Although she had been born and raised in San Francisco, Beth Cronin felt that, really, she was as Irish as Paddy’s pig.

She had been a rock ‘n roller in the 1990s, enjoying her drugs and her boyfriends, and had married one of them, a wannabe musician named Digger Cronin, with whom she then had had two children. Both kids had been remarkably successful in school because of Beth’s own regard for herself and her ability for nurture. Digger, having reverted to his real name John and eventually becoming a distinguished attorney, had had a delusional affair with Beth’s friend Natalia and had run away with her to a remarkably unhappy second marriage.

After Natalia had rid herself of John, she had asked Beth for forgiveness, and Beth had actually thanked her.

By then she was thirty-five, on her own, and had decided that in fact she was an Irish girl. She looked upon her own two children as though they were the very cream of County Galway, from where her great-grandfather Neill Agnew had come, as well as his wife, a distant cousin of Neill’s named Emily Fortune. They had arrived in San Francisco long ago and had had one son, who had founded a tugboat company. Beth’s beloved grandfather.

Beth decided one day to go to Ireland.

“What are you doin’ here then?” the cabbie at the Shannon airport asked her.

“Finding myself.”

He offered a pause that went on for at least a half mile before looking over his left shoulder toward Beth. “You’ll forgive me, Miss. But I been here all me life, lookin’ for the same thing, like.”

“How’s it gone?”

“So far….” He addressed the steering wheel. “Okay.”

“You think so?”

“Well, if you don’t mind condemning yourself now and then, I’d have to say yes.”

“Condemnation!”

“Ah, no.” His gaze through the windscreen remained steady. He was a careful driver, something Beth appreciated as he, she, and the taxi made the sixty-mile journey up the M18 to Galway. “The fact of it is I haven’t spent a lot of time doin’ that to myself.”

“How so?”

“There’s so much else. If you were to live out here long enough, you’d get it.”

“How so?”

“We condemn the weather, right enough. We shout at the rain. We let it know loudly when it’s soakin’ us.” He nodded. “Those kinds of things. But rakin’ ourselves over the coals?”

“The rain? How—”

“It falls on us, Miss. That’s all. Nothin’ like that’s ever happened to you?”

“Well…my marriage.”

A long pause ensued, interrupted by one glance and a soft smile from the driver.

“May I ask your name?” Beth said.

“Lannie Doyle. And yours?””

“And you were born out here?”

“On the very day of me emergence.”

Beth laughed. “So I guessed.”

He drove on for a moment. “What was your name?”

“Beth.”

“And you have a family name, I suppose.”

“Cronin.”

Lannie ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head. “They came from Munster, eh?”

“Who?”

“Those other Cronins. The ones who preceded ya.”

Beth remained silent.

“That’s not such a famous name in Galway. You’ll see. It’s as Munster as you can get.”

“I…I do know that, Lannie. But it doesn’t matter.”

“And do you think you’re Irish?”

“I do.”

“I figured that. I think there are far more people on that continent o’ yours who claim they’re Irish than there’ve ever been on this island.”

Beth laughed. “Why do you ask?”

“Sure you’re not the first such Yank I’ve met who’s ever actually claimed such a thing. Bein’ actual Irish, I mean.” He laughed. “Comes as a surprise because, you know, you all sound so American…” Lannie looked over his shoulder at Beth. A large grin tumbled from his face. “…with that funny accent o’ yours.”

The following day, Beth stood on the front porch of Flannery’s Hotel on Old Dublin Road. Rain surged from the entirety of the grey, fumbling sky. She was an unusually fine-looking woman, evinced by the occasional glances, one after the other, that Lannie had offered his rear-view mirror. Beth had decided in San Francisco that she would wear nothing green in Ireland, feeling that such a preference identifies anyone walking around in that garb as an American tourist. So, she reverted to her preferences for the many colors in her garden. She spent an hour or so every day out there, some tool or another in hand, savoring her effort to allow light to break through, to feed the garden’s wish to flourish. And it did, so much so that she was now congratulated by all her Russian Hill neighbors for being such a pro. The orange, breeze-softened flames of “Beth’s poppies”, as they were known, the superb yellow laughter of “Beth’s daisies,” of course the ever-deepening reds—from soft and dark to profound, to white and blue —of her many roses, along with the hues of her formidable carnations…and no lawn.

Lawn bored Beth.

She hoped she added something to her garden beyond just her hands and the plunge of them into the dirt or her great love of pruning. She hoped she herself shared her garden’s actual beauty. Not just frivolous looks. But that which comes to someone who understands what she is viewing…and doing…and providing.

The fellow at Flannery’s front desk had offered her a fine umbrella, an apology for the weather, a nice smile, a compliment for “your well-advised rain gear, Miss,” and a folded note. “He came in with it just this morning.”

“Who?”

“Lannie.”

Beth fingered the note, surveying it a moment without opening it. When she looked up at the hotel clerk, he offered a commiserative smile. “A fine one, that fella.”

The note was short.

Dear Beth, I enjoyed our conversation yesterday and hope you’ll let me drive you around Galway today. No fare…none of that. I’m upstanding. I am in no way harmful. I guarantee a pleasant journey. Lannie. PS: I’ll be along at 10 AM and hope to find you.

Folding the note, she recalled having asked Lannie during their drive to Galway what his own life was like.

“Well, a Roman Catholic. Baptized and all that. Altar boy at Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and Saint Nicholas. St. Joseph’s Patrician for secondary school. University of Galway. Bachelor of Arts in English.”

“Fully educated, then.”

“Sure, Beth, like a lot of us in Galway.”

“But, Lannie… . Uh, Lannie….”

“I know what’s comin’.”

“What?”

“’Why are you drivin’ a cab, Lannie?’”

“Yes. That is the question,” Beth said.

“Because of my education. If you want a profession that’ll take everything out of you in return for no money at all, write novels.”

“You write novels?”

“I do, and not ashamed to admit it.”

“I wouldn’t be either.”

Lannie glanced at her. “You write, Beth?’

“I don’t. But I read.”

“Well, then, let’s…. Let’s talk about that. Who do you like?”

“James Joyce,” Beth said. “Sometimes.”

A very long silence ensued. Beth felt she was being disbelieved, that Lannie would say she was just bragging or trying to put one over on him. Finally, he gathered himself, as though a lengthy, much-considered response had settled upon its own outcome. “Can’t understand a word he says.” Lannie took in a sad-seeming breath, a kind of admission of a lost wish. “Although there is his Dubliners, of course.”

“That’s the one I mean. Loved it.”

“Yeh. Good, isn’t it?” Lannie’s funk seemed nonetheless to continue. “’Araby,’ eh? And there’s ‘The Dead.’” He pondered the road ahead of him. “You know, he wrote ‘the snow was general all over Ireland.’ So plain-spoken that phrase, and so true to what he wanted the story to say.” The road sped beneath them, disappearing as they surged up it. “I’ve thought a lot about Joyce. I think it was the drink that got to him. And maybe he lost his marbles, which the drink will also do to ya.”

“You mean—”

“Most of Ulysses, except Molly at the end, of course. All of Finnegans Wake.” Lannie waved a hand before his forehead, shaking it. “From the old song, you know.“ Lannie ventured into a thin tenor delivery. ’To help him on with his work each day/Had a drop o’ the cray-chure every morn’.” Lannie sighed, shaking his head. “Although otherwise I didn’t get a feckin’ word of Finnegans Wake.” He took hold of the steering wheel with both hands. “Excuse me, Beth. That kind of coarse language. I…I don’t usually—”

“Don’t worry, Lannie. About that book, I agree.”

Beth saw a broad grin in the rearview mirror. “Attagirl.” Lannie put a bit more speed into the car.

“But, Lannie. What about you?”

“Me!”

“Yes. Who do you like?”

“I’ve had it out with myself about that for many years.”

“About what?”

“My favorite writer.”

“Irish, I’ll bet,” Beth said.

Lannie shook his head back and forth, as though in slow self-examination. His thoughtfulness turned from an examination of the road ahead to some sort of contemplation of a difficult mystery, a long-examined dispute between understandings…. “Jane Austen.”

“You’re kidding.”

“And why would I kid about someone like her?”

Beth had meant her reaction to be one that asked for a commiserative smile. But Lannie seemed offended. “Protestant, wasn’t she?” he said. “A Brit if there ever was one. Sendin’ her cousins off to conquer the colored races. Read her books, Beth. It’s all there.” Looking toward Lannie, Beth saw the remains of his tightened lips. “But I’ll wager you have read her books, eh?” She noted the appearance of a smile and Lannie’s right hand reaching for his head, to push his hair about. Wonder. Even graciousness. The hand, she noted, was lovely. “Sure no one writes as well as she does.”

“I just thought you’d be ready to give me a lesson on who I should read now,” Beth said. “On who the real Irish writers are now.”

“I see. I get it.”

“Is that insulting?”

“No, no, Beth. Please. I don’t—” The taxi progressed a quarter mile further before Lannie ventured a further reply. “You think I’ve got that right…about Jane Austen?”’

“I do.”

“As God is in heaven…of course, even as we….” He leaned forward to look up the road.

Beth waited for the rest.

“Even as we can’t be too sure about God even bein’ up there.”

On the following day as she stood on the hotel’s porch, Lannie arrived with a toot of the horn at exactly 10 AM. He was driving a red Mini Cooper.

“1981,” he said as Beth, laughing and looking about her, seated herself next to him. “I’m proud of it.”

Beth looked into the rear seat, admiring its new-seeming red leather. “You should be. It’s in beautiful condition. And you say it’s forty years old?”

“I do.”

“A little older than me.”

“Ah, but you’re better lookin’.”

Beth sat quietly a moment. This last remark of Lannie’s seemed so cavalier, so insincere, that she wondered whether she had better get out of the Mini before they got under way.

“Excuse me. Uh….” Lannie’s mouth tightened, his lips seeming to negate what had just passed from them. Because she now was sitting next to him, Beth noted with some pleasure that he was a sweet looking man, not just some rough Mick cabbie. “That was forward.” His lips formed the words with considerable finesse.

She took her hand from the door handle and sat back.

“I’m just excited, Beth. I didn’t mean to be so…so…nervy.”

Beth nodded her head to the side…a furtive smile. “I forgive you, Lannie.”

Having thus settled themselves, they took off.

It took some minutes to clear the outskirts of Galway City, and the road they followed was eventually two-laned, narrow, and bordered on both sides by fields of such deep vernal pleasantry that Beth realized she had never in her life seen such green.

“We’re famous for it, of course,” Lannie said.

That Ireland is green is a cliché of notable accuracy. Beth could barely speak as she watched it pass by, as she looked into the distance at the hills covered by it, the nuances of it…dark, fine, piecemeal, of profound emotion, lovely here and gone…the fields of sheep grazing from it, and the many trees in full leaf or needle, the walled fields everywhere. Lannie explained to her how there had been only trees out here a long time ago, but that the Brits had come along and cut them all down. “Their industrialization, see….” Beth had noticed how little industrialization there is in Ireland and mentioned it to Lannie. He responded with a brief lecture on the north of Ireland—“If you want a sorry treat, go up to Belfast.”— the Brits, the great factories and shipbuilding of the last few centuries up there, the need for firewood to make that coal and fuel those factories. “Down here, trees were everywhere.”

“And they obliterated them?”

