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She heard a bird cooing outside the window, beyond the closed curtain, and wondered who it was.
Echo-shay, echo-shay
—that’s what it sounded like.
Écorché:
the word came into her mind before she could remember what it meant. A painting of the body with the skin removed. To show what lies beneath. The French for “flayed”—now how do I even know that word? Already dozing off into a deep and dreamless sleep, she remembered the book bag on the shelf and realized who it was from—the small, neat handwriting. Larry Mond. It was Larry’s book.

B
y early evening
Jean had decided she’d go to London. She’d cancel her
échographie
—ultrasound, just like Mark said. Perhaps he was right, they were just being sure, but she wanted to see her own doctor, and she wanted to see Victoria. Mark was again sequestered in the study and talking on the phone: the fridge campaign, this time with the client. He’d offered to prepare a meal when he was done, a welcome gesture. Her pleasure in “getting dinner” (shopping, cooking, and then clearing up afterward), never high, had also been canceled by Giovana; apparently she and Mark spent almost as much time eating as fucking. It was all one thing:
appetite.
Something she not only didn’t have but couldn’t imagine ever having again.

When she went to get a drink, she saw the corner of Vic’s letter sticking out from a high shelf where Mark had left it—deliberately putting it out of the way, or merely inconsiderate (and
tall
)? She poured a glass of cold white wine and stood on a chair to get Vic’s letter, grabbing, on the way down, the remaining package: Larry’s book. She found a yellow legal pad (the only trace of her wasted education) and went out to the terrace. And as she read the letter she thought she’d been right: it was love. Maybe sex, too, but that was the wrong emphasis; of this she must find a way to convince Mark—though possibly the diverting of Victoria’s love away from him, as he seemed prepared to view it, would upset him even more.

She glanced over the other side of the letter. After the postscript about Vikram she saw there was another:
You’ll never guess who stopped by. Sophie de Vilmorin
—
nice!
So, she finally did go around, the coatless waif from the dry cleaner, daughter of Mark’s famous ex. Typical that he hadn’t read that out—once again shielding her, or not wanting to “bore” her. So what if Sophie was weird? Thousands of women regularly looked to Jean for guidance, and her own husband treated her like a child.

Jean picked up
A Theory of Equality
and held it out to inspect: a pair of red scales on the cover, the university press imprint, no author photograph, a serious book. She opened it as wide as she could without cracking the spine, deeply inhaling at the seam, and as she did so a sealed envelope dropped into her lap. She didn’t open it yet. First, she made a list.

Scully, Vic (Maya move out), travel agent

Then she wrote
G.
She wanted to write to Giovana without delay. The stop at the clinic, and then that
package,
had made Giovana’s continuing presence seem utterly frivolous, like the White House affair with the intern: folly in a time of ease and plenty. In this new world of peril, there was no place for such fripperies. It was not enough that she hadn’t checked the Naughtyboy1 account. She knew that if she signed in the next day and there was a message blinking in her in-box, a message dense with time and place, with detail morbid and high—well, she might not have had enough after all. Jean badly wanted to believe in willpower. But willpower was a restraining order, not a change of heart. Her measured, and weakening, resistance was itself an engagement she wanted rid of. She’d go to
the Internet café in the morning, after the travel agent and before the gym, and break it off.

Listen to you! she thought, resolving to “break it off,” as if Giovana was her own lover, not a complete stranger. She’d leave it for tomorrow, but still she thought about how she’d do it.

Dear Giovana, For these past months, without knowing it, you have been corresponding with me, Jean Hubbard.

Yeah, me, Mrs. Hubbard to you—capeesh?

Hi, this is Jean here.

Well,
that
didn’t work. What was she going to say?

Dear Giovana, For the past two and a half months I’ve been impersonating my husband. Yours truly this time, Jean Hubbard

She tried again.

Dearest Gio. No.

Dear Gio. No!

Dear Giovana, The time has come to call it a day. And here I must thank you. All your patient, indeed painstaking, ministrations have made me the lover my wife has always desired and goodness knows she deserves…

Oh, sure. Still, it was in the right direction. She’d cut Giovana off with the one thing she had and that girl would never have: the marriage. The bedrock of twenty-three mostly happy—no, twenty-three plain happy years. Or how about,

Dear Slut, I adore you, but I have a new slut to call my own!

