THERE USED TO be a neighborhood dog I liked. Since I didn’t know his name, the second time he visited I started calling him Easy, after Hugh’s bullterrier. The dog didn’t seem to mind. A mixed breed, he had the color and markings of a cow—brown spot here, white there. Midsized, short haired, calm brown eyes, a real dogdog. He came by once or twice a week on his rounds. A gentleman, he invariably stood at the bottom of the porch steps and waited for me to invite him up. I was always happy to see him. When you are my age you have few visitors.
      Usually I would be sitting in the rocking chair with a magazine or book or just my old woman’s thoughts. That’s one of the things I like about this house—it has a good sitting porch where whole chunks of a day can be spent daydreaming and contentedly watching this small district of the universe come and go. My house is just off Beechwood Canyon in Los Angeles. During the day most of my neighbors are away at work and their children are in school, so it is surprisingly quiet and peaceful for a street ten minutes from Hollywood Boulevard. Generally the only sounds are occasional snatches of conversation, the hiss of sprinklers or roar of a leaf blower, and the muted but constant hum and thump of traffic on the Hollywood freeway a mile away. It is a good house in which to be old. One floor, a few rooms, not much work to keep it clean. The porch has a view of a peaceful street and good-natured neighbors who wave or smile when they pass.
      Whenever Easy came to visit I would give him two Oreo cookies. He knew that was the limit and even if I had the package with me, he would make no attempt to ask for more. The dog had his dignity and never begged or stared with “gimme more” eyes. I liked that. I also liked the way he sat beside me on the porch for a while after he had slowly eaten his cookies. He was my companion for a small part of his day, and we watched life’s passing parade while I’d tell him what I had been thinking. Who wants to listen to you when you are old? A sympathetic dog is better than an empty chair.
      Sometimes odd things happened. Once a bird flew so low that it almost hit him. Once a child fell off its bike directly in front of us. Easy looked at me to see if these things were all right—if the world was still in order. I said, “It’s okay, nothing major,” and he went back to watching or sleeping with his head between his paws. Dogs are here to remind us life really is a simple thing. You eat, sleep, take walks, and pee when you must. That’s about all there is. They are quick to forgive trespasses and assume strangers will be kind.
      After I heard that someone had poured gasoline over this dog and set it on fire, I realized I could no longer wait for you. These many years, your coming was the only thing I had left to hope for. I genuinely believed it would happen one day. Although I had no idea what would occur when we met, I’ve thought about it constantly. But after Easy was murdered I realized I had to finish this account as soon as possible because we might notmeet before I die. Whether we do or not, this diary will be here to help you. To explain where you really came from. Perhaps that knowledge will save you from some of the awful experiences I have had because not knowing my own history ruined my life.
      What is important about the death of a dog when so much else has happened over the years? I can only say it brought the realization it was no longer important whether I continued living or not. I’d thought that moment had come years ago, but I was wrong. Old age arrives like the first days of fall. One afternoon you look up, or smell something in the air, and know instinctively things have changed. I suppose the same thing is true about our own death. Suddenly it’s near enough that we can smell it.
      Despite that, I must continue to tell this story. Whether I am still alive or not when you read it, you must know what really happened and why.
 
      IS IT POSSIBLE to properly describe the months right after Hugh and I first became lovers? That means describing happiness, and no words bear the weight of real joy. I can tell you about meals and weekend trips, conversations walking down a street on Block Island in August when the summer air was thick as breath because it was about to rain and the afternoon was suddenly purple everywhere.
      Our hearts were always too full. But what does that mean? That each of us had our separate, impossible hopes, which we had brought along like secret extra suitcases.
      His small touches on my arm, hair, hand always reminded me of a school of silvery fish that swam up, intensely curious, made contact, then fled at my slightest movement. But I was always moving towardHugh, not away, and after a while when he touched me his hand would stay.
      I have never felt so loved in my life. It made me suspicious at first. Like a turtle, I kept pulling my head back into my shell because I was certain a blow was imminent. But as our bond grew stronger, I left my head out and realized how much I had been missing my whole life.
      The great surprise was how quickly we understood each other. Even in the best relationships I’d had, certain things were never communicated or understood. No matter how fluent you are in a language, situations arise that stump you for ways to express exactly what needs to be said. Being with Hugh gave me the words, which in turn helped me to know myself better. Trusting him, I opened up in an entirely new way.