“Sure didn’t they? And these fields, almost all of them owned by the English and cleared of those trees also so that they could raise their sheep and plant their crops and keep the rest of us in rags.”

“Lannie.”

“Bare toes, dirt floors, huts, and downpours.”

Beth looked out the car window at the countryside, one of the most beautiful she had ever seen. Surely there was nothing like this anywhere in California…or anywhere.

“You wouldn’t think wholesale destruction would be so charming, would you?”

“Oh….”

“But it’s because of us Micks that it still is.” Lannie himself looked out the windscreen, clear pleasantry streaming from him. “And there’s the truth.”

Beth remained silent, surveying the view and feeling the loveliness of it as the Mini passed through, mile after mile.

“Have you published anything, Lannie?”

“I have.”

“Tell me about it…or them….”

“Them. But the most recent is my favorite.”

“What’s it about?”

“The Civil War.”

Beth brought a hand to her chin. “Not ours….”

“No! Ours!” Lannie himself fell into a dark self-examination, sighing as he surveyed the road before them. ”Yours was the real deal, wasn’t it? While Ireland’s was just bollocks.” He grumbled. “We were all I.R.A. in 1920, all the Doyles on my side.”

“And?”

“Well, we lost…and we lost one Doyle.”

“No.”

He shook his head, sighing once more. “Yeh. My great-great-grandfather Bob Doyle.”

Beth sat back and examined her hands, which were folded on her lap. The countryside remained beyond lovely while her thoughts darkened with commiserative sadness.

“The Four Courts, in Dublin. June, 1922. He was killed in an artillery barrage.”

“By?”

“The national army, who else? The Irish army! Michael Collins’s crew, just a couple months before they got Collins himself.”

“Yes, I’ve read about him.”

“So have I, Beth. So have I. Chapter and verse. And I hate admittin’ to the fact that he was a great man.”

“You think so?”

“Of course! We all should have been on each other’s side.” Lannie turned toward Beth and she recognized in him a passage of sorrow. “All of us. Bob Doyle. Mick Collins. Me.”

“But you…. You weren’t even born. You couldn’t—”

“No. But there is memory, you know. And history. And those I do have.”

They drove on without conversation for fifteen minutes. Beth was worried that too much information had sprung from Lannie, information that made more conversation uncomfortable for him. She wanted to break through but wasn’t sure how to do so without incurring even more troublesome memories for him. She had known him now for less than one day, yet found him attractive, simply because of the way that, despite this current silence, he otherwise seemed capable of fine talk, of humorous talk, and maybe even of intimate talk…although Beth was hesitant about any intimacy that could come along. Way too soon, she thought. Grow up, Beth!

For the next five days, Lannie escorted Beth around parts of Counties Galway and Clare. “I’m takin’ a little holiday, Beth.” He took her to the cliffs of Moher, which astonished Beth. “A lot of people think they’re a cliché, these cliffs. Every Yank wants to see ‘em and walk along ‘em.” They were observing the cliffs from a wide spot in the road. For Beth, they were the essence of pre-history, fantastic obstructions to the sea itself, beautiful monsters.

“But if that’s what they are, I’ll take that cliché,” Lannie said.

They spent a morning on The Sky Road, aptly named with a sprawl of huge white clouds overhead.

It was raining the next day, so Lannie took Beth to Kylemore Abbey. It reminded her a little of Walt Disney, but she enjoyed it anyway.

In Galway City, he took her to Garavan’s for a pint, and then for another to The Crane.

Beth’s personal favorite of all these visits was that to the island of Inishbofin and its fine views of the Galway coast. From here, the sea was everywhere, its gigantic urgings almost frightening to Beth. “Inishbofin. It means ‘White Cow Island,’” Lannie explained. “Couldn’t tell ya why.”

And on the final day, Lannie suggested what he said was his favorite place of all. “We’re going into County Clare again this morning,” he said as Beth got into the Mini. “What do you know about it?”

“Not much, although friends of mine have told me about The Burren.”

“That’s right. That’s where we’re goin’.”

“We are?”

“Everything in Clare is worth seein’, Beth, but you’ll not have seen anything like what we’re about to.” Lannie’s demeanor was now back to its former liveliness. His voice continued the humorous certainty it had demonstrated the moment he had driven her from the Shannon Airport. “What do you know about the monks?”

“The monks?”

“Yeh. You know, those men out here in the west protecting the manuscripts and such from The Huns. You know, The Middle Ages.” He shook his head, as though with wit-filled despondence. “Or simply prayin’ out here, on their knees in the cold rain, shiverin’ and worried about whether they’d been betrayed at the very edge of God’s own earth.”

Beth looked out to her right, where The Atlantic Ocean was once again making its presence felt. The weather by now was turning fine, so that The Atlantic was blue beneath swirling white clouds, surging about itself like a heavy-breathing, celestial, endless monster.

“They thought the land stopped right here in County Clare and that no one is his right mind would make any effort to find out what was out there off the coast. Because, Beth, you know….” Lannie pointed to the ocean, gesturing across it. “Out there, it was sin itself, as far as they knew.” He nodded. “Fish? The Deep? Nah, it was none o’ that. It was pure unknown fate.”

Beth took in a breath. Even now, knowing what The Atlantic truly is, she swallowed, imagining the fear those monks must have felt.

“Chaos,” Lannie said.

“Why were they out here, the monks?”

“Because they needed the grace that God would give them simply for bein’ here, protecting Him, so to speak. So that they could ascend to heaven.”

“From here? The Burren?”

“That’s right. You know, from what Oliver Cromwell called it…. It was a famous phrase o’ his, like…‘a savage land, yielding neither enough to drown a man, nor tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury.’” Lannie waved a hand before his face, laughing. “Good phrase, eh?”

“Terrific!”

“But a bad man.” He turned his head toward Beth. “Don’t say anything to anyone in Galway City about your appreciation of Oliver Cromwell. Or of his predecessor Thomas.” He grinned, a moment of forced hilarity. “They’ll take your head.”

Beth laughed.

“No, of course they won’t, Beth. But if they could sneak up on ya, you’d think they’d like to.”

Parking by the side of the road, the two found a rough, narrow pathway leading toward some hills, up which Lannie led Beth. The path wandered through what seemed an endless, rubbly field of limestone rocks of every shape and size, miles of them, as plain-spoken a passage as could be imagined…except for the flowers. Millions of them growing from between the stones, offering, Beth thought, soft laughter as they wavered, laughing, in the occasional winds that blew over them. She noticed how Lannie walked. He was dressed better today than he had been yesterday, even wearing a single-button dark blue sport coat over a white shirt and black slacks. His walking shoes were far more rough…un-shined, high-topped, scuffed, even battered. Amused, Beth was nonetheless grateful that he had advised her at the hotel to bring along some walking shoes of her own, “’Cause I’m takin’ you to the end of the planet.” Just now he also was carrying a small backpack. “Sandwiches. Tea. You won’t find a café out here, Beth.”

“I guess not!” she said, her eyes celebrating the flowers.

After twenty minutes or so, they entered a wood and soon arrived in a small cul-de-sac, shaded by trees, on one side of which was a rough, fallen granite wall covered with bright green scum and leafiness. Light fell through the trees across Beth and Lannie as though it were seeking its own enjoyment. A small stream appeared from some rocks, tumbling down them, clear water reflecting the wavering sunlight. Lannie pointed out how these wall stones had clearly been hewn in order to fit together. A few hundred of them, some still placed together as the ruins of a hut.

“Mac Duagh’s Bed,” Lannie said.

“Who was it?”

“Colman Mac Duagh. He’s a saint. Lived out here for many years, praying, searching for his soul.”

“Did he find it?”

Lannie studied the structure. “You’d have to ask him.”

“When was he here?”

“Seventh century.” Lannie nodded toward the structure that was still standing. “There were many of ’em out here, Beth. Many. All of ‘em searchin’.”

She remained silent, trying to contemplate what such an existence must have been like. The weather alone would have convinced you that you’d been condemned to this place to rot, rather than allowed to set up here in order to contemplate the face of God.

“Were they all saved?”

“Ask them.” Lannie gestured toward the falling stream. “But that’s the finest water in all of Ireland right there.” He removed the backpack and took a plastic glass from it. “Try it.”

Beth knelt and marveled as, even here, even into this small cup, the water seemed to reflect light itself from its own clarity. She brought the cup to her mouth. The water, so cold, was entirely pure.

“You see?” Lannie said.

Beth leaned forward to take up more.

“I’ve often thought…” Lannie knelt down with his own cup and reached out to fill it. His shoulder brushed Beth’s. “…that Mac Duagh might have concluded he’d found his heaven right here. You can’t beat water like this, can you?”

She did not move. She had enjoyed the light touch of his sport coat’s sleeve.

“But I wouldn’t live out here for all the tea in China.” Lannie laughed, sipping from his cup. “At least not in the seventh century.” Beth fell into silence, sipping from her cup once more. “No heat. No TV. No internet,” Lannie said.

The two remained quiet.

Beth sighed. “I’m not much of a Catholic, Lannie. But would you mind if I said a little prayer to Father Mac Duagh?”

“You won’t mind if I don’t join you?”

“Of course not.”

“That sort of thing is beyond me.”

“How so?”

“Ever since my mother had me and they put her into one of the laundries.”

“You mean, the Magdalene Sisters?”

“Yeah, those hoors. You know about them?”

“Oh, Lannie…. Your mother—”

“Out of wedlock, that’s right.”

“Your father?”

Lannie lowered his head. “You’ve got me there. I was adopted.”

“And those parents?”

“As loving as they could be. Fine Catholics, even as they welcomed my real mother. They’d let her come visit me. Caught the fury of the priests for it, but did it anyway”

“And how do you feel now?”

“Loved, Beth. Loved by all three of ‘em. All three still alive.”

He looked down. His high forehead, so Irish, so filled, Beth thought, with thoughts and fine humor, with all his history and fine blather, his Civil War, with kindness, his contemplative eyes, his hands on the wheel of his Mini, his rough, even bitter contemplations.

“Beth, I have a question.” Lannie stood up and took a few steps away. He replaced his cup in the bag and put his hands in his pockets. Beth, as before, was amused by his seeming shyness. “Somethin’ I’ve been meaning to ask you.” He pushed a few stones aside with the toe of his left boot. “Especially this morning.”

There was a silence, interrupted only by the soft burble of the water.

“Would you consider stayin’ with me a while?”

“In Galway?”

“Where else?”

“Well…. Lannie!”

His eyes fell to despondency, as though Beth’s effort to answer Lannie had been so worrisome that the only thing he could come up with now was a silent sigh. Beth moved to refuse him. But as she watched Lannie’s eyes, she fell into more truthful self-searching and a consideration of what she really wished to say.

“Can you imagine it?” His eyes sought hers…and found them. “Beth and Lannie!”

She thought about it again…what she really wished to say.

“Will you, Beth?”

Copyright © 2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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At twelve, Beth fell in love.

