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You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow-Jones dipped two hundred points, the Paris paper boasted a banner headline: normal man marries oblong woman. They knew what was important. They did! But you had to get out once in a while, even if it was just across the border to Terre Haute, for a movie.

Outside of Paris, in the middle of a large field, was a scatter of brick buildings, a small liberal arts college with the improbable name of Hilldale-Versailles. Zoë Hendricks had been teaching American History there for three years. She taught “The Revolution and Beyond” to freshmen and sophomores, and every third semester she had the Senior Seminar for Majors, and although her student evaluations had been slipping in the last year and a half—Professor Hendricks is often late for class and usually arrives with a cup of hot chocolate, which she offers the class sips of—generally, the department of nine men was pleased to have her. They felt she added some needed feminine touch to the corridors—that faint trace of Obsession and sweat, the light, fast clicking of heels. Plus they had had a sex-discrimination suit, and the dean had said, well, it was time.

The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing “Getting to Know You”—both verses. At the request of the dean, the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, “Fine,” and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. There was too much effort with the eyeliner, and her earrings, worn no doubt for the drama her features lacked, were a little frightening, jutting out from the side of her head like antennae.

“I’m going out of my mind,” said Zoë to her younger sister, Evan, in Manhattan. Professor Hendricks seems to know the entire soundtrack to ‘The King and I’. Is this history? Zoë phoned her every Tuesday.

“You always say that,” said Evan, “but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you’re quiet for a while and then you say you’re fine, you’re busy, and then after a while you say you’re going crazy again, and you start all over.” Evan was a part-time food designer for photo shoots. She cooked vegetables in green dye. She propped up beef stew with a bed of marbles and shopped for new kinds of silicone sprays and plastic ice cubes. She thought her life was “OK.” She was living with her boyfriend of many years, who was independently wealthy and had an amusing little job in book publishing. They were five years out of college, and they lived in a luxury midtown high-rise with a balcony and access to a pool. “It’s not the same as having your own pool,” Evan was always sighing, as if to let Zoë know that, as with Zoë, there were still things she, Evan, had to do without.

“Illinois. It makes me sarcastic to be here,” said Zoë on the phone. She used to insist it was irony, something gently layered and sophisticated, something alien to the Midwest, but her students kept calling it sarcasm, something they felt qualified to recognize, and now she had to agree. It wasn’t irony. What is your perfume? a student once asked her. Room freshener, she said. She smiled, but he looked at her, unnerved.

Her students were by and large good Midwesterners, spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and cheese. They shared their parents’ suburban values; their parents had given them things, things, things. They were complacent. They had been purchased. They were armed with a healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographic. They seemed actually to know very little about anything, but they were extremely good-natured about it. “All those states in the East are so tiny and jagged and bunched up,” complained one of her undergraduates the week she was lecturing on “The Turning Point of Independence: The Battle at Saratoga.”

“Professor Hendricks, you’re from Delaware originally, right?” the student asked her.

“Maryland,” corrected Zoë.

“Aw,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “New England.”

Her articles—chapters toward a book called Hearing the One About: Uses of Humor in the American Presidency—were generally well received, though they came slowly for her. She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them—she didn’t trust things written in the morning only—so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day, its moods, its light, was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for over a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.

The job she’d had before the one at Hilldale-Versailles had been at a small college in New Geneva, Minnesota, Land of the Dying Shopping Mall. Everyone was so blond there that brunettes were often presumed to be from foreign countries. Just because Professor Hendricks is from Spain doesn’t give her the right to be so negative about our country. There was a general emphasis on cheerfulness. In New Geneva you weren’t supposed to be critical or complain. You weren’t supposed to notice that the town had overextended and that its shopping malls were raggedy and going under. You were never to say you weren’t fine thank you and yourself. You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier, saying, “If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists.”

But now, in her second job, in her fourth year of teaching in the Midwest, Zoë was discovering something she never suspected she had: a crusty edge, brittle and pointed. Once she had pampered her students, singing them songs, letting them call her at home, even, and ask personal questions. Now she was losing sympathy. They were beginning to seem different. They were beginning to seem demanding and spoiled.

“You act,” said one of her Senior Seminar students at a scheduled conference, “like your opinion is worth more than everybody else’s in the class.”

Zoë’s eyes widened. “I am the teacher,” she said. “I do get paid to act like that.” She narrowed her gaze at the student, who was wearing a big leather bow in her hair, like a cowgirl in a TV ranch show. “I mean, otherwise everybody in the class would have little offices and office hours.” Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class’s time just talking about movies she’s seen. She stared at the student some more, then added, “I bet you’d like that.”