“You wouldn’t be talking about me, now wouldja?” Jean asked herself aloud, in the Bugs Bunny voice she and Vic used to denote comic lack of self-knowledge, together with indignant frowns, feet pointing out, hands on hips.

Or, how about…nothing. The best, the coolest, would be just to stop. And say nothing.

The sun had gone down behind the blue hills, and the air was suddenly cool. All the detail was gone, the earth a solid shape, the silhouette of a sleeping animal. Even the parrots in the tall eucalyptus trees were quiet. The sky was a deep yellow streaked with black, as if scrawled over, two fisted, by a toddler wielding charcoal. Jean could hear Mark running a bath—so much for getting dinner. To think they used to share baths, two alligators in a tiny swamp.

Jean lit the potted citronella candles on the table and took out Larry’s envelope. Inside was a postcard, part of a painting by Boucher,
Cupid a Captive,
1754. The detail was of a flowing fountain, adorned with two gray stone putti, one poised to administer to the other mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She turned it over to see the familiar small, clear handwriting.

Whence thou return’st, and whither went’st, I know;

For God is also in sleep, and dreams advise…

In me is no delay; with thee to go,

Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,

Is to go hence unwilling…

Jean looked up—hang on, that was a bit much, wasn’t it? What was he saying? She knew it was Milton; Larry loved Milton. But why now? She recognized the lines, from
Paradise Lost.
He’d written them out for her once before, the part when Adam and Eve must leave paradise and become fully human.

She’d found these same lines written in this same hand, in her paralegal’s desk as she was clearing out, getting ready to leave New York. She read it again now and blushed to remember (as if she could forget) the line that followed those closing ellipses, “thou to me Art all things under heaven, all places thou.” Instead, he’d written,
And the dry cleaner lost all my suits—maybe they should change their name?

She looked up again. It was nearly dark. So, he wasn’t declaring his undying love. Well, thank goodness for that, she told herself, embarrassed by her eagerness. He
wasn’t
saying he was still waiting for her; he was making a crappy joke about the Paradise dry cleaner, now rechristened Paradise Lost. A mosquito seethed close to her ear. Again she looked down, trying hard to swallow. There was more.

Are you ever coming back? Please give a call if and when.

L.

Jean looked over at the distant hills just as they disappeared into night. Maybe he meant
she
was lost, here in paradise. She felt her throat constrict. How could he know that? Into the envelope he’d also put his business card, with a cell number handwritten and underlined, twice. She put the two cards back in the envelope and stuck it deep inside her legal pad. A bit flirtatious, she thought, even if it was also a heavy-handed joke. And the
L
was more intimate than Larry.
L,
the letter for love, like Vic’s
LOL:
lots of love. Or, for Vic’s generation, did that always mean “laugh out loud”—suggesting there might be another way to laugh. Then Mark, clean shaven and handsome with his wet hair slicked straight back from the forehead, reappeared.

“They
adored
the pitch,” he said, grinning, as if he’d just gotten away with something. Which she supposed he had. “
Mad
for it.”

She slapped her leg. The mosquitoes were drinking their fill. “Fantastic.
Really
—well done.” She slapped her arm, hard. “Goddamn! These candles
never
work. They make absolutely no difference.”

“Shall we go out and celebrate? A festive cocktail at the Bamboo Bar and then the Beausoleil, the Royal Palm? Your pick, Gorgeous. You name it.”

Jean smiled, thinking of how her nonsarong clothes were all flecked with mold, which you wouldn’t really see at night—but the
smell.
She certainly wasn’t going to wear the checked dirndl, last seen on the day Giovana’s letter arrived. But what then? There was a sense for Jean now in which trepidation made dress important, as if she was preparing each day for the battle of unknown eventuality, and what did you wear for that? Everything cotton gave off the acrid blast you’d get by sticking your head in a bag of wild mushrooms; everything wool reeked of damp dog.

Twenty minutes later, in an old blue crepe dress, Jean was sitting beside an elated Mark as he steered the creaking truck down the drive, talking with an unexpected lightness about Victoria and her newfound love, and she thought again of Adam and Eve taking “their solitary way.” She crossed her arms and looked out into the blackness, resting her middle finger on the worry zone under her bra—calcification? Or mere microcalcification? Fibrosis or just neurosis? How amazing that she remembered the Milton. But then she’d read those lines hundreds of times on the plane back to England, and every once in a long while, she’d read them again.