      Sexually he was marvelous because he had had so much experience. He admitted that for years women had drifted in and out of his life like incense. His wife knew about many of these affairs but they had come to a truce about them: so long as he was discreet and never brought home any part of these other relationships, Charlotte turned a blind eye. Was theirs then only a marriage of convenience? Did she have lovers too? No. She didn’t believe in affairs and no, the marriage was strong and important.
       If thatwas true, why had he allowed me to come into his apartment?
      “Because I was already gone for you by then. Gone like never before. I would have done anything. I broke every one of my rules.”
      “Why, Hugh? Why meafter all those other women? The way you describe some of them, they were incredible.”
      “There’s never a satisfying answer to that. No matter what I say, it won’t assure you or lessen your doubts. Love is like an autistic child when it comes to giving good explanations. Sometimes we love things in others they’re not even aware of. Or they think are ridiculous. I love your purse.”
      “My purse? Why?”
      “I’ve never seen a woman with such a Zen purse. You keep only the most necessary or beautiful things in there. It says so much about you, all of which I cherish and admire. I love the way you put your forehead against my neck when we sleep. And how you put your arm over my shoulder when we’re walking down the street. Like two pals.”
      “You aremy pal. My dearest pal. Whenever I write you a letter that’s how I’ll start it—Dearest Pal.”
      What did I feel about his wife? What one would expect, made all the more difficult by a quality I liked very much in Hugh: he said only good things about Charlotte, no matter the context. From his description, she was a loving, generous woman who made life better for everyone.
      Married people often feel compelled to deride their spouse to a new lover. I knew it from my friends, and particularly from Zoe’s accounts of ex-boyfriend Hector. It makes sense, but it’s neither honest nor brave. We have affairs because we’re greedy. Don’t blame that greed on someone else. People are brilliant at justifying their motives. It’s one of our ugliest talents. Hugh and I wanted each other and were willing to hurt others if it meant the survival of our relationship. There were other explanations and rationalizations, none of them true. We were simply greedy.
      When did Charlotte find out about it? I think a couple of months on. Hugh never said, directly, “She knows,” but things came up in conversation that indicated she did. Strangely, the more involved we became, the more like her Ibecame in not wanting to know about his other life. In the beginning I was fascinated to know what they did together. Or what kind of woman he was married to. But one day that stopped. As best I could, I tried to shut her out of my thoughts and ignore the fact she was there.
      It worked for a time, but six months on I answered the ringing phone and almost threw up when the tranquil voice on the other end said, “This is Charlotte Oakley.”
      “Hello.”
      “I think you know why I’m calling.”
      “Yes.” I wanted a composed voice too. One that said, I’m ready for this, ready for you; nothing you say will change how I feel.
      “My husband told me he was in love with you. I said I was going to call you. He made me promise not to, but some things need to be said before this goes further. I think you should know them.
      “He was very frank about your relationship. I don’t know you so I can only go on what he said. Hugh loves women and has had many lovers over the years.”
      “He told me.” Was thisthe tack she was going to take? Try to humiliate me by making me feel like just another of his sweeties? Something inside lightened immediately. I pushed hair off my face that had fallen there a moment before, when I sat with it hanging down, like the guilty party.
      “I’m sure he has. That’s Hugh’s way. Women love my husband because he is so honest. And funny and pays so much attention that you feel like he’s your alter ego.
      “What you don’tknow is his habit of choosing the same kind of woman again and again, Miranda. They’re always pretty and very intelligent. They have something to say. They do interesting things with their lives. But when you get down to the fine print in his job description, they must also be needy. Hugh wants to save you from your dragons. He’s a chivalrous man. I’m sure you need help and he’s here to give it.”
      “I’m going to put the phone down.”
      For the first time, her voice became cross. “I’m telling you something that will save allof us time and pain! If you are anything like his other girlfriends, you love him because you need him and not the other way around. You’ll fall into this relationship until you’re helpless without him. Maybe you already are. But I warn you, once it happens and he grows bored with your weakness, he’ll leave. He always has. That’s just his way. He’ll do it sweetly and it’ll seem he’s in so much pain that you’ll think it’s your fault, but it isn’t—”
      “How can you say these things about your husband?”