“Maybe I sound whiny to you,” said the girl, “but I simply want my history major to mean something.”

“Well, there’s your problem,” said Zoë, and with a smile, she showed the student to the door. “I like your bow,” she added.

Zoë lived for the mail, for the postman, that handsome blue jay, and when she got a real letter, with a real full-price stamp, from someplace else, she took it to bed with her and read it over and over. She also watched television until all hours and had her set in the bedroom, a bad sign. Professor Hendricks has said critical things about Fawn Hall, the Catholic religion, and the whole state of Illinois. It is unbelievable. At Christmastime she gave twenty-dollar tips to the mailman and to Jerry, the only cabbie in town, whom she had gotten to know from all her rides to and from the Terre Haute airport, and who, since he realized such rides were an extravagance, often gave her cut rates.

“I’m flying in to visit you this weekend,” announced Zoë.

“I was hoping you would,” said Evan. “Charlie and I are having a party for Halloween. It’ll be fun.”

“I have a costume already. It’s a bonehead. It’s this thing that looks like a giant bone going through your head.”

“Great,” said Evan.

“It is, it’s great.”

“Alls I have is my moon mask from last year and the year before. I’ll probably end up getting married in it.”

“Are you and Charlie getting married?” Foreboding filled her voice.

“Hmmmmmrnnnno, not immediately.”

“Don’t get married.”

“Why?”

“Just not yet. You’re too young.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re five years older than I am and you’re not married.”

“I’m not married? Oh, my God,” said Zoë. “I forgot to get married.”

Zoë’ had been out with three men since she’d come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the Paris municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she’d brought in to protest and who then asked her to coffee. At first she thought he was amazing—at last, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong, he said, “You would not be ill-served by new clothes, you know.” She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve.

“Did you have to brush that off in the car?” he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.

“Excuse me?”

He slowed down at a yellow light and frowned. “Couldn’t you have picked it up and thrown it outside?”

“The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it make?”

“It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it’s going to lay eggs in my car!”

The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he’d do or say would startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn’t, he finally thrust his fist across the table and said, “Look,” and when he opened it, there was her parsley sprig and her orange slice, crumpled to a wad. Another time he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. “And there I was in front of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those painted, drowning bodies splayed in every direction, and there’s this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom left, swirling and building, and building, and building, and going up to the right-hand corner, where there’s this guy waving a flag, and on the horizon in the distance you could see this teeny tiny boat…” He was breathless in the telling. She found this touching and smiled in encouragement. “A painting like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It just makes you shit.”

“I have to ask you something,” said Evan. “I know every woman complains about not meeting men, but really, on my shoots, I meet a lot of men. And they’re not all gay, either.” She paused. “Not anymore.”

“What are you asking?”

The third guy was a political science professor named Murray Peterson, who liked to go out on double dates with colleagues whose wives he was attracted to. Usually the wives would consent to flirt with him. Under the table sometimes there was footsie, and once there was even kneesie. Zoë and the husband would be left to their food, staring into their water glasses, chewing like goats. “Oh, Murray,” said one wife, who had never finished her master’s in physical therapy and wore great clothes. “You know, I know everything about you: your birthday, your license plate number. I have everything memorized. But then that’s the kind of mind I have. Once at a dinner party I amazed the host by getting up and saying good-bye to every single person there, first and last names.”

“I knew a dog who could do that,” said Zoë, with her mouth full. Murray and the wife looked at her with vexed and rebuking expressions, but the husband seemed suddenly twinkling and amused. Zoë swallowed. “It was a Talking Lab, and after about ten minutes of listening to the dinner conversation this dog knew everyone’s name. You could say, ‘Bring this knife to Murray Peterson,’ and it would.”

“Really,” said the wife, frowning, and Murray Peterson never called again.

“Are you seeing anyone?” said Evan. “I’m asking for a particular reason, I’m not just being like mom.”

“I’m seeing my house. I’m tending to it when it wets, when it cries, when it throws up.” Zoë had bought a mint-green ranch house near campus, though now she was thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have. It was hard to live in a house. She kept wandering in and out of the rooms, wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree. The day she moved in, she had tacked to her tree a small paper sign that said Zoë’s Tree.

Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed on the house they sent her flowers with a Congratulations card. Her mother had even UPS’d a box of old decorating magazines saved over the years, photographs of beautiful rooms her mother used to moon over, since there never had been any money to redecorate. It was like getting her mother’s pornography, that box, inheriting her drooled-upon fantasies, the endless wish and tease that had been her life. But to her mother it was a rite of passage that pleased her. “Maybe you will get some ideas from these,” she had written. And when Zoë looked at the photographs, at the bold and beautiful living rooms, she was filled with longing. Ideas and ideas of longing.

Right now Zoë’s house was rather empty. The previous owner had wallpapered around the furniture, leaving strange gaps and silhouettes on the walls, and Zoë hadn’t done much about that yet. She had bought furniture, then taken it back, furnishing and unfurnishing, preparing and shedding, like a womb. She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children’s coffins, so she returned them. And she had recently bought an Oriental rug for the living room, with Chinese symbols on it she didn’t understand. The salesgirl had kept saying she was sure they meant Peace and Eternal Life, but when Zoë got the rug home, she worried. What if they didn’t mean Peace and Eternal Life! What if they meant, say, Bruce Springsteen? And the more she thought about it, the more she became convinced she had a rug that said Bruce Springsteen, and so she returned that, too.

She had also bought a little baroque mirror for the front entryway, which she had been told, by Murray Peterson, would keep away evil spirits. The mirror, however, tended to frighten her, startling her with an image of a woman she never recognized. Sometimes she looked puffier and plainer than she remembered. Sometimes shifty and dark. Most times she just looked vague. You look like someone I know, she had been told twice in the last year by strangers in restaurants in Terre Haute. In fact, sometimes she seemed not to have a look of her own, or any look whatsoever, and it began to amaze her that her students and colleagues were able to recognize her at all. How did they know? When she walked into a room, how did she look so that they knew it was her? Like this? Did she look like this? And so she returned the mirror.

“The reason I’m asking is that I know a man I think you should meet,” said Evan. “He’s fun. He’s straight. He’s single. That’s all I’m going to say.”

“I think I’m too old for fun,” said Zoë. She had a dark bristly hair in her chin, and she could feel it now with her finger. Perhaps when you had been without the opposite sex for too long, you began to resemble them. In an act of desperate invention, you began to grow your own. “I just want to come, wear my bonehead, visit with Charlie’s tropical fish, ask you about your food shoots.”

She thought about all the papers on “Our Constitution: How It Affects Us” she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her doctor and her doctor’s assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying. Or ovaries or colon. “You guys practice medicine?” asked Zoë, aloud, after they had left the room. Once, as a girl, she brought her dog to a vet, who had told her, “Well, either your dog has worms or cancer or else it was hit by a car.”

She was looking forward to New York.

“Well, whatever. We’ll just play it cool. I can’t wait to see you, hon. Don’t forget your bonehead,” said Evan.

“A bonehead you don’t forget,” said Zoë.

“I suppose,” said Evan.

The ultrasound Zoë was keeping a secret, even from Evan. “I feel like I’m dying,” Zoë had hinted just once on the phone.

“You’re not dying,” said Evan. “You’re just annoyed.”

“Ultrasound,” Zoë’ now said jokingly to the technician who put the cold jelly on her bare stomach. “Does that sound like a really great stereo system, or what?” She had not had anyone make this much fuss over her bare stomach since her boyfriend in graduate school, who had hovered over her whenever she felt ill, waved his arms, pressed his hands upon her navel, and drawled evangelically, “Heal! Heal for thy Baby Jesus’ sake!” Zoë would laugh and they would make love, both secretly hoping she would get pregnant. Later they would worry together, and he would sink a cheek to her belly and ask whether she was late, was she late, was she sure, she might be late, and when after two years she had not gotten pregnant, they took to quarreling and drifted apart.

“OK,” said the technician absently.

The monitor was in place, and Zoë’s insides came on the screen in all their gray and ribbony hollowness. They were marbled in the finest gradations of black and white, like stone in an old church or a picture of the moon. “Do you suppose,” she babbled at the technician, “that the rise in infertility among so many couples in this country is due to completely different species trying to reproduce?” The technician moved the scanner around and took more pictures. On one view in particular, on Zoë’s right side, the technician became suddenly alert, the machine he was operating clicking away.

Zoë stared at the screen. “That must be the growth you found there,” suggested Zoë.

“I can’t tell you anything,” said the technician rigidly. “Your doctor will get the radiologist’s report this afternoon and will phone you then.”

“I’ll be out of town,” said Zoë.

