh of regret. He wobbled a bit as he walked back to his desk. “Where was I?”

Halfway to Skid Row. Nicole’s thought was as cold as the ice in his glass. More than halfway, if you can’t remember what you’re saying from one minute to the next.

Well then, she thought, colder yet — the kind of coldness she imagined a soldier must feel in battle, and she knew a lawyer felt in a bitterly fought case: an icy clarity, empty of either compunction or remorse. In that state of mind, one did what one had to do. No more, not a fraction less. Maybe she could take advantage of his alcoholic fog to steer him away from the line he’d been taking and toward one more useful to her. “We were talking,” she said, “about ways to improve my chances for the next partnership that becomes available.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right.” But, even reminded, Tony Gallagher didn’t come back at once to the subject. At least, for the moment, he wasn’t leering at her. He was staring out the window instead; he had a view as splendid as Mr. Rosenthal’s, as emblematic of both eminence and power.

Nicole began to wonder if he’d forgotten she was there. She pondered slipping quietly away while he sat there in his semi-stupor, but she couldn’t be sure if he was drunk enough to let her get away with it. She stirred in her chair. As she’d half hoped, half feared, the motion drew his attention back to her. He wagged his forefinger in her direction again, as if it were something else, something not symbolic at all. “Say, I heard a good one the other day.”

“Did you?” Nicole said. Gallagher told jokes constantly, both out of court and in. He insisted he’d caught several breaks from judges and juries over the years because of it. Nicole could believe it. Not that she’d have cared to try it herself, but with his personality and his — well — attributes, he could carry it off.

“Sure did,” he said now. “Seems this gorgeous woman walked into a bar and asked the bartender for a six-pack of Budweiser. She…” From the very first line, Nicole hadn’t expected she’d care for the joke, but she hadn’t expected the disgust that swelled up in her as Tony Gallagher went on telling it. When he finished, he was grinning from ear to ear: “ — and so she said, ‘No, give me a six-pack of Miller instead. All that Budweiser’s been making my crotch sore.’ “

He waited, chortling, for her to fall over laughing. No, she thought. Not even for a senior partner. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said with rigid deliberation, “that was the most sickening, sexist thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” She could have stopped there — should have, if she’d started at all. But something in her had snapped. “Nobody,” she said, shaking with the force of her disgust, “nobody should tell a joke like that, under any circumstances, to anybody. If that’s what it means to ‘cooperate,’ to be ‘one of the boys’ — if I have to crawl down in the gutter with all the rest of you, guzzling pricey liquor and laughing at sick jokes — then frankly, Mr. Gallagher, I don’t want to play.”

There was an enormous silence. Nicole knew with sick certainty that he’d erupt, that he’d blast her out of her — his — chair.

He didn’t. His eyes went cold and hard, like green glass. He was, she realized with dismay, much less drunk than she’d thought. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” he said with perfect and completely unexpected precision, “one of the complaints leveled against you by your peers and by the senior partners was that you did not get along with people as well as you should. I took the contrary position. I see now that I was mistaken.”

“What exactly do you mean, I don’t get along?” Nicole asked. Maybe he would give her enough rope to hang him.

She should have known he wouldn’t. He was a lawyer, wasn’t he? “I mean what I said,” he snapped. “No more, no less.” But even while he played the lawyer’s lawyer, his eyes slid down to her hemline again. Maybe — and that was worst of all — he didn’t even know he was doing it. He straightened in his chair. “Good afternoon, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”

“Good afternoon,” Nicole said, with the starch of generations of Midwestern schoolmarms in her voice and in her spine.

She left with her head high. Oh, he wanted her to cooperate, no doubt about it — in bed and naked, or more likely wearing something vinyl and crotchless from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

So now she’d offended not only the founding partner but the one senior partner who’d even pretended to be on her side. At least, she thought, she still had her self-respect. Unfortunately, it was the only thing she did have. She couldn’t eat it, put it in the gas tank, or pay the mortgage with it. She’d shot her chance for a partnership right between the eyes.