      She laughed and the tone scared me; it was relaxed, knowing. Here was a subject she knew a great deal about. Talking to me, the beginner, was amusing.
      “Has he given you the Kazantzakis autobiography to read yet? Report to Greco. He will. There’s a line in there he loves: They were sparrows and I wanted to make them eagles.’”
      I hung up. I had never done that before in my life. I wanted to dismiss her but couldn’t because what she said was right: I wasweak. I didneed him.
      For minutes afterward, I hated Hugh and myself equally. Why couldn’t it just be an affair? I would have been content with that. Why couldn’t we just have driven our car up to that point on the road and stopped? Whose fault was it that we had gone so far?
      An hour later, I was still sitting in the same chair when he called. I told him about the talk with his wife and that I didn’t want to see him again.
      “Wait! Wait, Miranda! Please, you have to know something else. Did she describe our whole conversation? Did she tell you how it happened? I told her I wanted to separate.”
      “ What?”
      “I told her I was so in love with you that I wanted a separation.”
      I took the receiver away from my ear and looked at it aghast, as if it were he. “What are you saying, Hugh? You never told me this!”
      “Yes I did, but you didn’t believe it was true.”
      “No, not like that you didn’t! I don’t know what’s going on. I amlike your other girlfriends. Charlotte’s right: I’m another weak little bird in your fan club. Why do you want to leave
      her—”
      “Because I love you!”
      “You’ll leave a wife of twenty years and your kids and… Bullshit! I don’t want that responsibility. Or that guilt. I have to go.”
      “No, please—”
      I put the phone down.
 
      I TRIED TO go back to life before Hugh Oakley and almost succeeded. You can create as much work for yourself as necessary. The problem is the time betweenthings, when thoughts and memories burst out of your brain like shrapnel.
      I took trips to California, Boston, and London. In a dreary secondhand bookstall near the Hayward Gallery I found one of the most valuable books I’d ever seen, selling for five pounds. Any other time, I would have done somersaults. This time, tears came to my eyes because the only person I wanted to show the treasure to was Hugh Oakley.
      He called constantly. If I washome, I’d force myself to let the answering machine kick in. His messages ranged from quiet to tormented. He sent letters, flowers, and tender gifts that stopped my breath. What he didn’tdo was show up at either my apartment or the store. I was grateful. The last thing I needed was to see him. He must have understood and accepted that, thank God.
      I told both Zoe and Frances Hatch what had happened. They disagreed on what I should do. Zoe had had her share of married men and was even more skeptical than I about the possibility of Hugh’s leaving his wife.
      “Forget it! They all say that till they know they have you back in their power. Then they get wiggly again. A married man wants the excitement and newness of a lover, combined with the comfort and peace of his family. It’s an impossible and unfaircombination. How could you ever give him both when you’ve only been in his life a few months? Someone said the first wife breaks the man in, while the second gets all the goodies, but I don’t think that’s true. Just the opposite. Even if he leaves his wife, you’ll be carrying ten tons of his guilt around on the back of your relationship until the day you die.
      “Do you know the joke about the man who goes to get a new suit made? The tailor measures him and says come back in two weeks. The guy does and puts on the suit. It looks terrible. The left cuff comes down five inches too long, the lapels are completely uneven, the crotch hangs like harem pants. It’s the worst suit in the world. The guy complains but the tailor says he’s seeing it all wrong: ‘What you’ve got to do is pull up the left sleeve and hold it there with your chin. Then ooch your right shoulder up five inches so the lapels are even, put your right hand in the pocket of the pants and pull up the crotch…’ You get the idea.
      “So the man does all this and ends up looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But when he looks in the mirror again the suitlooks wonderful. The tailor says, That’s the new style these days.’ So the jerk buys the suit and walks out of the store wearing it.
      “He’s staggering down the street like Quasimodo and passes two men. They turn around and watch him limp away. The first guy says, ‘I feel so sorry for the handicapped.’ The other says, ‘Yeah, but what a fabulous suit!’
      “It’s the best metaphor I’ve ever heard for how we try to make relationships like this work. Or what we do to ourselves to make anythingimportant work. Don’t do it, Miranda. You’ve got so much going for you. You don’t need him, no matter how good you think it is.”