“I’m sorry,” said the technician.

Driving home, Zoë looked in the rearview mirror and decided she looked—well, how would one describe it? A little wan. She thought of the joke about the guy who visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say you’ve got six weeks to live.”

“I want a second opinion,” says the guy. You act like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.

“You want a second opinion? OK,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.” She liked that joke. She thought it was terribly, terribly funny.

She took a cab to the airport, Jerry the cabbie happy to see her.

“Have fun in New York,” he said, getting her bag out of the trunk. He liked her, or at least he always acted as if he did. She called him “Jare.”

“Thanks, Jare.”

“You know, I’ll tell you a secret: I’ve never been to New York. I’ll tell you two secrets: I’ve never been on a plane.” And he waved at her sadly as she pushed her way in through the terminal door. “Or an escalator!” he shouted.

The trick to flying safe, Zoë always said, was never to buy a discount ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn’t crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

*  *  *  *  *

“You’re here!” shrieked Evan over the doorbell, before she even opened the door. Then she opened it wide. Zoë set her bags on the hall floor and hugged Evan hard. When she was little, Evan had always been affectionate and devoted. Zoë had always taken care of her, advising, reassuring, until recently, when it seemed Evan had started advising and reassuring her. It startled Zoë. She suspected it had something to do with Zoë’s being alone. It made people uncomfortable. “How are you?”

“I threw up on on the plane. Besides that, I’m OK.”

“Can I get you something? Here, let me take your suitcase. Sick on the plane. Eeeyew.”

“It was into one of those sickness bags,” said Zoë, just in case Evan thought she’d lost it in the aisle. “I was very quiet.”

The apartment was spacious and bright, with a view all the way downtown along the East Side. There was a balcony and sliding glass doors. “I keep forgetting how nice this apartment is. Twentieth floor, doorman…” Zoë could work her whole life and never have an apartment like this. So could Evan. It was Charlie’s apartment. He and Evan lived in it like two kids in a dorm, beer cans and clothes strewn around. Evan put Zoë’s bag away from the mess, over by the fish tank. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “Now what can I get you?”

Evan made them a snack—soup from a can, and saltines.

“I don’t know about Charlie,” she said, after they had finished. “I feel like we’ve gone all sexless and middle-aged already.”

“Hmmm,” said Zoë. She leaned back into Evan’s sofa and stared out the window at the dark tops of the buildings. It seemed a little unnatural to live up in the sky like this, like birds that out of some wrongheaded derring-do had nested too high. She nodded toward the lighted fish tanks and giggled. “I feel like a bird,” she said, “with my own personal supply of fish.”

Evan sighed. “He comes home and just sacks out on the sofa, watching fuzzy football. He’s wearing the psychic cold cream and curlers, if you know what I mean.”

Zoë sat up, readjusted the sofa cushions. “What’s fuzzy football?”

“We haven’t gotten cable yet. Everything comes in fuzzy. Charlie just watches it that way.”

“Hmmm, yeah, that’s a little depressing,” Zoë said. She looked at her hands. “Especially the part about not having cable.”

“This is how he gets into bed at night.” Evan stood up to demonstrate. “He whips all his clothes off, and when he gets to his underwear, he lets it drop to one ankle. Then he kicks up his leg and flips the underwear in the air and catches it. I, of course, watch from the bed. There’s nothing else. There’s just that.”

“Maybe you should just get it over with and get married.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, you guys probably think living together like this is the best of both worlds, but…” Zoë tried to sound like an older sister; an older sister was supposed to be the parent you could never have, the hip, cool mom.”… I’ve always found that as soon as you think you’ve got the best of both worlds”—she thought now of herself, alone in her house; of the toad-faced cicadas that flew around like little caped men at night, landing on her screens, staring; of the size fourteen shoes she placed at the doorstep, to scare off intruders; of the ridiculous inflatable blow-up doll someone had told her to keep propped up at the breakfast table—”it can suddenly twist and become the worst of both worlds.”

“Really?” Evan was beaming. “Oh, Zoë. I have something to tell you. Charlie and I are getting married.”

“Really.” Zoë felt confused.

“I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Yes, well, I guess the part about fuzzy football misled me a little.”

“I was hoping you’d be my maid of honor,” said Evan, waiting. “Aren’t you happy for me?”

“Yes,” said Zoë, and she began to tell Evan a story about an award-winning violinist at Hilldale-Versailles, how the violinist had come home from a competition in Europe and taken up with a local man, who made her go to all his summer soft-ball games, made her cheer for him from the stands, with the wives, until she later killed herself. But when she got halfway through, to the part about cheering at the softball games, Zoë stopped.