On the other hand, if she’d read Sheldon Rosenthal right, she’d never been in line for a partnership. She’d been a blazing fool from start to finish.

“Thank you so much, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said when Nicole handed her a check that afternoon. “You are the last one. I got to cash this, then run for the airport.” Nicole’s nod was grim. She’d have to get a cash advance from her MasterCard to keep the check from bouncing. She was buying groceries, gasoline — everything — on plastic till she got paid again. The MasterCard was close to maxing out. So was the Visa. Her whole life was on the verge of having its charging privileges revoked.

Kimberley and Justin hugged Josefina so tightly when she bent to say good-bye to them that she laughed a little tearily and said something half reproving, half teasing, in the Spanish that they understood and Nicole never had. At that, Kimberley, who professed loudly and often that “only babies cry,” wept as if her heart would break. Nicole’s own heart was none too sturdy, either. Damn it, it pulled her apart to see her baby hurt.

“Oh.” Josefina straightened, wiping her eyes and sniffing. “I got to tell you, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin, we got a virus going around the kids. I had to call two mothers this afternoon.”

Great, Nicole thought. Why not? The way this day had been going, all she needed was a nice round of the galloping crud. “Thanks,” she managed to say to Josefina, though the last thing she felt was gratitude. She fixed Kimberley with a mock-severe look, one that usually made her erupt into giggles. There were no giggles today, just tears. “Don’t you dare get sick, do you hear me?” Nicole said — as if by simply saying it she could make the virus sit up and behave.

Kimberley had stopped sobbing, at least. “I won’t, Mommy,” she said, sounding stuffy and forlorn. “I feel fine.”

“Me, too,” Justin declared, not wanting to be left out.

Then why were you wailing like that? Nicole thought uncharitably as she buckled her daughter into her car seat and got Justin into his. It wouldn’t be much longer before Kimberley outgrew the one she was in. Another milestone. These days, Nicole measured time by how her children changed. First step, first time dry through the night, first dirty word… Her mouth twisted. Her own life was on the downhill side. First abandonment, first divorce, first partnership lost — first firing next, probably, if things didn’t get better fast.

On the way home, Victory was slow. Sherman Way would have been slower. The 101 would have been slowest. Nicole had got past White Oak and was heading for Reseda Boulevard — halfway back, more or less — before Kimberley gulped. “Oh, baby,” Nicole said in despair — she knew what that sound meant. “Don’t be sick. See if you can hold it till we get there.”

“I’ll try.” Kimberley gulped again. She wasn’t saying she was fine now. Nicole tried, too: tried to go faster. She didn’t have much luck.

Just past Reseda, Kimberley threw up. “Corny dogs!” Justin said gleefully. Nicole hadn’t wanted to find out quite that way what the kids had had for lunch.

There was a medium-sized shopping center at the corner of Victory and Tampa. Nicole pulled in there among the people stopping for milk and groceries on the way home from work. None of them, she was sure, had to stop to mop up a pool of puke. She fished an old towel out of the trunk and, holding her breath against the acrid reek, cleaned off Kimberley and the car seat and the upholstery under it as best she could, and flung the towel into a trash can. She probably couldn’t afford to replace it. “Who gives a damn?” she said to the trash can.

Kimberley had the thousand-yard stare of a sick child. Her forehead was hot. A virus, sure as hell. “It still stinks, Mommy,” she said as Nicole buckled her in again.

“I know it does,” Nicole said, as gently as she could. “I’ll put that goop on it after we get home.” Odo-Clean, the stuff people used to get the smell of dog and cat pee out of rugs and chairs, also worked wonders on making cars livable when kids puked in them. Frank had taught her about it; it was an old family trick of his. At the moment, Nicole was not inclined to give him any credit for it.

Home came none too soon. Justin had stopped holding his breath and started making imitation retching noises of his own. Kimberley was mute, which said something worrisome about how sick she was. Nicole got her out of the car and cleaned her up properly and threw her soiled clothes in the washing machine, then settled her in front of the VCR in her pajamas with Toy Story and some water to rinse out her mouth, and fed her a little Tylenol liquid to make her feel better. Nicole hoped it would stay down. In case it didn’t, she equipped her daughter with a red plastic bucket and a roll of paper towels, and went back outside with rags and the bottle of Odo-Clean. Fine way to work up an appetite before dinner, she thought as she held her breath and scrubbed.