Shay lived at the top of The Lyon Street Steps on Vallejo Street. While Beth lived on Russian Hill and went to The Hamlin School on California Street, he went to Saints Peter and Paul on Washington Square. Both had to wear uniforms, and Beth thought hers clunky...a white middy blouse and a dark plaid skirt, white socks, and lace-up, thick leather shoes. She felt dumb in the uniform. But because she was one of the smartest girls at Hamlin’s, she decided that “she’d wear it and like it,” as her mother Deirdre would occasionally say. That remark would shut Beth up, Deirdre’s tone of voice being so clarion. This was difficult for the girl since she was, after all, the smartest one in her class, a fact for which her mother seldom offered a compliment. Indeed, she seemed plain resentful of Beth’s smarts. The year before, though, Beth had gotten a “B” on an essay she had written about her colorful San Francisco neighborhood, and had been hurt by the disavowal of her in Deirdre’s surprise at the grade. Beth had herself told her about it without being asked, but the news gave her mother the opportunity to complain about Beth’s watching too much television. Sometimes, when Beth would make a thoughtful reply to something her mother had said, Deirdre would chastise her for being a smart aleck. Report card day was almost never congratulatory, despite all Beth’s more usual “A’s”. Deirdre would look the card over, sign it, hand it back to Beth with continued dismissiveness.

1955 was different from 1954, when Beth had been eleven and such things as worried thrill, sudden hurrying of breath, embarrassment, and outright reserve and silence had not yet become part of her personality. But now they had, and there were also the complications of occasional sadness as disapproval from her mother had increased during the same interim. Beth herself had no particular defense against it, especially when her mother would become outright angry with her. Beth liked school and, although these new feelings of hers sometimes interfered, school remained school as the thing that interested her most. Although she did wonder if, once she got to high school, things might be a little less, well, invaded. She loved reading, but would like to learn how to dance, something her mother also thumbed her nose at. “No daughter of ours....,” etc. Beth also enjoyed going to the movies. Deirdre wouldn’t let her see this Marilyn Monroe, whom Deirdre thought “a slut.” Beth had to look the word up and when she found it out, she was thoroughly surprised. At the time, she had seen only photographs of Marilyn and thought that any girl who was that kind of beautiful had to be special and, for sure, not a slut. Not with such a bright smile as the one Marilyn had. She thought her mother was being silly, although Beth kept that opinion veiled.

Just now Beth’s favorite actor was Marlon Brando, whose face caused her tummy actually to tingle. She wondered if there would ever be a boy in high school like Marlon, so disrespectful, so disgraceful, so cute in that waterfront movie. The way Marlon picks up Eva Marie Saint’s glove that she’s accidentally dropped...and playing with it as they talk. His beautiful hands, Beth had thought. She had secretly put aside the money she would need to see the movie, an event her parents had forbidden, having read in the papers about Brando and his Hollywood notoriety. Beth’s mother had overheard her and a girlfriend talking about Marlon in Beth’s bedroom. The girls’ voices were full with wishes...“Gosh, do you think he knows how to kiss?”...with laughter and astonishment for how he looked on the covers of those magazines. In total secret, in thorough silence and worry that they would be found out, they had entered the movie theater and, once into On The Waterfront itself, both girls had been thrilled by Marlon and those searching hands.

Beth imagined being one day in the movies herself. Maybe while in high school she could play Marlon Brando’s younger sister. She knew she would ask for his autograph between takes.

But...Shay? Shay did not have Marlon Brando’s looks or anything like them. His school uniform was as uncool as Beth’s. A pair of grey slacks, a white button-down shirt and a dark, conservative tie, dark dress shoes and black socks. Every day. Shay looked forward to after school and weekends so that he could put on a pair of jeans, although his father thought jeans a little too “lowbrow” for his son. “Only bums wear jeans.” He did not understand that his son felt liberated in his. One Saturday, when his dad had criticized the jeans and Shay had explained to him how cool they were, his dad had wondered how it was that such roughshod pants “can in any way make you feel the cold, Shay.” It was on that day that Shay discovered that his own father was uncool.

Shay had something, though, that not a lot of other boys had. Girls liked him. He was nice. His hair had curls. Like Beth, he was one of the smartest students in school, excelling in reading, essays, and book reports. He was pretty good at Math and Science too, but really he preferred Robert A. Heinlein in Boys Life magazine. He liked Ray Bradbury, too, his favorites being The Martian Chronicles and especially Fahrenheit 451, from which Shay first learned about book-burnings. That story brought Shay to one of his first real intellectual struggles, causing the boy to worry about why anyone would want to outlaw a book. Books give you stuff, Shay thought. It was then that Shay decided that if some book got banned and if he was interested in why that was so, he would rush to read it. Sadly, he discovered right away that he was too young to buy The Catcher in the Rye, the one Father Collins had lectured the parishioners about at Mass a few weeks earlier, it and “its filth.” When he had asked for it at the new bookstore City Lights, the guy behind the counter had grinned and asked him “What are you doin’, kid? Tryin’ to get us raided?”

One day walking home from school, Shay had spotted a group of three girls in Hamlin uniforms. They encountered one another walking in the same direction and, to the girls’ immediate surprise, he said “Hi!” He was nice. This surprised all three of them since it was well known among the girls that most boys were dumb. Boys stuck to themselves in noisy back-and-forth and were universally crass. The girls would not have used that specific word to describe the boys, at least not until they would begin reading British novels or Edith Wharton some years later. Nonetheless, most boys were crass. One like Shay was a surprise. These three girls were nice and he especially wanted to talk with one of them...”Beth,” she had said. “Short for Bethany.” Beth was herself cute...small, with a big smile and nice eyes. Right away, nice eyes. She was the one girl among the three most forthright in the back-and-forth with Shay, the one who actually conversed with him, asking him questions about what it was like going to a Catholic school, about where he lived, what did he enjoy doing.... The two other girls lived closer to Hamlin’s than did Beth, so that eventually Shay got to accompany her home all by herself. She asked him questions, and once he had answered, he would ask her a question. Back and forth. What movies do you like? Do your parents have a television? What about Elvis Presley? “’It’s down at the end of Lonely Street...at Heartbreak Hotel,’” he sang, grinning to himself, way out of tune. “So cool,” she rejoined, enjoying how Shay had looked when he had attempted crooning the line, moving his hips back and forth in a shaky jig. Beth knew she could shake her hips better than he could.

They were way too young to have an actual date. So, Shay continued making the effort to join her on her way home from school. They spoke of all sorts of things. Beth was always reading, and when she discovered that Shay liked books too, they would talk about the ones they especially enjoyed. Beth told him how much she wanted to dance and that her mother wouldn’t allow it, and Shay admitted to her that he didn’t know how to dance either. “I kind of jump around,” he said. “And that’s it.” One day on Market Street, he had seen some black kids dancing to a transistor radio, Chuck Berry’s Maybellene. “You done started in doin’ the things you used to do” hurtled from the radio. Shay had never seen anything like it and, asking one of the kids where he’d learned how to dance, the kid, actually smiling as though he were glad to be noticed, had pointed at the sidewalk. “Here, man. Right here.” When Shay asked if he would teach him, the kid had looked him up and down, probably noting the Peter and Paul uniform, and said “Nah, man. Sorry.”

One day, at the corner of Broadway and Divisadero and waiting for the signal to change, Shay had taken Beth’s left hand into his right. She hurried with an effort to remove hers from his, but then glancing at him, allowed it to stay...at least until the signal changed, when they fell back into the more usual isolation. When they paused at her front gate, Beth smiled at him, which allowed Shay to think that maybe she had enjoyed his holding her hand.

Deirdre awaited Beth in their living room. “Who was that boy you were with?”

Beth, suddenly a little embarrassed, was yet not intimidated. “Shay.”

“Shay!”

“Mom. That’s his name.”

Deirdre grumped, folding her arms and looking toward the floor. This was a gesture familiar to Beth, and she awaited what was to follow. Deirdre let out a frustrated breath. “And that’s a Peter and Paul uniform he’s got on.”

“I know. Is there something wrong with that?”

“Well...yes, Beth. That means he’s Catholic.” Deirdre’s look was a scold. “They’re all Catholics down there.”

There were a couple Catholic girls at Hamlin’s, and Beth discerned nothing particularly objectionable in any of them. One, Kayla O’Connell, had also been born in Ireland and all the girls enjoyed how Kayla talked. Beth herself thought her accent pretty. It was fun, too, and thus made Kayla fun.
“Everyone in Ireland is Catholic,” Kayla had once told Beth. “At least that’s what my Da says.”

“But, Mom—”

“I won’t have you walking around with a Catholic boy.”
“Mom!”

“Catholics, Beth. There’s something wrong with them.” Deirdre turned away, her left hand at the side of her neck, her head nodding back and forth in silent derision.

“Why?”

Deirdre did not lower herself to a further answer. At the time, Beth did not know that her mother was herself half Irish American, her mother’s father having come to the U.S. as an infant. Deirdre’s maiden name had been Agnew, a name about which Beth knew nothing. It was just a name, as far as she knew. Indeed, she didn’t know anything at all about Ireland except that it is an island and that she liked Kayla O’Connell.

This refusal from her mother caused Beth to enter into the first of what would be many disagreements with Deirdre. There was nothing wrong with Shay Flood. He was smart. He was cute. His hand in hers was friendship itself, as far as Beth could tell, the first such friendship in her life of the many she was to have with guys. If her mom would just calm down or get less upset or stop being so mean, she would eventually see that Shay was a good guy. And Beth was enjoying having a...a boyfriend! So, even against her better judgment, Beth decided to introduce Shay to her mother.

She wanted Deirdre to see that Shay had no bad intentions. At twelve, Beth did not completely understand to whatever things bad intentions...which Deirdre frequently warned her about in boys...could possibly lead. But Beth wasn’t worried about any of that because Shay treated her with real kindness. Surely her mother would see that...and maybe even like it.

Beth had imagined even sitting in her own living room with Shay and reading to each other or talking about school or even about the San Francisco Forty-Niners, having learned in an early conversation about this one flaw in his character. Most girls could care less about the Forty-Niners. But at least the football team was not the only thing Shay wanted to talk about. She found him easy to converse with, a talent that few other boys their age ever exhibited. Sure, some of them were okay. But only Shay could do this. She even came to harbor the notion, although only momentarily, that maybe the Forty-Niners could be interesting, too. But she couldn’t imagine what it was that made her father, while watching the Forty-Niner game on the Sunday afternoon television, stand up and raise his arms in victorious excitement now and then during the game. The announcer would be shouting. Her dad would be grinning and striding around the living room. There would be more shouting, all of it causing Beth to go upstairs to her room to straighten her closet or read something or look out the window.

“Hi, Mom.” The two kids stood in the foyer of Beth’s house on Pacific. “This is Shay.”

“Hi, Mrs. Cronin.” Shay wasn’t nervous or anything. But the way Deirdre fixed on him with such silence worried Beth. It wasn’t quite the foyer yet, because they had been standing just outside the open front door, on the porch. This was a thrilling porch, the only such one that Beth had ever encountered, because it bordered the entire front of the house, which itself stood almost on the top of Russian Hill. So, anyone standing on the porch could get a big view of all downtown San Francisco. The view always changed with the weather. On a bright sunny day, the city reminded her of one of those illustrations of a fairy castle in the books she used to read when she was little. On foggy days, it was mystic, soft, faraway, and furry at the edges. When it was raining, the downtown seemed silvery and even reflective of somber grey light, while at night, it was filled with jittery lights, made even more so if the wind were blowing in from the ocean. Just now, Beth had been pointing out to Shay her mother’s gardens. He had appeared only mildly interested, maybe a little bored by them. But they were indeed beautiful, Beth thought, almost the only thing that she discerned could make her mother happy.