“What?” said Evan. “So what happened?”

“Actually, nothing,” said Zoë lightly. “She just really got into softball. I mean, really. You should have seen her.”

*  *  *  *  *

Zoë decided to go to a late-afternoon movie, leaving Evan to chores she needed to do before the party—I have to do them alone, she’d said, a little tense after the violinist story. Zoë thought about going to an art museum, but women alone in art museums had to look good. They always did. Chic and serious, moving languidly, with a great handbag. Instead, she walked over and down through Kips Bay, past an earring boutique called Stick It in Your Ear, past a beauty salon called Dorian Gray’s. That was the funny thing about beauty, thought Zoë. Look it up in the yellow pages, and you found a hundred entries, hostile with wit, cutesy with warning. But look up truth—ha! There was nothing at all.

Zoë thought about Evan getting married. Would Evan turn into Peter Pumpkin Eater’s wife? Mrs. Eater? At the wedding would she make Zoë wear some flouncy lavender dress, identical with the other maids’? Zoë hated uniforms, had even, in the first grade, refused to join Elf Girls, because she didn’t want to wear the same dress as everyone else. Now she might have to. But maybe she could distinguish it. Hitch it up on one side with a clothespin. Wear surgical gauze at the waist. Clip to her bodice one of those pins that said in loud letters, shit happens.

At the movie—Death by Number—she bought strands of red licorice to tug and chew. She took a seat off to one side in the theater. She felt strangely self-conscious sitting alone and hoped for the place to darken fast. When it did, and the coming attractions came on, she reached inside her purse for her glasses. They were in a Baggie. Her Kleenex was also in a Baggie. So were her pen and her aspirin and her mints. Everything was in Baggies. This was what she’d become: a woman alone at the movies with everything in a Baggie.

*  *  *  *  *

At the halloween party, there were about two dozen people. There were people with ape heads and large hairy hands. There was someone dressed as a leprechaun. There was someone dressed as a frozen dinner. Some man had brought his two small daughters: a ballerina and a ballerina’s sister, also dressed as a ballerina. There was a gaggle of sexy witches—women dressed entirely in black, beautifully made up and jeweled. “I hate those sexy witches. It’s not in the spirit of Halloween,” said Evan. Evan had abandoned the moon mask and dolled herself up as a hausfrau, in curlers and an apron, a decision she now regretted. Charlie, because he liked fish, because he owned fish, collected fish, had decided to go as a fish. He had fins and eyes on the side of his head. “Zoë! How are you! I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you first arrived!” He spent the rest of his time chatting up the sexy witches.

“Isn’t there something I can help you with here?” Zoë asked her sister. “You’ve been running yourself ragged.” She rubbed her sister’s arm, gently, as if she wished they were alone.

“Oh, God, not at all,” said Evan, arranging stuffed mushrooms on a plate. The timer went off, and she pulled another sheetful out of the oven. “Actually, you know what you can do?”

“What?” Zoë put on her bonehead.

“Meet Earl. He’s the guy I had in mind for you. When he gets here, just talk to him a little. He’s nice. He’s fun. He’s going through a divorce.”

“I’ll try.” Zoë groaned. “OK? I’ll try.” She looked at her watch.

When Earl arrived, he was dressed as a naked woman, steel wool glued strategically to a body stocking, and large rubber breasts protruding like hams.

“Zoë, this is Earl,” said Evan.

“Good to meet you,” said Earl, circling Evan to shake Zoë’s hand. He stared at the top of Zoë’s head. “Great bone.”

Zoë nodded. “Great tits,” she said. She looked past him, out the window at the city thrown glitteringly up against the sky; people were saying the usual things: how it looked like jewels, like bracelets and necklaces unstrung. You could see Grand Central station, the clock of the Con Ed building, the red-and-gold-capped Empire State, the Chrysler like a rocket ship dreamed up in a depression. Far west you could glimpse the Astor Plaza, its flying white roof like a nun’s habit. “There’s beer out on the balcony, Earl—can I get you one?” Zoë asked.

“Sure, uh, I’ll come along. Hey, Charlie, how’s it going?”

Charlie grinned and whistled. People turned to look. “Hey, Earl,” someone called, from across the room. “Va-va-va-voom.”