Mark stopped at the gate and put the car in neutral, yanking up the hand brake. “You drive through,” he said, then opened
the door to get out. Jean slithered and limboed across the gearbox into the driver’s seat as she watched him approach the gate in the yellow beam of the headlights. He was looking at the ground and smiling. She was relieved he seemed to be retreating from his agonies over Victoria and Vikram, even as she doubted he could. For who is the father of a daughter, after all, but the man who has loved her more than any other? Not just longer, in Mark’s case, but
more.
As he began his struggle with the homemade loop, his hair and jacket flaps whipping in the wind, Jean tried it out loud.

In either hand the hastening angel caught

Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate

Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast

To the subjected plain; then disappeared.

They looking back, all the eastern side beheld

Of Paradise, so late their happy seat…

Something here she couldn’t recapture, seeing Mark struggle with the twanging catch and no longer smiling, and then the end came back to her—the natural tears.

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and providence their guide:

They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

Mark stood by holding the gate open, flattening his hair against his head with his free hand, as Jean shot past him and through to the other side.

T
hursday morning
, Gatwick Airport. Jean had been hoping for a powerful intuition, a clear apprehension of her future here in her adopted country. If she was to return—and in her mind she’d already begun folding her T-shirts and rolling her sarongs—she wanted to feel the Kingdom was fighting to have her back, not merely that she’d been “given leave to remain,” as the smudged stamp in her passport said. She knew that desperate thousands would be overjoyed with “given leave,” but she, in her turn, had given England her twenties and her thirties; she’d studied here; she’d married here, had a child here, and raised a British daughter. She’d toiled, paid her taxes, and over two decades of writing contributed to the health of the nation, and now she wanted to be sought after, not
given leave.
This was no time for assumptions or ambiguities. What if this island shunned her as St. Jacques recently had?

Inside the terminal the Hubbards walked the long walk, heavy hand luggage becoming heavy shoulder and heavy back luggage. Only an airport golf cart gave the idea of forward motion, the pompously beeping buggy speeding through the stream of travelers, its spike-haired young driver avoiding the eyes of weary old people in need of a lift. Keeping up the pace, Jean glanced outside at skim-milk clouds spilling across the sky, thinly covering all the blue. She remembered this: by noon in England, the best part of the day was past. Did that count as an intuition about her place here? No. She’d fallen out with the hectoring, unrelenting sun.

It wasn’t until they were on the shuttle connecting the north and the south terminals that Mark said anything at all. “Vic and Mark backwards. Do you think that’s significant? I mean even subconsciously?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jean said, too mesmerized to look up from the rows of summer-bright trees below the flying train.

“ ‘Vic’—and ‘Mark’ backwards,” he repeated, still puzzling, “makes ‘Vikram.’”

“Oh, I
see,
” Jean said. “I don’t think so. Not even subconsciously. But why don’t you ask them tonight?”

Mark stuck with his frown of stolid, committed perplexity as they boarded the Gatwick Express.

“Victoria Station,” Jean said, looking at her ticket as if she’d never noticed the link between the station and her own daughter. She was experiencing the fresh-ear, fresh-eye sensation that lasts only a short while on return. Mark, who unlike Jean had made the journey back several times, was more engaged by the miracle of a working cell phone.

She couldn’t remember cappuccino on the train before. Was England joining Europe after all? Mark stuck with tea, as if reaffirming his national allegiance, a process that would normally reach its peak with
Match of the Day
on Saturday night—how gaily the three Hubbards used to hum and whistle the theme tune—but not this weekend, she registered, the festive jingle petering out as she remembered why not.

Mark was going to Germany for a two-day retreat with his biggest client. He’d listen to the Bavarian managing director’s lousy ideas for the new campaign, then hunt wild boar with the
core team of Germans and Brits. He’d been complaining about the trip for weeks, but never very convincingly—only enough to put her off joining him or, as he stressed, joining the wives. She thought he was in fact looking forward to it—a little male company, a little death, a lot of drinking. Or just a lot of hotel time with Giovana? Were all “client retreats” dirty weekends?