It wasn’t till she’d made it back into the house again that she noticed the smear of vomit on her suit jacket. She shed it with a muffled curse. The tag inside said Dry Clean Only. Of course.

Justin was waiting for her in the kitchen, perched in his high chair with the tray table up. “Hungry,” he announced, patting his tummy.

“Nice to know somebody is,” Nicole said dryly. She wondered if he’d get sick tonight, or if he’d wait till tomorrow or the next day. He’d been massively exposed to whatever bug Kimberley had. But, she conceded to herself, he’d also been good while Nicole took care of his sister and cleaned up the car. She took a package of chicken nuggets and French fries out of the freezer.

When Justin recognized the box, he slid down out of his high chair and hopped with glee. Chicken nuggets and French fries had no nutritional value whatsoever. So, of course, he loved them. So, also of course, his father fed them to him all the time. Frank was a devout believer in the four basic food groups: sugar, fat, salt, and chocolate. Nicole, cast by default in the role of Health-Food Ogre, often wondered why she even tried.

Tonight, just for this once, she stopped trying. One meal of solid fat and sodium wouldn’t kill the kid, and he’d earned a little reward for being so good for so long.

Slacker, her conscience chided her. She shut it down and clamped the lid on it.

She thrust the tray in the microwave, set the timer, and pushed the button. Nothing happened. The light inside didn’t go on, either. She gave the door a push, thinking — hoping — she hadn’t closed it all the way. It was closed. She opened it and closed it again. Still no light. When she pressed the button, still no action. One dead microwave. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said.

“Hungry,” Justin repeated. He watched Nicole take the chicken nuggets out of the microwave; his eyes went huge with dismay as she shoved them into the regular oven and twisted the temperature knob up as high as she dared. “Hungry!” he screamed, and started to cry.

God, Nicole thought, prayed, maybe cursed, give me patience. Give Justin some, too, please, while you’re at it. “You can still have them,” she said. “They have to cook longer in this oven, that’s all.” Half an hour longer. Getting the idea of a half-hour delay across to a hungry two-year-old who was already feeling betrayed made everything she’d gone through at the office seem like a walk in the park.

In the end, she broke her own rule. She gave him some chocolate Teddy Grahams and milk to shut him up. That killed any chance he’d have of eating a good dinner, but chicken nuggets and fries weren’t a good dinner to begin with, so who cared?

Absently, Nicole slid a frozen dinner in the oven for herself, too. It was healthier than the one she’d pulled out for Justin, that much she could say for it. Frozen food was all she had time for, all she ever had time for. Sometimes she dreamt of cooking lavish gourmet meals full of vitamins and minerals, fresh vegetables and quality ingredients, then freezing portions and heating them up for all those nights when she had neither time nor energy to spare for feeding herself once the kids were fed and bathed and tucked away in bed. But who had time to cook anything, even on weekends? Who had the ambition to even start? So she lived on Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice and Thrifty Gourmet, and pitched fits when Frank fed the kids hot dogs and frozen chicken nuggets.

“It’s a wonderful life,” she said to Justin, who ignored her. He was playing happily on the kitchen floor with his cup of milk and his Teddy Grahams.

In the front room, Kimberley stared through Woody and Buzz, not at them, but she hadn’t thrown up again. That was something. Not much, but something. Patting her daughter on the head, Nicole went into the bedroom to call Frank at his place. She liked that even less than calling him at UCLA, but didn’t see that she had a choice. She’d have to replace the microwave, and for that she needed money — money he owed her.

Someday, she swore to herself, she’d be in a position to pay for everything without the humiliation of calling Frank. Until that day came, she’d just have to bite the bullet and do what she had to do.