They squeezed their way past the other guests, past the apes and the sexy witches. The suction of the sliding door gave way in a whoosh, and Zoë and Earl stepped out onto the balcony, a bonehead and a naked woman, the night air roaring and smoky cool. Another couple was out here, too, murmuring privately. They were not wearing costumes. They smiled at Zoë and Earl. “Hi,” said Zoë. She found the plastic-foam cooler, dug into it, and retrieved two beers.

“Thanks,” said Earl. His rubber breasts folded inward, dimpled and dented, as he twisted open the bottle.

“Well,” sighed Zoë anxiously. She had to learn not to be afraid of a man, the way, in your childhood, you learned not to be afraid of an earthworm or a bug. Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she rushed things in her mind. As the man politely blathered on, she would fall in love, marry, then find herself in a bitter custody battle with him for the kids and hoping for a reconciliation, so that despite all his betrayals she might no longer despise him, and in the few minutes remaining, learn, perhaps, what his last name was and what he did for a living, though probably there was already too much history between them. She would nod, blush, turn away.

“Evan tells me you’re a professor. Where do you teach?”

“Just over the Indiana border into Illinois.”

He looked a little shocked. “I guess Evan didn’t tell me that part.”

“She didn’t?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s Evan for you. When we were kids we both had speech impediments.”

“That can be tough,” said Earl. One of his breasts was hidden behind his drinking arm, but the other shone low and pink, full as a strawberry moon.

“Yes, well, it wasn’t a total loss. We used to go to what we called peach pearapy. For about ten years of my life I had to map out every sentence in my mind, way ahead, before I said it. That was the only way I could get a coherent sentence out.”

Earl drank from his beer. “How did you do that? I mean, how did you get through?”

“I told a lot of jokes. Jokes you know the lines to already—you can just say them. I love jokes. Jokes and songs.”

Earl smiled. He had on lipstick, a deep shade of red, but it was wearing off from the beer. “What’s your favorite joke?”

“Uh, my favorite joke is probably… OK, all right. This guy goes into a doctor’s office and—”

“I think I know this one,” interrupted Earl, eagerly. He wanted to tell it himself. “A guy goes into a doctor’s office, and the doctor tells him he’s got some good news and some bad news—that one, right?”

“I’m not sure,” said Zoë. “This might be a different version.”

“So the guy says, ‘Give me the bad news first,’ and the doctor says, ‘OK. You’ve got three weeks to live.’ And the guy cries, ‘Three weeks to live! Doctor, what is the good news?’ And the doctor says, ‘Did you see that secretary out front? I finally fucked her.'”

Zoë frowned.

“That’s not the one you were thinking of?”

“No.” There was accusation in her voice. “Mine was different.”

“Oh,” said Earl. He looked away and then back again. “You teach history, right? What kind of history do you teach?”

“I teach American, mostly—eighteenth and nineteenth century.” In graduate school, at bars, the pickup line was always: “So what’s your century?”

“Occasionally I teach a special theme course,” she added, “say, ‘Humor and Personality in the White House.’ That’s what my book’s on.” She thought of something someone once told her about bower-birds, how they build elaborate structures before mating.

“Your book’s on humor?”

“Yeah, and, well, when I teach a theme course like that, I do all the centuries.” So what’s your century?

“All three of them.”

“Pardon?” The breeze glistened her eyes. Traffic revved beneath them. She felt high and puny, like someone lifted into heaven by mistake and then spurned.

“Three. There’s only three.”

“Well, four, really.” She was thinking of Jamestown, and of the Pilgrims coming here with buckles and witch hats to say their prayers.

“I’m a photographer,” said Earl. His face was starting to gleam, his rouge smearing in a sunset beneath his eyes.

“Do you like that?”

“Well, actually I’m starting to feel it’s a little dangerous.”

“Really?”

“Spending all your time in a darkroom with that red light and all those chemicals. There’s links with Parkinson’s, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I suppose I should wear rubber gloves, but I don’t like to. Unless I’m touching it directly, I don’t think of it as real.”

“Hmmm,” said Zoë. Alarm buzzed through her, mildly, like a tea.

“Sometimes, when I have a cut or something, I feel the sting and think, Shit. I wash constantly and just hope. I don’t like rubber over the skin like that.”

“Really.”

“I mean, the physical contact. That’s what you want, or why bother?”

“I guess,” said Zoë. She wished she could think of a joke, something slow and deliberate, with the end in sight. She thought of gorillas, how when they had been kept too long alone in cages, they would smack each other in the head instead of mating.

“Are you… in a relationship?” Earl suddenly blurted.