Deirdre had appeared in the front doorway and stepped out onto the porch. She had been gardening, so that she was wearing pedal pushers, a blouse and jacket, and rubber boots. She had a trowel in her right hand and a glass of water in her left, and her hair was held back by a thick rubber band.

“What’s your name?”

“Shay.”

“No. Your family name.”

“Flood.”

Seeming puzzled, Deirdre passed the two kids by, when, thinking twice about it, she turned and addressed Beth. “You need to let me know, dear, when you’re going to bring someone home with you.” She turned toward the steps to the garden. “And don’t you two go anywhere else besides the living room.”

Beth brought Shay a glass of milk, a banana, and a cookie, the same snack she brought for herself. Deirdre said nothing else to them, not even saying goodbye when Shay was leaving after half an hour.

“Where does he live?” Deirdre, arranging flowers in a tall vase in the kitchen several minutes later, was actually smiling. Beth knew that the flowers she grew brought her pleasure.

“Vallejo Street.”

“How long have you known him?”

“A couple weeks.”

“How did you meet?”

“Walking home from school.”

“And he hasn’t tried anything, as he?”

“Well, gee, Mother.... Yes. He tried to hold my hand.”

“You didn’t let him, did you?”

“Mother!” Beth swallowed, wishing silently for the end to the conversation. She was embarrassed and felt that, when her mother took up the trowel from the kitchen sink and rinsed it off, she was rinsing off Beth herself. As though little splotches of some other kind of dirt rested here and there on Beth.

“Don’t hold hands…sweetheart.” For Beth the moment before the endearment reeked with a silent sniff. She escaped to the stairway leading up to her bedroom, her feelings scuttling into each other back and forth, a flurrying of them, with hurt sadness.

The weekend passed and, the following Monday, Beth had to walk home alone. She worried that Shay must have understood Deirdre’s distrust of him. Maybe Deirdre’s silences had gotten through to him, the silence of disavowal.

Coming up the stairs through the front garden, Beth decided to bring this up with Deirdre. Her mother was once again in the garden, snipping at several flowers that, Beth knew, Deirdre would arrange in the slim crystal vase that she so cared for. It had been a wedding gift from her mother. The sound the clippers made seemed always to attract a smile from Deirdre, or a kind of pleasant notice in her eyes, the tool’s precision and the resultant flower on a stalk that came of it. She would place the flower with others on a piece of newspaper on the ground, as though she thought it pleased to be kept there with its friends.

Beth was worried. She knew her mother would not allow being questioned in such a way. But Beth, with a kind of brusque sense of herself that was new, felt she had to let her mom know how she felt, how hurt she was that her mom had simply dismissed Shay.

“Mom, why were you mean to Shay?” When she asked the question, she awaited the answer, and the wait was long. Deirdre swallowed, placing the clippers to the side and removing the gloves she was wearing. The cut flowers, lying next to her knee, were beautiful, despite their having just been sacrificed. Their colors were like lovely smirches. Deirdre’s lips tightened. She gazed at her daughter, who knew from the look that she was about to be punished.

“Beth! He seems like a nice boy, that boy you like. Why wouldn’t I like him?”

Beth studied the question, simply astonished by it. There was in it a sense of actual kindness. She thought maybe she hadn’t heard her mother right. But she saw in Deirdre’s now renewed digging in the ground with the trowel something like actual enjoyment of the conversation. The trowel went into and out of the dirt with what seemed like slow grace. Approval was something Beth had so little experienced in her mother’s speech that the girl now fell into a state of plain wonder. Mom! she thought. What’s wrong? She remained quiet. She had gotten so used to Deirdre’s fault-finding and the constancy of it that the appearance of joy in Deirdre’s behavior was simply unexpected. Beth, intimidated by this turn to approval, remained silent.

“Yes, why wouldn’t I like him?” Deirdre said once more. The trowel she had taken up made its way into the dirt and the soft turning of it, the dirt now even damp and darkened. Stunned by the turn to simple back-and-forth, even with the bit of negativity in Deirdre’s question, Beth realized that it was a suggestion of actual approval. Her mom’s approval! Surveying the clear pleasure the dirt was giving to the trowel and to her mother, Beth didn’t know what to say.

Copyright © 2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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“It’s clear to me, Mr. Clarke, that you should give up the study of literature because you have no talent for it.”

I sat in the professor’s office, a twenty-two year-old fifth year undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. I had changed my major from European History to English Literature the year before. The study of history was, and remains to this day, a major subject of enquiry for me. But I’d made a kind of existential change. Poetry mattered more…Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, et. al. Novels also mattered more…Dickens, Wharton, Ellison, and so on. I had discovered the wish to write my own stuff, and I wanted to write a novel like one of those. My very first publication had come in the pages of the university’s literary magazine that year…a piece of short fiction titled “Your mouth ain’t no prayer book, even though your lips do flap like Bible leaves.” My soul had been stirred. Sure, the French Revolution was interesting. But, to me, Joyce’s Dubliners was a mind-shattering revelation.

This fellow was a Milton scholar, already on the road to academic greatness, it was felt by his colleagues, at the age of twenty-seven. I was a student in his graduate seminar on John Milton’s work. I didn’t understand Milton. His Puritanism, and its importance to English and American history, was one thing. His place in the panoply of English poetry was quite another. I disputed none of that. But I didn’t get Milton’s wordiness. He is difficult to understand. Where Shakespeare is clarity itself, laced with subtle linguistic subterfuge and complication…while Pope is a paragon of humorous reason and spectacular rhyme…while Donne is a poignant explainer of death and sadness, Milton was for me a jungle of misplaced wanderings and overlong sentences, whose command of the rules of grammar needed a lot of help.

I didn’t get it.

This professor had once opined in class that, while no one would ever wish Paradise Lost any longer, every word in it was essential. I knew that I, at least, wished it a great deal shorter. In class, I was flummoxed by the professor’s self-possession. Insistent upon an answer to whatever question he posed, he was yet unable to clear up my pesky questions about Milton’s extreme wordiness and grammatical inaccuracies. The professor was buoyed to authority by his manner of dismissing opinions other than his own, except for those from like-self-assured scholars, about the work of the great Puritan. The professor declaimed, and you listened. It came to me only years later that, indeed, he had been just twenty-seven at the time. So, one can depend on the idea that, like me, he too was too young to know himself.

I left his office that day with his opinion of me solidly in mind. I went for coffee, certain for the moment that he was right. I didn’t have talent for literature, and I continued believing it…for a while. I completed my bachelor’s degree in English from Berkeley, worried about whether I deserved one, while all the while continuing to doodle on my own. More stories. The proverbial slim volume of verse. Two years reading and composing on the Left Bank of the Seine with my then-wife, a very talented painter finding her own way while at the same time giving birth to our only child, a son, Brennan. A reading of my poems, with the American Ted Joans, at Shakespeare and Company. Another published story, in English, in an unknown literary throwaway.

Some years later, after I had published several novels, all of them reviewed memorably, I thought again about the Milton scholar. It goes without saying that I had not followed his career. I know that he became quite famous in academic circles for his work on Milton, and that he has pursued a second career as an observer of American culture, politics, and academic issues. But I have done little to follow up on his accomplishments.

For many years, I eschewed the memories I had of him. In my deep heart, I still do. But his advice on that day immediately revealed to me an element in my personality that anyone interested in a creative life in literature, or of the arts in general, must have. Rejection is the norm in the arts. For example, my personal favorite rejection-slip from the many I’ve received, from a poetry journal in California in the 1970s, read, “Trite. A little wooden. But, thanks!” That editor has now been dead for many years, although not as long as his journal. That level of rejection, though, is essential to the making of successful literature. Of course, it hurts. But it is a beacon call to the determination to write well. If you want to do so, you should hope for such snide disapprobation..

Of course, when you’re in your youth and don’t know what’s really involved in writing something of value, you’re deeply hurt by criticism such as what I got from the Miltonist. But although I have no plans to contact him to offer thanks, I do realize that, even though he did not know it at the time…indeed was being a self-important snot…he gave me a boost.

But in the end, the work of English Literature academics like this man is of second-tier importance. In their journals, papers, and struttings before classes, they give themselves heavy congratulations. But when they don’t write literature themselves, they display the fact that, really, they have little talent for it.

Copyright © 2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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Joey Bates had learned to watch. Animals, speeding trucks, birds in the trees, raspy men, millionaire athletes complaining on TV, small men on crutches, skinny women laughing, scurrying spiders, priapic skyscrapers…. It didn’t matter. Small dogs scratching. Large magnolias in bloom and breeze. He wanted to know what they were feeling. He wished to learn why they felt that way and how he might be able to pantomime that feeling. If I were in a movie, he had thought as a boy, how could I do a skyscraper?

Joey was smart and not unhappy. He liked school. He had friends. He enjoyed his father and mother and had no frightening longings or deep worry. He did not wish to become any of the things he wasn’t. He just wanted to know how it felt to be such things.

“Try standing up straight, Joey,” his mother had told him one day when he was eleven. “Act it out.” They were looking at a photo of The Empire State Building in a magazine, and he had realized right then how understanding his mother was. He knew he didn’t want to be a skyscraper. He just wondered what would cause him to act like one, and she had the best suggestion.

To…act, he had thought.

So now, on the completion of his third role in a movie, and this one a starring one, he was being heralded for his performance. “Joey Bates’s ability is worthy of every appreciation,” The Los Angeles Times had gushed.

The movie, The Last Apostle, told of an American named Fitzgerald, an ex-Marine twenty-five years old, a Vietnam veteran who goes to Belfast in 1970 to fight with The Provos. Fitzgerald quickly becomes a principal guy for them, sharing his Vietnam experiences with them, training them, and finally betraying them. The experience of making the movie had been uniformly unhappy for Joey as he had struggled to find in himself why this fellow Fitzgerald would ever want to do such things. What’s in it for him? A Yank? The Provos? Joey asked himself. So much danger for so far-away a reason? It was not the character Fitzgerald’s worries in the script that caused this second-guessing. It was Joey’s own, even as his fine talent as an actor was acknowledged. Joey was noted for his pensive, handsomely battered looks. His jaw was large and moved a bit back and forth as he pondered some difficult moment. His eyes, quite darkened by what seemed personal doubt, were even written about favorably by critics. Those eyes observed what passed before him with self-contradictory caution, but no fear. Joey himself had even received offers of marriage. His now and then smile onscreen was a pleasing threat, and he was congratulated in the press for the smile’s often dangerous appearance.

But Joey’s current worries besieged him, the worry of immersing himself in the Marine Fitzgerald’s self-questioning, with Fitzgerald’s shadowy, only partial understanding of his actions…of his missing the point of doing something as murderous as this. Were the Provos a lark for Fitzgerald? Or were they the solution to Fitzgerald’s deep-felt anger over what had happened in Ireland during the last many centuries and his own having missed all of it, out there in San Francisco and South Vietnam? Or maybe just Fitzgerald’s rattled apprehensions, brought on by his recollections of the savage Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968.