Jean resisted reaching over to help Mark peel the lid off a plastic thimble of milk. He was frowning more than ever, head angled back because he was too lazy to rummage for his glasses, stabbing at the foil edge with a blunt finger. It was a piteous sight, but she knew he’d be annoyed if she intervened. His tea was cold by now, Jean thought, unable to watch any longer.

She turned to the rows of houses whizzing past, terraces of identical brown brick, neat and grimy and tall. Individuality was expressed by the recently added decks, one with an ornate newel post, another with diagonally laid blond planks. Then, at Croydon, back to uniformity, this time in a pebble-dash finish, the cream surface with its infinity of pits and ridges attracting and retaining soot. Brown train breath scorched the paintwork from the bottom up, staining it, Jean thought, like her coffee seeping in along the edges of white foam.

At Thornton Heath, some relief from the chestnut trees: a red hawthorn, a yellow Indian laburnum. Balham was buried under scaffolding and for sale signs. Jean fixed on a school yard, a secondary, the boys and girls in black blazers; a group of them sneaking a smoke behind a bike shed. She saw each figure clearly defined, the entire life of the playground in a single glimpse, like a Brueghel. Beyond the smokers, the emerald sward of the sports field, and even from here, even at this speed, you could see it was too soggy for play.

“Maybe we need to set out a few more rules about who can and cannot stay in Albert Street, what do you think?” Jean said, gearing up for her return to mothering. “Maya Stayanovich, Sophie de Vilmorin, these
orphans
—I mean, we’re not running a shelter, and if Vic can’t say no…” Looking out the window, feeling a little queasy for facing in the wrong direction, she thought for a moment of the waif and stray Sophie de Vilmorin and of how Mark had ignored repeated questions about her contact with Victoria, possibly out of boredom with the line of inquiry. Instead he’d talked so enthusiastically about a new contract, “in St. Malo, of all places,” to design the literary festival there. Was the evasion deliberate?
Jean
was bored, by the mistrust that engulfed her.

Mark didn’t reply now, either, too busy trying to read the stamp-size screen of his cell phone. Clapham Junction, and Jean’s unease grew—she was unnerved, countrified. All around her, passengers were gabbing loudly on their phones. Mark with his tiny folding device was among them—no attempt at a whisper as he checked in with the office, licking the milk off his finger. In the end he’d succeeded in puncturing the foil with his nail, displacing all but a few drops.

Battersea, scattered with satellite dishes and self-storage ware-houses. Another train going in the opposite direction shot past, making her jump in her seat, and when it was gone what was left behind was the grand, wheeling geometry of a raised and elaborately riveted Victorian gasworks. Next, the inverted worktable of the old Battersea power station, and at last the Thames, brown and low this morning, but swift. Nothing outmoded there.

Jean didn’t comment when, finally in Albert Street, Mark paid the cabdriver a month’s wages on St. Jacques. She was distracted by their house: weirdly still there but looking much smaller, behind its shiny spears of black railing and the narrow black front door. The ornamental purple cabbages in the window boxes were all gone. Dead heads carefully disposed of by the person who forgot to water them? Or gleefully decapitated
by one of Camden Town’s roving Kings of Swing? Moving to help Mark free a suitcase wheel that had wedged itself between concrete paving slabs, Jean decided she wasn’t going to mind about
anything
—and certainly not missing cabbages.

Victoria had suggested dinner at the tapas place in Parkway; afterward they walked her and Vikram to the tube station, a peninsula in a sea of violent northbound traffic, and returned for coffee in their old, semisubterranean kitchen.

“So, not worried anymore about Vic and Mark backwards?” Jean asked, cupping her brown mug in both hands, teasing him only because he clearly was relieved. They were sitting at the kitchen table, just the two of them plus Elizabeth the cat, relaxing into the night exactly as they had thousands of times before, and it was possible to imagine they’d never gone away.

“I think he’s
terrific.
Bright, pretty, clever, and clearly in love with Vic. Didn’t understand a word he said about eccentric ellipses and crazy orbits and, and, expoplanentiary exploration. But so long as it’s astromony and not astrology, I’m sure it’s all brilliant marvelous stuff. In fact, I can’t see anything
not
terrific about him.
Mildly
touchy, hm?”

“That’s ex
o
planetary exploration.”

“Yes, and
astronomy
and none of that horoscope shit, with all due…you’re seeing that sad-sack editor of yours tomorrow, aren’t you?” It was true, Edwin Mackay wrote the magazine’s star chart, under the byline of Mrs. Moonlight.