“Now? As we speak?”

“Well, I mean, I’m sure you have a relationship to your work!” A smile, a weird one, nestled in his mouth like an egg. She thought of zoos in parks, how when cities were under siege, during world wars, people ate the animals. “But I mean, with a man.”

“No, I’m not in a relationship with a man!” She rubbed her chin with her hand and could feel the one bristly hair there. “But my last relationship was with a very sweet man,” she said. She made something up. “From Switzerland. He was a botanist—a weed expert. His name was Jerry. I called him ‘Jare.’ He was so funny. You’d go to the movies with him and all he would notice were the plants. He would never pay attention to the plot. Once, in a jungle movie, he started rattling off all these Latin names, out loud. It was very exciting for him.” She paused, caught her breath. “Eventually he went back to Europe to, uh, study the edelweiss.” She looked at Earl. “Are you involved in a relationship? With a woman?”

Earl shifted his weight, and the creases in his body stocking changed, splintering outward like something broken. His pubic hair slid over to one hip, like a corsage on a saloon girl. “No,” he said, clearing his throat. The steel wool in his underarms was inching toward his biceps. “I’ve just gotten out of a marriage that was full of bad dialogue, like ‘You want more space? I’ll give you more space!’ Clonk. Your basic Three Stooges.”

Zoë looked at him sympathetically. “I suppose it’s hard for love to recover after that.”

His eyes lit up. He wanted to talk about love. “But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they’ve got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they’re still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they’re… straight.”

“Yeah, well,” said Zoë, “where I’m from, they’re all married or gay. Did you see that movie Death by Number?”

Earl looked at her, a little lost. She was getting away from him. “No,” he said.

One of his breasts had slipped under his arm, tucked there like a baguette. She kept thinking of trees, of gorillas and parks, of people in wartime eating the zebras. She felt a stabbing pain in her abdomen.

“Want some hors d’oeuvres?” Evan came pushing through the sliding door. She was smiling, though her curlers were coming out, hanging bedraggled at the ends of her hair like Christmas decorations, or food put out for the birds. She thrust forward a plate of stuffed mushrooms.

“Are you asking for donations or giving them away,” said Earl, wittily. He liked Evan, and he put his arm around her.

“You know, I’ll be right back,” said Zoë.

“Oh,” said Evan, looking concerned.

“Right back. I promise.”

Zoë hurried inside, across the living room, into the bedroom, to the adjoining bath. It was empty; most of the guests were using the half bath near the kitchen. She flicked on the light and closed the door. The pain had stopped and she didn’t really have to go to the bathroom, but she stayed there anyway, resting. In the mirror above the sink she looked haggard beneath her bonehead, violet grays showing under the skin like a plucked and pocky bird. She leaned closer, raising her chin a little to find the bristly hair. It was there, at the end of the jaw, sharp and dark as a wire. She opened the medicine cabinet, pawed through it until she found some tweezers. She lifted her head again and poked at her face with the metal tips, grasping and pinching and missing. Outside the door she could hear two people talking low. They had come into the bedroom and were discussing something. They were sitting on the bed. One of them giggled in a false way. She stabbed again at her chin, and it started to bleed a little. She pulled the skin tight along the jawbone, gripped the tweezers hard around what she hoped was the hair, and tugged. A tiny square of skin came away with it, but the hair remained, blood bright at the root of it. Zoë clenched her teeth. “Come on,” she whispered. The couple outside in the bedroom were now telling stories, softly, and laughing. There was a bounce and squeak of mattress, and the sound of a chair being moved out of the way. Zoë aimed the tweezers carefully, pinched, then pulled gently away, and this time the hair came, too, with a slight twinge of pain and then a great flood of relief. “Yeah!” breathed Zoë. She grabbed some toilet paper and dabbed at her chin. It came away spotted with blood, and so she tore off some more and pressed hard until it stopped. Then she turned off the light and opened the door, to return to the party. “Excuse me,” she said to the couple in the bedroom. They were the couple from the balcony, and they looked at her, a bit surprised. They had their arms around each other, and they were eating candy bars.

Earl was still out on the balcony, alone, and Zoë rejoined him there.

“Hi,” she said. He turned around and smiled. He had straightened his costume out a bit, though all the secondary sex characteristics seemed slightly doomed, destined to shift and flip and zip around again any moment.

“Are you OK?” he asked. He had opened another beer and was chugging.

“Oh, yeah. I just had to go to the bathroom.” She paused. “Actually I have been going to a lot of doctors recently.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Earl.