The phone sat on the nightstand. As she reached for it, the plaque with Liber and Libera caught her eye. There they stood, god and goddess together, equal, as they were supposed to be. She’d never known any Latin that wasn’t strictly legalese — she’d been a business administration major before she got into law school — but what their names meant was clear enough. Liberty, liberalism, liberality. She didn’t have enough of any of those things.

She dialed the number to Frank’s condo so seldom, she had to look it up. The phone rang once, twice, three times, four. Then, with a faint but distinct click, a sweet — gooey-sweet, Nicole thought — voice came on the line. “Hi, this is Dawn. Frank and I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Remember to wait for the beep. ‘Bye.”

“Frank, this is Nicole,” Nicole said, ignoring Dawn even in recorded form. “I just want to let you know Kimberley is sick, the microwave is dead, and I need the child support you’re late with. Pay up, dammit. Good-bye.”

It wouldn’t do much good. She knew that too well. Frank would take his own sweet time answering a message like that, but she’d been too frazzled to come up with anything kinder or gentler. She had a sudden, horridly vivid picture of him and Dawn screwing when she called, and laughing like a couple of loons when they heard who it was.

The front of the house was quiet when she emerged from the bedroom. Kimberley hadn’t moved since she left. Nicole bent to feel her forehead, then to kiss it. Kimberley was still warm, but maybe a touch less. The longer the Tylenol stayed down, the better. “How’s your tummy feel?” Nicole asked. Kimberley shrugged and subsided back into immobility.

Loud stomping noises sent her running to the kitchen. Justin had scarfed down most of the Teddy Grahams, then dumped the rest of them on the floor and spritzed them with milk from the three little holes in the Tommee Tippee cup. Now he was having a high old time smashing them up. “Mud!” he told Nicole, delighted.

“No, not mud,” she barely managed not to scream at him. “Mess. Naughty. No-no!” Her hand itched to give him a good solid spanking.

No. She wouldn’t do it. She didn’t believe in it. A good parent had no need to strike a child to make it behave.

Not that she was a perfect parent, either. She’d smacked Justin and Kimberley once or twice, more because she was at the end of her rope than because they had done anything extraordinarily hideous. Each time she’d felt horrible, and each time she’d thanked heaven she hadn’t seemed to do them any lasting harm.

She pried Justin’s Reeboks off him and carried them over to the sink. Their soles, though formed in miniature, had as many gripping cups and ridges and grooves as those on the shoes she wore on weekends. Milk-smeared chocolate crackers had got into all of them, and refused stubbornly to be scrubbed out. Finally, she found an old toothbrush that did the job — bristle by bristle, crumb by crumb, and ridge by ridge.

The floor was just as delightful. Paper towels and Formula 409 disposed of most of the mess, but, sure as hell, some of the sodden Teddy Graham crumbs had slithered down between the tiles. She had to rout them out with the toothbrush, too. She couldn’t just let them go. Teddy Grahams were worse than mud. A lot worse, all things considered. If she didn’t scour out every speck, by morning the kitchen would be swarming with ants.

By the time she was through cleaning, the chicken nuggets and French fries and her own Lean Cuisine shrimp-and-boring-vegetables were ready. She carefully cut the chicken and potatoes into bite-sized bits for her son and let him practice impaling them with a fork. After four or five bites, he was picking, not eating: the Teddy Grahams had taken their toll on him along with his shoes and the floor.

She’d managed two bites from the tray in front of her (too much sodium, and low-fat only by comparison to some of the other frozen food out there) when the telephone rang. She got up so fast, she almost overturned her bottle of Evian. Maybe Frank would come through after all. Stranger things had happened.

“Hello?” she panted, breathless from the dash to the bedroom.

“Hello, is this Nicole?” asked a friendly and completely unfamiliar male voice.

“Yes,” Nicole said warily. “Who is this, please?”

“My name’s Bob Broadman, Nicole.” Too friendly. “Now, I know that a busy homemaker like yourself doesn’t have a lot of time, so I’ll make this quick for you, all right, Nicole?” Way too friendly. “Would you be interested in trying in your own home — ”

Nicole slammed the receiver into its cradle. She hated telemarketers. She particularly hated telemarketers who, hearing a female voice, assumed the person who owned it was a housewife. She most particularly hated telemarketers who did all that and — insult on top of injury — called at dinnertime.