But those ponderings turned out, for the critics, to lead to the very positives of Joey Bates’s performance as Fitzgerald. His self-questioning countenance had been constant through the movie itself, and he was being congratulated for playing a character whose shaky personal commitments far outshine his firm political beliefs. Joey knew he had not really understood Fitzgerald’s character, confused about it as the film was being shot in Belfast itself, a city he found uneven and quite unhappy. Even as the director, producers, and movie critics lauded his “full accounting of the foolishness of The Troubles,” as the fellow at The Irish Times had put it in his amazed review. “How could an American know, even one of Irish descent as this Fitzgerald is supposed to be?” Just before this question, the critic had spent two full paragraphs lauding Joey’s superb understanding of the many layers of idiocy in that sad conflict. “So small a conflict, The Troubles” he had written. “So murderous. So self-defeating. The Irish against themselves are anything but civil, especially when they’re Protestant and Catholic, and this lad Fitzgerald’s worries about why he is even in Belfast show that instability. Which side is he on, and why? Does he even know?”

So, here it was, the evening of The Academy Awards, and Joey was unnerved by the fact that he was even here at all. He had once supposed that those actors that achieve such a moment are born self-assured and confident. But Joey now knew that that is seldom the case among actors, even among those for whom personal self-reckoning confidence is at the center of every scene. John Wayne as Sean Thornton. Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby. Et. al.

Joey knew it was all just an act.

He also knew that everyone, at some point or another, acts. No cameras or anything. No sound equipment. No badgering director. But the moment someone tells a lie, he is acting. Insincerity requires dissemblance. The attempt to save a relationship that has lost its allure reveals hidden truthlessness. Happiness is often betrayed by what seems a loving smile. Even outright anger is now and then a guise intended to save love. The guy in his living room attempting to explain to his wife why he has gone astray plays the fool, especially when he is the fool.

Is everything a play-act? Joey asked himself. But he also realized that, in his own case, what was an obvious deception…the taking on of a fictional character…gave him the way to tell some sort of truth with blessed accuracy. His dissembling profession revealed to him now and then the realities of his own heart.

Sitting on the aisle in the fourth row at the Ovation Hollywood/Dolby Theater, he took Lila Gowan’s hand. Joey was smitten with Lila and realized, after they had worked together, that she was smitten with him. A fiercely fallen-away Irish Catholic and an accomplished actress at the age of twenty-four, Lila had played Fitzgerald’s Belfast love, Maura Sentinel. An Irish Protestant spy for the British, Maura is ordered to give false information to the American Fitzgerald about the kinds of weaponry being stored for The Ulster Defense Regiment and where it is to be found. Thus, the British hope, they can ambush an important number of Provos during any attempt to abscond with those weapons. The couple’s back-and-forth leads to romance, the second plot in the movie, the difficulties of which lead to great danger for Fitzgerald himself, as well as for Maura. Maura’s own doubts about her soul find questioning resonance in her love for the American. She worries that if she betrays him and the weaponry, in the end Hell will await her. She’ll be an accessory to murder, after all. Perhaps to Fitzgerald’s own murder. She knows that he is risking everything to act on her information, and that death may surely await him if he does not succeed in getting the weaponry into the right Provo hands.

In one of the movie’s most lauded scenes, Maura is in conversation, in tears and deep, fearful self-condemnation, with a British officer named Smith, played with fine force in a cameo by Tom Hardy. Especially when having to present the officer’s own streaky pro-Brit befuddlements, he counsels her, “Listen, Maura. These bleedin’ Micks deserve everything we force on’ em.” Her surprise at this clear murderousness was one of Maura’s most lauded moments, stuck in morbid discovery across Smith’s desk of his simple condemnation of the Irish, be they Provos or not. The camera, right in her face, revealed silent, shocked horror.

As the presenter held up the envelope, Lila caressed Joey’s hand. “And the award for best actress goes….” He opened the envelope with brio intended to remind everyone that he was himself the winner of such an award a few years ago, as a ruffled Brooklyn New Yorker known personally for his drink-induced rages. “To Lila Gowan!”

Lila’s hand tightened. It seemed itself to be in immediate disbelief as the audience in the theater broke into noisy, chaotic applause. Others around the couple shouted out their congratulations and, as Lila stood to go to the stage, she turned to Joey, who also stood and grabbed her, giving her such an embrace and such a whisper of congratulation that she began to weep, to wipe the tears away, and to kiss him. “Oh, Joey!” A terrorized smile beamed from her lips.

—

He had been struck by her the day they had met. The film’s director, the American Vincent Gillette, had done a half-dozen independent films, the most recent of which, about a pair of Los Angeles hoods running afoul of each other in the 1920s, had convinced Warner Brothers to hire him for the The Last Apostle. Vincent had invited Joey to his office, to meet his leading lady. Lila Gowan, who wore a pair of close-fitting jeans, a flowing, voluminously long-sleeved red blouse, and a flower-immersed silk scarf hurrying from her neck and shoulders. She stood and offered Joey her hand. A smile glistened from her, as did her clover-green eyes.

“I’m sorry I haven’t seen any of your work,” she said. “Vincent just told me about you this morning.”

“I’m not surprised.” Joey offered a smile. “My work in film is not august.”

“August?”

“Which is to say that, so far, it exists only in…” Joey grinned. “…lower case.”

She turned to Vincent, who shrugged. “Don’t worry, Lila. He can do it.”

As they sat at a conference table speaking about the project, Joey realized that, put simply, he could not not look at Lila. First, although it required no eyesight, her voice was filled with a kind of dark authority that no twenty-something young woman he had ever met possessed.

“Your family came from Dublin, you say?” Lila said

“They did, yes. Stonybatter. You know, where the Misses Morkan come from. My grandmother came to The States after her parents died. A single girl. She even succeeded in getting an American accent.”

“Don’t suppose I can meet your grandmother.”

“No, she’s gone.”

“She became an American.”

“She did. But other than the difference in your accents, she had what you have, Lila. The sound your voice has got.”

“Oh…well….” Lila looked away, taking in a breath. “Thank you, Joey. I’m sorry not to…not to….” Lila seemed to question herself, and looked back at Joey, into his eyes. “Joey. Not to meet her.”

During the filming, Lila gave him significant help, offering advice especially about one scene in which a couple of Irish actors playing Provo drug dealers are plotting how to assassinate Patrick Smith, a PSNI detective sergeant in Belfast, and are seeking weapons from Joey’s character, Fitzgerald. Lila’s advice had to do with Fitzgerald’s not understanding some of the slang, Belfast lingo that confuses the American. “The script’s got it right, Joey. These Provos…this Benny McDonnell and the other one…Jim Slattery. The language they’re using, I mean. It would be good if, just now and then, you don’t understand what they’re sayin’. You know, the Yank doesn’t get the language, even though…” Lila offered a fervid, slight smile. “…sure doesn’t he understand the guns.”

The assured affection accompanying this charmed Joey.

That advice became something of a sub-theme in the film, very occasional humorous moments when Joey’s Fitzgerald is confused by some Provo’s odd language. Lila even suggested to the director Vincent an addition to the script in which one of the hit men laughs at Fitzgerald’s request for a translation and responds, “What’s wrong with ya, ya spoon?” The others in the room, all from Belfast and all laughing, chagrin the offended Yank. But they nonetheless know Fitzgerald is a warrior who understands the weaponry better than they do…or ever could. Joey knew he had to give the American Provo Fitzgerald a threatening stare that, in the script, causes the hit man to turn to the others in the room, shrugging. “Well, this here’s no spoon, boys.

Joey himself had had to be trained in the weaponry. One of the fellows from the studio, indeed an ex-Marine, showed him the principal arms to be used in the movie, all circa Vietnam era: the Russian AK-47s, the American AR-18s, the HME homemade explosives. The character Fitzgerald is wary of such weapons himself because he knows so well what they can do. Joey decided that that reticence should be part of Fitzgerald’s reactions: a Marine who understands the destruction these weapons can cause. Joey made much of those hesitations, even as he so thoroughly understood them. The Provos give Fitzgerald a nickname... “The Apostle.”

“Sure you know about them, don’t ya?” one of the older Provos asks him. “Mick Collins and his Apostles.” Fitzgerald’s not knowing about Michael Collins gets a laugh from the others in the room. “Where ya been, Yank?”

Several Belfast women were indeed arms-carrying Provo combatants. In the film, Lila’s Maura Sentinel is one of them, and Joey’s Fitzgerald supplies weapons training to them as well. With the way she played the scene in which, along with a half-dozen other women, Maura shows up by surprise to receive an AK-47 and ammunition for it, Joey saw Lila add a layer of wishful confusion to her character. Lovely Maura, a Catholic Falls Road girl, had attended Catholic schools all her youth, even Saint Mary’s College, yet harbors real worry about the sinfulness of murder, whether in a righteous cause or not.

There had been a moment during the filming during which Lila had argued with Joey about one scene. In it, Lila’s Maura is taking an AK-47 apart, to clean it, while she and Fitzgerald are having a lovers’ tiff that has been caused by Fitzgerald’s anger with her being so directly involved.

“You’re Provo?”

“As rain falls from heaven,” Maura says, examining the weapon in her hands.

“But aren’t you worried for your own soul?”

Lila looked up at Joey, offended disbelief showing from her eyes. She improvised. “What about you and yours?”

Joey, flustered by the made-up line, didn’t know how to react to it, and they had to re-do the scene.

In the scene, Maura is both fascinated and terrified by the rifle, studying pieces of it as she disassembles it. She caresses the bolt handle ball with her right hand, the camera exploring her delicate fingers and the fine curve of the rifle part. She admires the protection against misfire offered by the trigger guard. The authority of its action causes her remark that “sure it’ll let me know when to pull the trigger, won’t it?” All this while the two characters argue with each other. “I wouldn’t love ya if you paid me to,” Maura says at one point.

This fervid remark and Lila’s delivery of it as she was so intently reassembling the rifle had made her acting in the scene uniquely notable.

Joey had worried that Lila would be shy about handling such a weapon since, as she had told him and the director, she had no previous experience with such things.

“But don’t you worry, Joey,” she had said, examining the rifle. It suggested to Joey violent death itself. “You just watch me.”

—

Lila did win Best Actress. The applause was deafening and congratulatory. They kissed once more and Lila’s smile was accompanied by an offering of simple accessible joy. As she ascended the stairs to the stage, she took a look back at Joey as, to his surprise, she was bringing her cell phone from a pocket in her dress. Joey was too excited to pay much attention to it and, once she put the phone away after a hurried moment and received the Oscar from Adrien Brody, she turned to approach the microphone to offer her thanks. She looked at Joey, her eyes now brimming. But the tears seemed to him to be of concern. Her shoulders drooped downwards. She was looking at him. But Joey could not be sure that the gaze was congratulatory. Rather, it appeared worried.

In the limousine on the way to the Vanity Fair party, Lila took Joey’s left hand in her right, looking out the window at the hurried flashing lights and traffic. They had spoken, but haltingly, until Joey asked her about the phone call.

“Joey, I….” She took his hand to her lips and offered it a very slight, passing kiss, holding it a moment longer to her cheek. “There’s an actor in Dublin. A friend of mine.”

“A friend.”

“Yes.” Lila looked down at his hand. Her study of it was silent and lacking in joy. “A boyfriend.”

Joey kept his hand in hers. The way Lila held it seemed so shy that he simply waited.

“Have you ever heard of Finn Gallagher?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t expect so. He’s known in Dublin but never been in films.”

“A boyfriend!”

“Yes.” Lila now let go of his hand and brought hers to her eyes. She wept.