      “But what if this is it, Zoe? What if I walk away and it turns out this was the most important relationship in my life? What if the memory’s too big and ends up crushing me?”
      “If we’re lucky and find Mr. Right, seventy or eighty percent is there from the beginning. The other twenty you have to create yourself. This is a lot more than twenty percent, Miranda. But if you have to do it, then do. Just make sure to put on a helmet and learn to recognize the sound of incoming shells when they start dropping. Because they will, in clusters!”
 
      A LETTER CAME from Hugh:
 
       I had a dream last night and have no idea what it means. But I wanted to tell you because I think it has to do with us.
       I’m in Los Angeles and need a car, so I go to a used car lot and buy an Oldsmobile 88 from the 1960s. It’s canary yellow and in good shape, especially the radio. But what’s really extraordinary is, the engine is a large potato! Someone replaced the original with this giant spud. For some wonderful reason, it works perfectly. I’m driving around L.A. in my old new car with a potato engine and feeling great. I have the only automobile in the world whose engine you could cook and eat if you were hungry.
       One day I stop at a light and the engine stalls. That worries me, especially because the thing has well over a hundred thousand miles on it. So I pull into a gas station and tell the mechanic what happened. He opens the hood and isn’t surprised at what he sees. He tells me to drive it into the garage. He and another guy winch the potato out of the car and throw it on the ground. It breaks in half. I’m horrified.
       Inside, like any normal tired out engine, it’s glutted with thick black oil and gunk. I ask how much it’ll cost to replace it. They say they can only put in a new, normal motor but it’s not expensive—a few hundred dollars. Right before I wake up, I can’t decide what to do. I keep thinking, Why can’t they put another potato in there. I don’t want a regular engine. What does this mean, Miranda?
 
      “How do I know what it means, Miranda?” Frances Hatch said. “I’m not Carl Jung!
      “Your boyfriend had a dream about potatoes and you’re asking meto interpret it? I’m just old. Being old doesn’t mean you know more; it means you ate enough fiber. Most of my life, people didn’t have psychiatry to rely on. If you had a bad dream, it was either something you ate last night or a vivid imagination.
      “I don’t believe in interpreting dreams. You should avoid it too. Don’t worry about what Hugh’s dream says; worry about what he says when his eyes are open. If he’s not anxiety-ridden about his wife and kids, don’t you be! Are you his conscience or his lover? I think it’s great he’ll throw everything over for you. That’s the way romance should be!
      “It’s arrogant to think you know what’s right. Morality is only cowardice most of the time. We don’t avoid misbehaving because it’s not proper; what we’re really afraid of is how far down it looks to the bottom. It isfar, and you may getkilled when you hit. But sometimes you survive the jump, and down there the world is a million times better than where you’re living now.”
 
      WHEN I CALLED to say I wanted to see him, Hugh asked what had changed my mind. I said the days were dead without him and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
      We met on neutral ground—a favorite restaurant—but we were out of there and back in my bed within an hour.
      If I’d had any fears he would leave, they disappeared quickly. He moved into my apartment within two weeks. He brought so little with him that I worried he might be thinking of the move as a test drive: since all of his belongings were still at his place, he could always go back to them if we failed.
      But one Saturday when he was at his office, the doorbell downstairs rang. A furniture store was there to deliver a big cushy chair I hadn’t ordered. When they said a Hugh Oakley had, I clapped my hands. Hugh loved reading at night but said it could only be done in a perfect chair. Now he had bought one for his new home.
      Charlotte refused to let me meet their children. She was convinced I was only a blip on the screen of her husband’s Midlife Crisis. Consequently, when he came to his senses, they would reconcile and I’d be yesterday’s news. Why expose their children to further confusion?
      Hugh didn’t care what she felt and was adamant about my spending time with them. I said no. They lived in a parallel universe I was not yet part of. There would be time in the future. Secretly I was petrified of what would happen when we did meet. I imagined two children glaring with fiery eyes that would melt me before I had a chance to say I would do anything to be their friend.
      He missed his kids terribly, so I encouraged him to see them whenever he could. I knew in certain ways he missed Charlotte too. I was sure there were conversations and meetings going on between them that he never told me about. His emotions tacked back and forth like a sailboat in a gale.