Her gaze fell again on Liber and Libera. She could have sworn they looked back at her with sympathy in their stony eyes. The thought wasn’t so absurd as it might have seemed before she went through this day from hell. Nobody in their time could have had to put up with what she’d just put up with. Just look at them, god and goddess side by side, equal and anything but separate. No repressive patriarchy. No fat plaid-jacketed lawyers leering up an employee’s skirt. “And, by God,” she said, “no telemarketers.”

Times were simpler then. They had to have been better. How could they possibly have been worse?

She trudged back to the kitchen. Justin, gymnast extraordinaire, had succeeded in standing up on the seat of his high chair. Just as she caught sight of him, he set himself up for a swan dive to the floor. Nicole caught him with a grab that would have made a big-league center fielder jealous.

“I think you’re done,” she said. Amazing how calm she sounded — she had to be numb. “Go play quietly in your room and let me finish eating my dinner.” Maybe that would buy her the five minutes’ peace she’d prayed for in the morning. She hadn’t got it then. She didn’t honestly expect to get it now.

No more than a minute and a half later, Justin was in the front room pestering Kimberley. Most of the time, Kimberley could take care of herself, but not when she was laid flat with a virus. Nicole charged to the rescue, to find her daughter halfway toward falling asleep, and Justin trying to wake her up by shoving a toy truck in her face. Nicole laid down the law to him, which wasn’t easy when she was trying to be quiet and not disturb Kimberley. She doubted it was sinking in. Two-year-olds paid even less attention to the laying down of the law than some juries did.

By the time the credits rolled on the Toy Story tape, Kimberley had dozed off. She hardly stirred when Nicole picked her up and carried her to bed. It was well before her usual bedtime, but Nicole didn’t worry about that. If her daughter got a long night’s sleep, she might be close to her old self in the morning. Kids got sick in a hurry, but sometimes they got well in a hurry, too.

Justin wasn’t used to being up when his big sister was asleep. He took one of Kimberley’s Barbies and tried to fracture its skull on the coffee table. Nicole looked on with benign approval. She would never have given Barbies to Kimberley: they sent all the wrong messages. The damn dolls were Frank’s fault. What was worse, and what worried Nicole most, was that Kimberley liked them far too much to make it worth her mother’s while to confiscate them.

“The minute they’re born, they’re trapped in gender roles,” Nicole muttered.

Justin looked up from his mayhem, distracted by the sound of her voice but not curious to know what she meant. Nicole smiled at him. Justin whacked happily away at the coffee table. “Wham! Wham!” he shouted.

“Beat her brains out, kid,” Nicole said. The doll, she thought with malicious glee, looked a little like Dawn.

After he’d worked out all of his hostility and some of Nicole’s, too, Justin went to bed with no more than a token protest. Nicole took a shower, pulled on a clean pair of designer sweats — Neiman-Marcus this time, with blocks of pure strong color, blue and hot pink and acid yellow, as if she could brighten her mood forcibly by livening up her color scheme — and scowled at the telephone. She didn’t think Frank had classes on Wednesdays this quarter. If he didn’t, he could take the kids, and she wouldn’t have to burn a vacation day riding herd on them.

When the hour crawled past nine o’clock and he still hadn’t called, she called him again. Again, she got Dawn on the answering machine. This time, she tried to be more civil. She didn’t know how well she succeeded.

Ten o’clock rolled by. The telephone stayed obstinately silent. Shaking her head, Nicole went into the study and turned on the computer. She used America Online just often enough to keep from quitting the service. One reason she hadn’t quit was times like this. Frank might take too long to answer telephone messages, but he was religious about replying to e-mail the minute he saw it.

As soon as she logged on to AOL, a bright electronic voice announced, “You’ve got mail!” Nicole blinked. People didn’t send her e-mail all that often; the ones who knew she was on line also knew the mail might sit in her box for a couple of weeks before she saw it.

What the hell, she’d read it before she sent her own.