“Lila….”

“Oh, Joey. I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“He’s comin’ here, he says.”

“Why?”

“To find out why I’ve been seein’ you, he says.”

“But is that any of his business?”

“He thinks so. And, Joey, I don’t…blame him. I can’t tell him to stay away. I can’t—”

“And it was this Finn who was phoning you.”

“Yes. He’s seen the film. He’s read the trades…about us. He saw how I kissed you tonight. You and me.”

“And he’s upset.”

“Oh…. Joey….”

Joey was not surprised that he received no message or call from her once they left the Vanity Fair party. He had put her into the limo…no kiss…and gotten a taxi to his own hotel. When he called her finally the following morning, he got just Lila’s recorded greeting and the request to leave a message. He turned his phone off and slumped on his unmade bed, the phone resting on his stomach. Hollywood lay in the sunshine outside. He was convinced he had lost her. He had a recollection of holding Lila’s hand at The Oscars, the moment before she had been named Best Actress. Her hand was calm, small, and caressing. He had wondered in that moment whether a simple hand could feel apprehension and worry…expectation…excitement. Holding hers, he had known it could…all four possibilities in the same moment. He was chagrined as he recalled how Lila’s hand was now nowhere to be held.

He spent the day in worry. He wanted to call her. But he was angry. Silence in a loving relationship occasionally reveals betrayal, and he suspected now that Lila’s silence was just such. But Joey wasn’t a schmuck. He also understood that Lila could possibly have been swept up in her feelings for him in the same way his had been swept up for her. Far away in California, she had kept this Finn Gallagher a close secret. With Joey Bates right here in her arms, Lila perhaps had simply not known what to do. Confusion. Worry. Suspicions of her own personal betrayal...of both men.

But Joey’s seeming open-mindedness was indeed a kind of ruse itself. He was hurt. He was angry. Lila could have told him about this Finn. She could have been straight with him about her Dublin boyfriend. But then he wondered if, instead of her quite real confidence as an actress, her very presence so appealing and right there in front of you, she had been embarrassed and worried. But again, this effort at understanding didn’t last. Joey wanted Lila to tell him that she was in love with him, and that this Finn guy was, as they say, history. Even though it was clear that this Finn guy indeed was not. Not yet.

—

Lila called him.

“Where are you?” he said.

“L.A. International.”

“What are you—”

“The airport.”

“I understand that, Lila. What are you going to say to him?”

A silence lasted several seconds. There was no weeping from Lila. No declaration of love for Joey. Rather, there was simple, unrestrained nothing.

“Lila.”

“I have to tell him what’s happened.”

“But what has happened, Lila?”

“I mean between you and me.”

“But—”

“How I feel about you, Joey.”
“Well, what is it that you feel about—”

“And how I feel about him.”

He hung up. Lila called him back. She offered no hello. She simply hurried to a question. “When can I talk with you?”

“Now.”

“No, Joey. I mean person to person. I need to see your face, your eyes. I need to see how you feel?”

“Lila, I can just tell you how I feel.”

“No. Please…. Joey.”

He grumbled. “Okay. But just you and me, right?”

“Tomorrow. Yes.”

They met at The Maybourne Cafe. It being Beverly Hills, the arrival of the two young movie stars on the colonnade carried little weight among the few other coffee drinkers. A mild glance here. A few of the diners obscurely pointed fingers, before a return to coffee and talk. Lila wore a dark green summer dress. Sunglasses did hide her eyes, although Joey saw, when she removed them to clean them, that she had not slept well. That she had been weeping. That she had been defending herself in an argument or some such, with ragged tears. She put the glasses back on with an apology.

Once they had ordered, Joey leaned forward. “So…. Lila.”

“No, let me talk, Joey. Please. I need to tell you.”

“I would hope so.”

“Joey….”

He noticed they were getting a bit more attention from others on the colonnade. He assumed these people knew that the famous couple were having a tiff. He sat back, glancing about at some of them. He frowned, in such a way that would assure them all that they could fuck off. The murmurs and knowing smiles turned away with cool embarrassment, in favor of a return to pastries.

“Finn and I have been lovers for more than a year.” Lila swallowed, sighing.

“I’ve assumed that.”

“And he’s worried that he’s lost me.”

“Well, is that—”

“To you.”

“And is that the case, Lila?”

Silence hurried across the table from her, across their lattes, the full set of silverware, and the small vase of flowers that seemed so festive even as all the objects were paying only trite, petty attention to the conversation.

“Is it, Lila? Has he lost you?”

Lila brought her napkin toward the sunglasses. Lifting them, she daubed her eyes with it.

“I suggest you tell me you love me, send Finn back to County Galway, and—”

“Cork.”

“Okay. Cork. Just send him back.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“He wants me to go with him.”

“So?”

“And I won’t.”

The possibility for cruelty hurried from Joey’s heart. “What, Warner Brothers have another star turn for you? You’re setting up shop in Hollywood? You’ve bought a mansion in Santa Barbara? You’ve—”

“Joey!”

“You’ve—”

“Stop!”

Joey held his breath, looking down at the table. He kept quiet a moment, trying to calm himself. “Sorry, Lila,” he whispered.

“He wants to talk with you.”

“What?”

“Please.”

“Talk with him!”

“Please, Joey.”

—

The two men met at The Maybourne the following day. Morning sun shone across the entirety of the terrace, so that the umbrellas over each table offered needed shade. Finn Gallagher was tall and straight. Were he an athlete, Joey thought, he’d be a high jumper. Olympic caliber. Wearing a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up a few inches, a pair of spotless black Levis, and dark brown loafers, no socks. Entering, he was the very best-looking man in the whole place, Irish pale, in his mid-twenties. A full gathering of brown-red hair with fine curls. His features were slim and, in the face, even delicate, with the sort of presence that did not surprise Joey, knowing that Finn too was an actor. Finn recognized Joey and, as he approached the table, Joey stood up, holding the cloth napkin. He did not offer to shake Finn’s hand.

“May I sit down?”

Joey gestured to the chair across the table, and both men settled into clumsy silence.

“I admire your work,” Finn said finally.

“Look, Finn. Just now, neither of us is acting.”

Finn nodded, sitting forward to study the coffee before him.

“How much are you in love with her?” Joey said.

“I’ve known her since we were twelve.”

“Did you love her then?”

“I did! Although…” He sat back. “…well, differently.”

“And how long has this different love been going on?”

“A year.” Finn leaned over the table once again. “It just happened, Joey. No plot. No manipulation. None o’ that.” He sat back, looking away a moment.

“You love her.”

“I do.”

“And what do you think about…about me and Lila.”

“It upsets me, mate.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“You? You’re upset because of you and Lila?”

“No. Because of you and Lila. Look, Finn—”

“And the truth is….” Finn slumped back, sliding down a bit in his chair and observing the tablecloth with dulled, somber silence. He fingered the edge of the cloth. Joey watched quietly, especially as Finn seemed to grumble, twice. The cloth had all the Irishman’s attention. “The truth is, I want her.”

“I know that.”

“I want her back in Dublin with me. I’ve known her since we were children. She’s my closest friend. I—”

“But which of us does she love?”

“Both of us, ya eejit!” Finn now straightened up. His actorly presence had disappeared. He leaned forward and placed a hand, palm down, on the tabletop and stared into Joey’s eyes. “Don’t ya understand that?” After a silence, he spoke once more. “Both of us!”

Joey remained silent. He could see Finn’s suffering and hated the fact that he sympathized with it. He wished to be outraged, to stand up and pull the tablecloth away, splaying the dishes and silverware across the floor with rattling noise, the tablecloth spattered with coffee. But he knew that that would just be a playact, and an insincere one at that. And, in this moment, silent and chagrined, he could really sympathize only with himself. There would be no attacking Finn, none of the action of an…an…. He searched the word for a moment. An eejit. Just two men in love, stuck with each other. Lila, the object of each’s wish, had given herself to each, even as she clearly realized how foolish such an arrangement was.

With sudden whisperings, the other customers on the colonnade looked around to the door from the café. Pointed fingers. Appreciative sighs. Lila Gowan strode toward the two men’s table. The white summer dress she wore was buttoned to the very bottom, which swirled just above her knees and the svelte black high heels she was wearing. She had on a broad white sun hat and the same sunglasses, offering a demeanor of glamorous authority. A gold necklace, so fine that it seemed barely there, made a frame below her smile that itself seemed simply delicate, not at all forced. Both men stood, each holding a napkin in a hand and, as she approached, Finn stepped to the side to pull a chair from the table for her.

“Thank you.” She sat down and crossed her legs, looking up at each man, a lovely glance at each. The men remained standing a moment, both disconcerted, until they too sat down.

“You’ve met, then,” Lila said.

Both nodded.

“You know, I did come out here just now as though I owned the place.” Lila looked to the side. Many of the others on the terrace were still watching. “But the truth is…. The truth….” She lowered her head, wrapping the fingers of her left hand around those of her right, observing her own action. “I don’t know what to say.”

Joey looked on. Finn remained quiet.

“Except that I care for you both.” She took in a breath, still looking to her hands. “And I want you to forgive me.”

“Forgiveness!” Finn seemed almost to choke on the word. “What is that, Lila?”

“Understanding, I hope.”

“Understanding!”

Lila, silent, swallowed what further words she had planned to offer. Finn looked to the side and Joey simply looked on. Confusion flurried between the three of them.

“I won’t lie to you, Finn.” Lila shook her head, glancing at Joey. “To either of you.” She remained silent a moment, as though not breathing. “I care for both of you.”

Anger eddied in Joey. “Lila, listen….” He would insist on his wish just to talk with her…without…without…. He glanced at Finn. Without this guy sitting right here. “I—”

“Joey. I need quiet.”

“Lila—”

“Quiet!”

Joey looked over the table setting.

“I want to explain myself to you.” Lila sipped from the glass of water before her. She adjusted her sunglasses. “I’ve loved Finn forever.”

Joey nodded although, unexpectedly and quickly, Lila turned toward Finn.

“And I fell for Joey, well….” She offered a saddened smile. “Finn, it seems like just the other day. The day I met him.” She shrugged. “So, can either of you understand how these things can happen?”

Joey frowned. ”I, well….”

Finn glowered. “You’re joking, Lila.”

“I am not.” A long wordlessness ensued until, still impatient, Lila took up the cup and saucer before her. The cup rattled against the saucer as she lifted it toward her lips. Her taking of the tea itself was arrestingly beautiful. “I’m not.” She replaced the cup and saucer on the table.

It seemed for a moment that Finn had lost his looks. “Then what is all this?” Although indeed he had not. His right hand had just passed with such frustrated hurry through his hair that he had badly mussed it, nothing more. The real fracture in his appearance had come with the gruff downturn in his voice. “What—”

“It’s an admission of….” Lila nodded with a seeming silent request. “Finn— A wish for….”

“For what?” Joey offered.

“The truth.”

“And which of us wins that truth?” Furious and hurt, Joey could yet see how genuine Lila’s feelings were, although he had no wish to accept them.

The silence that now enveloped all three was long, itself waiting. Joey pondered the certainty of his loss. Lila had known Finn as a child and loved him now. But she had lain with Joey, beset with ecstasy. Before he had learned about Finn, he had felt Lila was his. His love flamed when she was in his arms. He strove for those arms.