“Mm, for lunch, after Scully. The gyno and the editor—a gay morning program. But what might Vikram feel even mildly touchy about? From what I gathered he comes from a rather posh Bombay family. What can he think of
us,
more like.” Jean glanced around at all the dingy stripped pine and vowed to whitewash the entire place. As soon as she could be bothered.

“Mumbai, please.” Mark was referring to Vikram’s correction over dinner. “Let’s wipe out all trace of the evil British Empire, shall we? Never mind, say, the parliamentary system or an independent judiciary. Perhaps he’d prefer to hail from Zaire, or should I say the Democratic Republic of the Congo? I guess we should be grateful we’re not dining with Burkina Faso or Xianggang.”

“I think you were right the first time: he’s terrific,” Jean said, steering Mark back around. “A bit pedantic, I grant you.” She picked at some food caught in the tabletop. In fact, she thought Vikram had been strikingly pompous. But Victoria was so full of hope and, here again, their absence made them unnaturally restrained in their judgments. As, she imagined, did Vikram’s appearance: he was pretty and clever—and brown; any criticism was unsayable, and for Victoria completely unthinkable.

“You have to make allowances,” Jean said, as much to herself as to Mark. “He was, after all, meeting the parents.”

“Not that he seemed remotely intimidated by either one of
us.
”

“Good.”
She laughed. “You can see how
that
would appeal to Vic: someone who can more than hold his own.” Rugby? Radley? She’d already forgotten which middling public school he’d been to—and then she realized, that’s what Mark, himself an old Etonian, meant by Vikram’s touchiness. The narcissism of minor difference, as far as Jean was concerned. “She certainly seems to like him. I can’t remember her so…
curious
about what someone else has to say. It’s a compliment to you, really, that our darling socialist has ended up with a public-school boy, don’t you think?”

“How do you mean, ‘ended up’?”

“I don’t mean anything, just that I agree: he’s extremely
nice. I still can’t seem to get used to how grown-up she is, though. It never bothers me to think of it, but to
see
her going off, down into the tube hand in hand to sleep who knows where…”

“I can’t believe this is
you.
Imagine if she’d gone off who knows where, as you say, with that singer if you can call him that—remember that scrawny bass player? His black drainpipes so tight they might’ve been tattoos. Rick or Mick, what was his name? A true Camden hero. The Ex-husbands, we saw them play at the Dublin Castle, remember? Now that’s what I call love. You complained for weeks that your hair smelled of beer. Not a problem for Dad, that, with hardly a hair left to speak of. Did you know that beer is incredibly nutritious for the scalp? Of course you do—I read it in your column. No, no, no—it could be
far
worse. Far, far worse.” He saw that Jean still wore a worried face. “How would you like it if she was in the sweaty embrace of some hulking rugger bugger? He
knows
things, about the
universe
for fuck’s sake, he doesn’t just spout ill-informed opinions like most people their age. Or any age, for that matter. He’s got real, what is it,
quiddidity.
”

“Are you drunk?” She got up and cleared their cups, leaving them unrinsed in the sink. “And it’s ‘quiddity.’”

Jean thought of Vikram trying to explain cosmic weather to this most earthbound family, how he’d spread his long, delicate fingers on the table and concentrated, seeming to stare at the dust on the inside of his glasses, and of his habit of clearing his throat or stuttering when anyone else tried to speak, fending off interruption—pretty much the only form of talk the Hubbards knew.

Outside the kitchen window, four legs were clacking by on the sidewalk, two in fishnets and stilettos, two in pointy black boots with the tips curling up like gondolas. A cigarette bounced off the glass and down into the light well.

“Charming!” Jean called after them through the foot-high gap of open window, suddenly exhausted. Mark was at the bar end of the counter, unscrewing a bottle of duty-free scotch. “Is that wise?” she asked.

“Certainly not,” he replied, hunched but elated, liberally pouring.

Early the next morning Jean would see Scully and, even earlier, Mark would fly to Munich. She was troubled by what awaited him at the
Gasthof,
but she was eager to see Vic properly and to be alone in her own house. “I’m
finished,
” she said, yawning, beginning her lap around the room to turn out the lights.

“Me too,” said Mark, banging down his empty glass and beating her to the bathroom.