      What could I do to help? Be his friend. Let him know how much I loved and appreciated him. Hold my tongue when necessary; try to be considerate when the first instinct was to snap at anything I didn’t understand or that threatened me. For all of my adult life, Hugh Oakley had lived in marriage, a foreign country I had never known. It was easy to imagine what the place was like, but imagining was like reading a brochure at the travel agency. You could never really know the place itself till you got there.
 
      “HAVE YOU EVER heard of Crane’s View?” Frances was smiling and her eyes were closed. She was sitting by a window in her red-carpeted living room, her face lit by the morning sun. A few minutes before, when I’d come in and kissed her cheek, it was almost hot.
      We were drinking gunpowder tea and eating English muffins, her favorite breakfast.
      “What’s Crane’s View?”
      “A town on the Hudson about an hour away. I discovered it thirty years ago and bought a house there. It’s a small place, but it has a spectacular view of the river. That’s why I bought it.”
      “I didn’t know you owned a house, Frances. Do you ever go there?”
      “Not anymore. It makes me sad. I had two good love affairs and a nice dog in that house. Spent most of a year there once when I was angry with New York and was boycotting it. Anyway, I was thinking about it last week. Houses shouldn’t be empty. They should either be lived in or sold. Would you like to have it?”
      I shook my head and put down the cup. “You can’t just give away a house. Are you crazy?”
      She opened her eyes and slowly brought the muffin to her mouth. A blob of marmalade started a slow slide off the edge. Very carefully she caught it with her thumb and shoved it back onto the top. She looked at me coldly but didn’t say anything until she had finished chewing. “Excuse me, I can do whatever I want. Don’t be obnoxious and treat me like an old nitwit. If I want to give you my house, I’ll give you my house. You don’t have to takeit, but that’s your choice.”
      “But—”
      “Miranda, you’ve said at least four times how you and Hugh would like to move. Your apartment is too small and you need someplace where you can start a new life together from scratch. I agree. I don’t know if you’d like Crane’s View. It’s a small town. There’s not much to do there. But both of you could commute to the city. It’s only an hour on the train and the ride is pretty—right alongside the river the whole way. At least go have a look. What do you have to lose?”
      The next Sunday we rented a car, picked up Frances, and drove to Crane’s View. It was the first time she had left her apartment in months. She was both thrilled and scared to be out in the world again. Most of the day she wouldn’t let go of my arm but was so excited she didn’t stop talking for a minute.
      From their first meeting, Frances and Hugh liked each other very much. Her life and the people she’d known fascinated him. Her greatest pleasure was talking about her experiences to someone who cared. They also argued all the time, but Frances loved a good fight. Despite her great age, there was still a big fire in her that longed to be fed. Hugh sensed this immediately and to my dismay started an argument with her the first time they met. The look on her face was pure joy. In the middle of the battle, Frances slapped a hand down on her birdie knee and proclaimed, “If you hadn’t said that, someone else would have. That’sthe difference between the clever and the great,” Hugh hooted and said he was going to pray to Saint Gildas, who protected people from dog bites.
      As we were leaving, she pulled me aside and said, “He’s so different from your description, Miranda. So much better and so much more annoying!”
      We visited her together after that. When Hugh did our shopping he invariably brought back a variety of Ding Dongs, Pinwheels, Twinkies, and other sweets for her. When I told Frances he was the one who bought her the junk food, tears came to her eyes. But the poster won her heart forever.
      Seeing it the first time, I asked how the hell he’d found it. Hugh said only that he’d been lucky. His assistant Courtney later admitted Hugh had all of his European contacts on the lookout for months before they tracked one down in Wroclaw, Poland. It was a large color poster from the Ronacher Theater in Vienna advertising a 1922 performance by The Enormous Shumda, “world renowned” ventriloquist and, of course, the great love of Frances Hatch’s life. On the poster he is standing with arms crossed, looking huge, confident, and mysterious in a tuxedo and full-length cape. He’s a handsome man with gleaming black hair combed straight back and a wicked little goatee. When Frances saw the picture, she touched her cheeks and exclaimed, “That goatee! He always put Florida Water on it first thing in the morning before he did anything else. You never smelled anything so good in your life.”