“Oh, probably nothing. But they’re putting me through tests.” She sighed. “I’ve had sonograms. I’ve had mammograms. Next week I’m going in for a candygram.” He looked at her worriedly. “I’ve had too many gram words,” she said.

“Here, I saved you these.” He held out a napkin with two stuffed mushroom caps. They were cold and leaving oil marks on the napkin.

“Thanks,” said Zoë, and pushed them both in her mouth. “Watch,” she said, with her mouth full. “With my luck, it’ll be a gallbladder operation.”

Earl made a face. “So your sister’s getting married,” he said, changing the subject. “Tell me, really, what you think about love.”

“Love?” Hadn’t they done this already? “I don’t know.” She chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. “All right. I’ll tell you what I think about love. Here is a love story. This friend of mine—”

“You’ve got something on your chin,” said Earl, and he reached over to touch it.

“What?” said Zoë, stepping back. She turned her face away and grabbed at her chin. A piece of toilet paper peeled off it, like tape. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s just—it’s nothing.”

Earl stared at her.

“At any rate,” she continued, “this friend of mine was this award-winning violinist. She traveled all over Europe and won competitions; she made records, she gave concerts, she got famous. But she had no social life. So one day she threw herself at the feet of this conductor she had a terrible crush on. He picked her up, scolded her gently, and sent her back to her hotel room. After that she came home from Europe. She went back to her old hometown, stopped playing the violin, and took up with a local boy. This was in Illinois. He took her to some Big Ten bar every night to drink with his buddies from the team. He used to say things like ‘Katrina here likes to play the violin,’ and then he’d pinch her cheek. When she once suggested that they go home, he said, ‘What, you think you’re too famous for a place like this? Well, let me tell you something. You may think you’re famous, but you’re not famous famous.’ Two famouses. ‘No one here’s ever heard of you.’ Then he went up and bought a round of drinks for everyone but her. She got her coat, went home, and shot a gun through her head.”

Earl was silent.

“That’s the end of my love story,” said Zoë.

“You’re not at all like your sister,” said Earl.

“Ho, really,” said Zoë. The air had gotten colder, the wind singing minor and thick as a dirge.

“No.” He didn’t want to talk about love anymore. “You know, you should wear a lot of blue—blue and white—around your face. It would bring out your coloring.” He reached an arm out to show her how the blue bracelet he was wearing might look against her skin, but she swatted it away.

“Tell me, Earl. Does the word fag mean anything to you?”

He stepped back, away from her. He shook his head in disbelief. “You know, I just shouldn’t try to go out with career women. You’re all stricken. A guy can really tell what life has done to you. I do better with women who have part-time jobs.”

“Oh, yes?” said Zoë. She had once read an article entitled “Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief.” Or no, it was a poem: If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She remembered that line. But perhaps the title was “The Empty House: Aesthetics of Barrenness.” Or maybe “Space Gypsies: Girls in Academe.” She had forgotten.

Earl turned and leaned on the railing of the balcony. It was getting late. Inside, the party guests were beginning to leave. The sexy witches were already gone. “Live and learn,” Earl murmured.

“Live and get dumb,” replied Zoë. Beneath them on Lexington there were no cars, just the gold rush of an occasional cab. He leaned hard on his elbows, brooding.

“Look at those few people down there,” he said. “They look like bugs. You know how bugs are kept under control? They’re sprayed with bug hormones, female bug hormones. The male bugs get so crazy in the presence of this hormone, they’re screwing everything in sight: trees, rocks—everything but female bugs. Population control. That’s what’s happening in this country,” he said drunkenly. “Hormones sprayed around, and now men are screwing rocks. Rocks!”

In the back the Magic Marker line of his buttocks spread wide, a sketchy black on pink like a funnies page. Zoë came up, slow, from behind and gave him a shove. His arms slipped forward, off the railing, out over the street. Beer spilled out of his bottle, raining twenty stories out over the city below.

“Hey, what are you doing?!” he said, whipping around. He stood straight and readied and moved away from the railing, sidestepping Zoë. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Just kidding,” she said. “I was just kidding.” But he gazed at her, appalled and frightened, his Magic Marker buttocks turned away now toward all of downtown, a naked pseudo-woman with a blue bracelet at the wrist, trapped out on a balcony with—with what? “Really, I was just kidding!” Zoë shouted. The wind lifted the hair up off her head, skyward in spines behind the bone. If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She smiled at him, and wondered how she looked.