There was only one letter. It was from Frank, from his UCLA Internet address, and sent that afternoon. In the way of e-mail, it was short and to the point: The reason I can’t take the kids tomorrow is that Dawn and I are leaving for three weeks in Cancun tonight, so you might as well stop bugging me for a while, all right? I won’t be around to listen to it.

Nicole stared at the screen. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “You can’t pay child support, but you and Ms. Dumb-Blonde can bop off to Mexico any time you feel like it? You son of a bitch.”

She logged off in controlled fury and shut down the computer. No point to sending e-mail now. Frank was off to sunny Mexico, Frank and Dawn and — god damn her — Josefina, though even in a well-nurtured rage Nicole couldn’t imagine Josefina doing the sights in Cancun with a pair of irredeemably Anglo tourists. Frank didn’t give a damn what happened back here in smoggy L.A. That was Nicole’s job. Women’s work. Sit at home mopping up puke and scouring Teddy Grahams out of kitchen tiles, while the big brave man went gallivanting off to play.

She trudged back into the bedroom. Time was when it had been a sanctuary, a place she’d made for herself after Frank left. She’d hauled the curtains and the comforter and the rest of the bedroom accessories off to Goodwill, got the dresser and the bedside tables refinished, dumped the king-sized waterbed that took sheets the size of Alaska, and bought herself a nice brass bed with a queen-sized mattress. She’d even painted the walls, got rid of the old ugly peach enamel in favor of a nice flat oyster white. She’d been proud of it then, determined to make it a new beginning: Nicole Gunther-Perrin, independent woman.

Now the bold Aztec print of the comforter was crumpled and dingy and flung half on the floor. The sheets still matched, but hadn’t been changed in a week. Justin had tried to climb the drapes and pulled the whole thing down, double rod and all. The window was naked but for the Venetian blinds that she’d used to open to let the daylight in, but she hadn’t done that since she could remember.

Not that, at the moment, there was any daylight to let in. If she bothered to look out, she’d see a dark stretch of yard and the fence that divided it from the neighbors’ swimming pool. She was glad the fence was good and strong and high, to keep the babies safe. She hadn’t had to have it built; just about all L.A. backyards were fenced, which still struck her as strange.

Both of Nicole’s babies were as safe as they could be, when their father had walked out on them and their mother had just been bilked of a partnership. She and Frank had planned to put in a pool themselves later, when the kids were past the drowning stage. Now they’d never do it. The yard was a nondescript patch of dirt with a sunburnt swingset and a sandbox that Kimberley and Justin could turn into a battlefield. These days, they never got to use it. They were always either at daycare or doing weekend visitations with Frank and Dawn.

It was all dark now, invisible. Nicole turned back to the disheveled bedroom. An impulse struck, to straighten up, make the bed, dust the tables and the dresser, pick up the scattered clothes and the pile of assorted shoes. Before she could start, a glance at the bedside clock changed her mind for her. Ten thirty-eight at night was no time to make her bed for the day.

She settled for shaking out the sheets and the blanket and pulling the comforter straight. It was an absurd thing to do, anal and rather pathetic, but at least she’d crawl into a more or less orderly bed. Sleep didn’t enter into it. She was wide awake, almost painfully so.

Well, and who cared? With Kimberley sick, with Josefina off to Mexico, and with her louse of an ex-husband off to Mexico, too, she could sleep as late as the kids would let her. Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng would have to do without her services tomorrow — not that they’d shown much enthusiasm for said services. The kind they really wanted, the bend-over-and-take-it kind, she would not provide.

Her eye fell again as it so often did, on the one thing in the room that wasn’t Yuppie Eclectic Chic. Liber and Libera stood in their stone calm, clasped hand in hand, staring gravely out at a world they couldn’t ever have imagined, let alone created. They wouldn’t have stood for the crap that had landed on her today. How could they, with names like theirs? Nothing in their world or time had been as purely awful as this one she lived in.

She rested her hand on the votive plaque. It felt cool and smooth, inert but somehow subtly alive, the way carved stone can be when it’s very old. “I wish I’d lived then, ‘ she said. “It would have been a good time to be alive, not so… artificial as it is now. Not so hateful.”