“All three of us win,” Lila said.

Each man remained in rough quiet.

“Please accept me.” She looked at each separately with wistful worry. “Please. Accept this.”

Joey tried battling with the jealousy groveling about in his heart. He could see, even just with the slight glance he offered the Irishman, that Finn was scowling the same.

“Lila, you’re kidding,” Finn said.

Joey nodded agreement.

Lila shrugged. “Finn, I hate asking you this.”

“What?”

“Will you go back to Dublin?”

Joey nodded.

“Only if I have you with me. Only if—”

“No. Tonight. By yourself,” Lila said.

“What?”

“I’ll come to you in a while.”

Joey turned to her. “Wait a minute!”

“And we’ll be together then, Finn.”

“Lila!” Joey pushed his own cup and saucer aside, creating a ragged spill.

“Until I come back here to be with…to be with you, Joey.”
Finn, shaking his head with a kind of elegant disbelief, nonetheless broke into a profanity. “That’s feckin’—”

“No, Finn.”

Joey offered a small, very quick smile. “Lila, I—”

“To be with you a while, Joey.” She breathed out. Silence worried all around her. “A while.”

“How much of a while?”

“Until I go back to Dublin.” Lila removed the sun hat. Her black-brown hair, with its fine occasional curl, its great softness and luxury, the qualities it had displayed so finely in The Last Apostle, took Joey’s entire attention. “For a while.” She hurried a breath, wetting her lips. “And during this time, we can all act…act civilized.”

Copyright © 2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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On that day in 1994 I didn’t know how to walk.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Nora Olivera stepped toward one of the chairs at the edge of the practice room, before a large mirror. She sat down and crossed her legs. I felt vulnerable standing before her, a laughable figure wet with sweat.

I could not see how I would ever achieve the sensuality in this tango dance that I had seen others achieve. That was completely out of the question, so remote a possibility that it seemed to have disappeared even before it had appeared, especially in view of the fact that I did not know how to walk.

“Poeta,” Nora said. She looked at me with a smile of great regard, as though I might actually have a bit of talent. “You walk like the English.”

I turned away, gesturing into the air.

“Wait!” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. I have respect for the English.” She placed an index finger below her right eye and looked up at me with comic sincerity. This conversation was taking place twelve years or so after the Malvinas (or Falklands) War between Argentina and Great Britain. “They nice people.”

She stood and stepped out to the middle of the practice room. She positioned herself with her feet apart, her shoulders hunched, her mouth seeming tightly bound shut. Her black hair surrounded her head and hung down from it like ringlets of obsidian.

“And this is how they walk,” she said.

Nora took several steps, her feet a few inches apart from each other as she moved. There was little fluidity in her walk. She plodded like the Tin Woodsman stiff with rust.

“You see?”

“Nora . . .” I whispered, amused by her characterization of my gait.

“But now, when you walk like this…”

She suddenly grew liquid, and she sauntered forward, her knees and ankles lightly brushing each other. There was something about her feet, the way that, as one passed the other in mid step, they appeared like two doves caressing each other in flight. Her shoulders moved as sensuously, her arms held up slightly, but sinuously, so that her erect head, that looked aside just now with a smile on the lips… so that she appeared to be heading for an unusually pleasureful union of some kind — just where, no one knew – some sensual bower, some assignation.

“You see?” Nora asked, coming to a halt.

“Yes. But what do I see?” I asked.

Nora’s eyes opened wide. “¡Che! ¡Buenos Aires!” she said, gesturing at the ceiling. She turned back toward the mirror, adjusted her hair, and then smiled at herself. “And Buenos Aires, poeta, is tango.”

Viewed from outside, tango does not necessarily seem so all-involving. It is a slow, complicated walk by two people in each others’ arms. We are simply dancing, and often — except for those true masters like Nora and her husband Edward Neale — without distinction, to incredibly sad music. But when you are engaged with the person dancing with you, when you can feel her in your arms and can feel the feline contracting and stretching of her muscles, the intensity of her in your embrace, so private an embrace….

So that day in 1994, Nora began teaching me how to walk.

“You have a hallway?”

I was living in a long Victorian apartment in San Francisco, on the second floor. There was a hallway that ran the entire length of the apartment, the living room at one end, the kitchen at the other. Two bedrooms, a bathroom and a laundry room were connected to the hallway at various intervals. A Turkish rug runner ran the length of it. It could be rolled up, so that the hardwood beneath could be revealed.

I described the hallway for Nora.

“Good.” She surveyed me. “You have a belt?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You take that belt from your pants and put it around your knees.”

“Now?”

“No! In the hallway!” Nora grinned. “You take the belt and you tighten it around your knees, so that they are always together.” She began walking. “Then, put the music. Something slow. Slow Pugliese. Slow Di Sarli.”

Her steps were exaggerated but nonetheless very stylish. Her knees remained tightly together, and she proceeded in a straight line across the floor.

“This way, you’ll learn how to walk,” she said. “You can learn it in many other ways. And the ability you have…I’ll teach you. But this way you learn it quick.”

I was peeved. Maybe defeated.

“You want to get around in Buenos Aires, poeta,” she said, “this is the way you do it.”

So, that evening I put the belt around my knees. I hopped over to the stereo and put on the tango “Gallo Ciego”. Hopping back to the beginning of the hallway, I started walking and fell down.

The music swirled. I gathered myself up to my hands and knees. I helped myself to my feet by grabbing the knob of the door that led to the kitchen. The bandoneon in the recording sounded like a lascivious church organ. I began walking again and fell again.

The music continued. I felt Nora’s voice. I felt her kindness. ¡Che! I felt Buenos Aires! If I could find that walk, I could maybe find tango.

I took the doorknob again and began walking. Slowly at first. Very clumsily. I stumbled once or twice more. But my knees were together. Then, surprisingly, almost as if naturally, my ankles brushed each other as I ascended the length of the hallway, two very clumsy doves.

With others, I have studied twice a week with Nora since that day in 1994, and I can assure you that I now know how to walk.

Copyright © 2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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I have been accused…wrongly…of being prolific. A book a year over the last seven years. Words and more words.

But it’s not true.

One of the curses of writing fiction is that, in general, it does not sell as well as non-fiction. The reasons for that are many and have been written about a great deal. But it is just a plain fact that, as a rule, English-speaking people don’t read nearly enough fiction.

Those of us devoted to writing fiction must accept that fact. But, if the practice actually compels you as a writer, it doesn’t matter. The wander of mind that fiction requires is for a writer one of its great attractions. The individualism of it. The adventures of the soul and the heart. The challenge of making something up out of whole cloth. It’s fun. Even tragic fiction is fun…to write, if perhaps not to read. You can do what you want with fiction.

But I have to tell the truth. I am hardly prolific.

After the publication by Mercury House and Ballantine Books of my novel My Father In the Night in 1991 (my third book) I couldn’t get anything published at all. This was during the antediluvian times prior to the internet and the revolution it has caused in book publishing. So, if you were serious as a writer, you had to run the gauntlet of literary agents and the Big Four (or Five or Six, whatever it was depending upon the many corporate takeovers) of serious publishing houses. Each of those two gauntlets represented a very rough passage through which you and your fiction manuscript had to pass. In my case, I would say that I have received favorable reactions from maybe two percent of the hundreds of query letters and subsequent correspondences I have had with literary agents and publishers.

My favorite was a letter and contract I received from one New York agent who wished to represent the novel I had sent her. I was thrilled…except that her contract would seal me into an arrangement from which, if I signed, I would not be allowed to leave were I to be dissatisfied for some reason. (Although she could get rid of me, if she wished, as spelled out in the contract.) Also, the agent required that I send her every future manuscript I was to complete, into, as the contract specified, “eternity.” She would also represent any stage, film or television work that was to derive from the manuscripts of mine under her control, also into “eternity.” There was much other self-serving language, all of it to the benefit of the agent.

I think she did not understand that I was hiring her, rather than the other way around.

So, I wrote back to her, with a version of her contract that I had run through the Word “Track Changes” editing program. My edits released me from all the requirements the agent had put into her contract, except for the one that pertained to her representation to publishers of the one title I had sent to her. “After all,” I wrote, “we haven’t worked together, and I will want to see how you do with this first project.” I also added the proviso that if, after two years of her representation, she had not placed the book, I could opt to re-open the conversation about our contractual relationship, with the idea of possibly changing it.

I sent my edited version of the contract to her with a kindly letter. For some reason, I never heard from her again.

The second gauntlet is filled with the major publishing companies. One of them, Ballantine Books, had published My Father In the Night (first published in hard-cover by Mercury House in San Francisco) in a trade paperback edition. When I attempted to interest Ballantine in my next book, I found that the editor who had accepted My Father In the Night had left publishing altogether. The new Ballantine editor had no idea who I was and, after an initial exchange of letters, brought an end to the conversation.

During the next twenty years, I wrote seven books of fiction, and could summon no interest in them from any agent or publishing company.

In the meantime, the internet was born and flourished. Along with it came the flurry of software programs that put the means of production for books into the hands of the authors. It took just a few years, but that did happen. It is a revolution. It also happened that, if as an author you pursued this path and you had sales, you would receive a significantly larger royalty payment per copy than you ever would have received under the previous regime of agents and corporatized publishers. Also, the entire panoply of book distribution opportunities remained as much in play for individual authors as it was for books published in the old-fashioned way.

Sensing a breakthrough, I started publishing my own work about seven years ago. I had written almost all those books during the previous twenty years. The manuscripts had resided in desk drawers, cardboard boxes, and on computer hard drives. I resuscitated them all, had them professionally edited, designed, and produced, sold in print and ebook forms, and professionally reviewed (I must say, rather favorably in all cases.)

Prolific? Thus, suddenly, I was!

Contemplating that breakthrough, I had had conversations with many writers and publishing people about this whole notion of doing it all myself. An editor whom I had hired to edit two of those seven books, who remains to this day beyond famous for his work as an editor and as a publisher, told me, “Being published by Houghton Mifflin these days, Terry, is like being able to say that you were on the roster of the 1947 New York Yankees.” An equally well-known New York literary agent who is a close friend of mine told me a few years ago, “The great literature of the twenty-first century, Terry, will have been self-published.”

So there you have it…one brief history of a prolific writer.

Copyright © 2021 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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Compared to the artists, critics remain in the back seat. Yet a very few have written marvelously about the graphic arts. When I first read E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, I thought that being an art historian would be something to which I could aspire. The book is still a must for anyone who knows little about the history of Western art and wants to know a lot more. At the time, I knew almost nothing about that history, having survived university without ever taking the time to go to the school’s art museum. (That would be U.C. Berkeley.)

The trouble was that, by the time I did read Gombrich, I was in my mid-20s and married to an artist who had insisted that I read his book, maybe to make myself less embarrassing at art openings. I had also written a couple of unpublishable novels. Those agonizingly arrived-at works nonetheless had convinced me that, really, I would be happier making my own art. The only disappointment was that my art would be made of the ever un-beautiful, gracelessly utilitarian words with which novelists have to work.

The tools—and the talent—that resulted in Velásquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja were not to be mine.

I was able eventually to read sufficient criticism and history—John Ruskin, Robert Hughes, Kenneth Clark and others—to have serviceable enough knowledge to write about art. But it required my own imaginative powers to express how I truly felt about what I was viewing. I simply did not have the technical chops to explain how a painting works, either in terms of its shapes or the materials and tools used to make it. In the time-honored phrase, I knew what I liked.