She squeaked in surprise. Her hand jerked itself away from the plaque. She stared at the palm. It couldn’t be — of course it couldn’t — but it felt as if it had been blessed with a pair of tiny kisses.

Had Liber and Libera smiled quite so broadly before? Of course they had. They must have. She was tired. She was stressed out. She was imagining things wholesale.

She shook out the comforter again, for luck as it were, and to clear her own head; then climbed into bed. She hesitated as she reached to turn out the light. The lamp’s glow fell softly on the gods’ smiling faces. Her palm itched a little, and stung a little, as if it had had a tiny — doubled — electric shock. She shook her head firmly, steeled herself, and flicked out the light. Dark came down abruptly. Sleep came down with it, too fast almost to perceive. The last thing she remembered was a kind of dim astonishment.

In the dark, quiet bedroom, on the old, old plaque, Liber turned his head and smiled at Libera. She smiled back. Excitement sang between them. True, it was true. A prayer at last; a votary; a wish so strong, it had roused them from their sleep. How long it had been? Hundreds of years — a thousand, and half a thousand more. Bacchus, that simpering Greek, had never lacked for either prayers or devotees. Liber and Libera had been all forgotten.

And such an easy prayer to answer, though not — they admitted to each other — as strictly usual as most. Most prayers were for wealth or fertility or escape from the morning-after price wine inevitably exacted. Such a wish as this: how wonderfully novel, and how simple, too. Nicole had traveled to Carnuntum. This plaque, on which Liber and Libera’s power was now so singularly focused, had come from that ancient city. And, best of all, when the plaque was made, a woman of Nicole’s blood and line had been living in Carnuntum. Is it not wonderful? they said to one another. Is it not meant? Is it not a beautiful symmetry, as beautiful as we are ourselves?

What pleasure, too, in granting the prayer; what divine and divinely ordained ease. This woman’s spirit was as light as thistledown, for all its leaden weight of worry. Purest simplicity to waft it out of the flesh, to send it spiraling down the long road into that other, kindred body.

Such lovely days, those had been, so much more delightful than these, which were nothing if not dull. How perceptive of this woman to comprehend it, and how ingenious of her to utter a prayer they could grant.

Because she was so clever a child of men, and because they were, in their stony hearts, as generous as gods can sometimes choose to be, they granted her spirit a gift. As it spun backward through the years, they instructed it in the language that mortal men had spoken then, the beautiful Latin that was so little like the harsh barbaric rattle of its native English. It had not thought, silly thing, to ask; but how else could it share fully in those lively times, those vivid and brightly sunlit years before the world grew gray and old?

After all, they assured each other, they were granting her every wish, both expressed and unexpressed. They could do no less for their first worshipper in so many hundred years. Our blessing on you, they called after the swiftly flitting spirit. May all gods keep you, and prosper you, and give you joy.

Nicole’s dreams were strange. She rode a spiral through the dark. Spiral dance? Spiral galaxies? — No: a helix, for she went down, backward, as well as round and round. Damn, what did that remind her of? It was dim, shadowed, fluxing in and out of her perception. And yet…

There. She grasped it and held on tight, before it slipped away again. She’d seen it on TV. Watson and Crick. The Double Helix.

DNA — that was it. Building block of life. Ascending chain of being. Descending stair of existence. She could feel the rungs under her feet, the gravity that drew her down and down, round and round.

She’d never dreamt such a dream before. She’d never been so aware of dreaming, either. Would she remember when she woke? Usually, she didn’t want to. This wasn’t frightening, nor particularly weird as dreams went. It was interesting. Words flitted past her, whispers, murmurs in a language she didn’t know, yet felt — strangely — that she did. How odd, she thought in passing. How wonderful. How deliciously strange.

Maybe after all it was the waking she wouldn’t want to remember. Maybe she wanted to stay inside the dream. She’d dream it to the hilt. She promised herself that, far down the spiral stair, the endlessly turning helix of her own and only self.