The Mexicans interested me tremendously. For one, they weren’t Europeans, a single fact that goes a long way to explaining why they are so special. The unique mixture in Mexico of the vernal, myth-fueled sensitivities of the indigenous peoples and the crazy otherworldly enthusiasms of the Spanish conquistador artists made for something entirely unique. When I saw the great Rivera murals in the National Palace in Mexico City and the heart-chilling Orozco depictions of The Conquest at the then-orphanage in Guadalajara, I realized a more earth-bound pagan-animist consciousness than what I had read about in so much of western European, heaven-touring art.

Diego Rivera’s earth-mothers and and Jose Clemente Orozco’s flame-wrapped, man-angel swirling into the Guadalajara universe struck my heart.

I wrote a novel in which I created a fictional Mexican artist whose work has the same combination of fruitful grit and celestial transformation of these and so many other Mexican artists. He comes to San Francisco, California and determines to paint murals across the entirety of the outside of the Cathedral of Saint Mary in that city (which actually exists, at the corner of Gough and Geary Streets). The local archbishop thinks the artist and his ideas crackpot, and therein lies the tale. Jesús Lázaro is the artist, and The Notorious Dream of Jesús Lázaro is the book I wrote about him.

When I started it, I knew that I would have to describe Jesús’s fictional art. What I had always thought necessary in writing about actual art became, precisely, the task at hand. But while the Mona Lisa has qualities that are abundantly evident, in my case the paintings I describe do not exist at all. So, my writing took on all the responsibility of providing for the reader’s emotional response. The reader of my book can only imagine the painting, and I have to give him/her the words that bring that imagining to flower.

That’s difficult enough when you’re presenting some sort of social scene, which is the basic stuff of almost all fiction. But describing an entire individual piece of art that is so ephemeral as to not be there at all is a different task. Luckily for me, it was a lot of fun, which lightened the burden considerably. But nonetheless, I would love to view Jesús Lázaro’s paintings, wherever they may be, to see if I got them right.

Copyright © 2024 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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Beth liked Mr. Macklin…until he asked her for a date.

Never in class, of course. He was too smart for that. But one day, they had run into each other outside Wheeler Hall, and Mr. Macklin had suggested coffee at The Student Union. The Berkeley campus was just now teeming with people, the campanile bells having rung out the noon hour.

Beth enjoyed Mr. Macklin’s class, the second semester of an introduction to English literature. She had learned he was some sort of expert on Shakespeare and, so, had taken careful notes when the class had been reading Hamlet. She couldn’t understand this Hamlet character, especially the way he treats Ophelia, who so loves Hamlet that his rudeness to her, his rejection of her, causes her to kill herself. Beth thought Ophelia was crazy to have done so, even as Hamlet’s treatment had driven her crazy. She had offered that opinion in class, which had gotten a few intakes of breath from some of the other girls. Mr. Macklin had nodded, actually disagreeing with Beth, although he had been nice about it. He had explained that this was Elizabethan England and not 1960s Berkeley, California, Miss Cronin, and that Ophelia’s actions were the very stuff of Elizabethan tragedy itself. “And what could possibly be the options for a girl back then, Miss Cronin?” he said. “Especially when Hamlet himself has lost his reason.”

Beth enjoyed being called “Miss Cronin” by her professors. It was standard practice in class at that time (Mr. Smith, Mr. Gomez, Miss Jones) and seemed to her an acknowledgement of the distinction a student had achieved, simply by being admitted to the University of California at Berkeley. He had then given a short description of the life that could be expected by women in 1600 in England, especially one high-born whose mistreatment by the equally high-born man she loves could ruin her forever. The explanation had finally made sense to Beth. Mr. Macklin had asked Miss Cronin to stay behind for a moment and had then told her that she was one of the most intelligent girls in the class and he hoped she didn’t mind his setting her straight about poor Ophelia.

But…coffee? No professor had ever asked her to coffee.

They sat down at a table outside The Student Union. Mr. Macklin placed his wallet and keys on the tabletop. The keys rattled pleasantly, their trite noise seeming even playful to Beth, as though she were some sort of girl being chortled by an amusing uncle. There was talk at many of the other tables, students enjoying themselves and the various conversations. Beth noticed that a few of the people in her class with Mr. Macklin had seen the two of them speaking with each other and were clearly discussing it, maybe even mildly huffing about it. She didn’t know whether to be mindful of their gossip or dismissive of it. Mr. Macklin was just Mr. Macklin, and Beth thought she really was one of the smartest people in the class, and she now knew a little better what life was like for a pretty, well-brought-up girl in England at the turn of the seventeenth century. Drowning herself was way extreme, but Beth now had sympathy for Ophelia, especially when she had been “pull’d from her melodious lay to muddy death…”, such a dark, self-contradictory description.

So terrifying a moment, Beth thought.

Mr. Macklin himself was very friendly, although he usually was a bit stiff in his conversation with Beth. She figured he was about thirty-five. He was actually handsome, she thought, his dignity as a professor being usually quite carefully presented with urbane chilliness. Beth liked his eyes. But especially she enjoyed watching him walk before the class, back and forth, his right hand held out to emphasize in various ways what he was saying. He was slim and carried himself slimly with fine shoulders held up as though with prideful welcome. He was best when reciting from some book or play, giving whatever passage the sort of authority it needed, whatever humor, whatever gravity, whatever sadness. His accent was American, and he had been humorous in describing how, were he to play Polonius in The Globe Theater, the way he talked would be laughed at by the groundlings for how weird this Polonius with the Chicago accent would sound to even the poorest of Londoners.

Beth had once noted the beginning…the very beginning…of a small bald spot on the back of Mr. Macklin’s head. He always wore a suit and tie, de rigueur for professors despite the fact these days that the students…even the women students…were becoming almost daily more sloppy, less careful of their appearance, and more and more hippie. Hippies, Beth thought. Sloppy, yes. But cute. Beth herself enjoyed dressing well. But even she was wearing jeans now, although with a pretty blouse instead of a dress, carrying her books in a dark green cloth “book bag,” as they called it, hanging from a strap over her right shoulder, lowering her standards to look a little hippie herself, so as to fit in. She was even wearing hippie sandals on this particular day, the fine weather permitting it. Beth seldom wore sandals.

Mr. Macklin always looked like a professor. A coat and tie every day. Rigorous sameness in his appearance, like a professor. Formal language devoid of any slang, like a professor. A nice man, Beth felt, unlike a lot of other professors. A little dull, maybe, although awfully handsome. And he sure knew his Shakespeare! And his Milton. And his Virginia Woolf. Beth had never even heard of Virginia Woolf before her class with Mr. Macklin.

Over coffee, he did ask Beth a question that surprised her. His own cappuccino rested, half-drunk, in its cup before him, his fingers holding to each side of the cup as he studied it. The same way he would look at whatever book they were talking about in class before speaking about it. Quiet perusal, almost like boredom itself. His forehead would furrow now and then. His hands would sometimes gather themselves together, fingers intertwined, as he would study whatever poetic lines, passage, or paragraph they were talking about in class. And when he spoke, he seemed actually almost dismissive of the moment, made tedious by it. Hamlet? Beth would think. Made tedious by Hamlet? But she was able to wade through Mr. Macklin’s seeming complacency because, despite its tone of disinterest, he really knew what he was talking about. Maybe he doesn’t like the teaching, she thought. Maybe he was just shy in front of an audience. But he sure knows what he’s reading!

And now…that question. “Miss Cronin, I’ve noticed that you seem pretty solitary. Is that so?”

“Solitary?” She swallowed. This was hardly the case. Beth had retained many of her friends from high school, some of whom were also now at Berkeley. She had a “crew,” too, as she called them, acquaintances from different classes whom she could meet on campus during a free hour here or there. Most were women, and one of the things Beth liked most about Berkeley was that people here were from everywhere, not just the U.S., but everywhere. So, she had made a plan for her second summer’s vacation, to go to France and Switzerland, to visit a couple of her new girlfriends who had been raised in those countries. Beth was friendly. She liked people.

Solitary? “No, not at all,” she said.

Mr. Macklin sat back, his eyes on hers. “Sorry. I hope I’m not speaking out of hand.”

The phrase, so old fashioned, surprised her. Its formality. Maybe he got it from Virginia Woolf, Beth thought. She had heard it before, of course. But from people like her grandfather.

“Oh, no, Mr. Macklin, I—”

He leaned forward over his cappuccino and touched her hand. “No. Please, Beth.” The touch was kindly. “It’s Morley.”

Beth, pulling back her hand, sat in silence a moment. Mr. Macklin had just called her “Beth.” She knew that he had her full name on his list of that class’s students. But no professor had ever referred to Beth as “Beth.” She was not prepared for this informality and was confused by the thought that Mr. Macklin’s name was Morley. He looked like a Morley, so formal appearing a man…like a professor! In class, he would stand before the students in quiet distinction, dismissive of them. No student was offended by it, since these men…there were few women…were authorities in their fields and so deserved the quiet respect of their “minions,” as Beth sometimes thought while smiling about the situation. Beth Cronin, even as a nineteen-year-old, was no minion.

“Oh, Mr. Macklin….”

“Morley.” He smiled affectionately. It was a quiet, authoritative… “gesture,” she thought…rather than an informality.

“It’s nice of you,” she said. “But I think we should keep it at ’Mr. Macklin.’”

He leaned forward. “Why?” He offered her another smile, which Beth suddenly decided was “smarmy,” as in the word she had learned a semester ago from her reading in some British novel, she couldn’t remember which. The discomfort Beth felt was not only real. She wished right away to remain just a student, which the name “Miss Cronin” afforded her. A smart girl reading Hamlet. “I would like to know more about you,” he said.

“Mr. Macklin—”

“Uh-uh. Morley.”

Beth glanced at the coffee before her. Suddenly she had little interest in it. When she looked up at Mr. Macklin, she saw he was smiling. But the smile was not pleasant. It was genuine enough and in no way threatening. But Mr. Macklin’s “smarminess” was in this moment…nonetheless…quite real for her. Here he was, an expert in the fine flower of William Shakespeare’s poetic genius, an explainer of James Joyce, for Lord’s sake, who Beth had tried with no success to read on her own as a freshman, the fine societies of Jane Austen, the pointed, noisy hilarities in Charles Dickens…. Here he was, Mr. Macklin, baring his teeth.

“Mr. Macklin, I’m a student. You’re a professor.”

“I know that. But can’t we be friends?”

Beth’s eyes, a bit shaky, looked away from the table. With sudden clarity, she realized she was looking at a man whose manners were anything but fine. Indeed, she recognized the manipulation he was attempting to put her through. No professor had ever attempted to be her friend. She had heard about such things and what they could lead to, but only in anecdotal ways. And that story, although rare, was always told by a girl, never by a boy. She knew the opportunity that some professor might have, to fail a girl in his class if she were to accuse him of anything out of line. Beth herself was on her way to a full-hearted “A” in this class. A “C” or worse from Mr. Macklin could scuttle her four-point average so far…. Well, 3.8, Beth’s having attempted the beginning course in Chemistry as a freshman and having found it leaden and colorless, like the guys who understood it, in which she had nonetheless achieved a “B”.

Now, Mr. Macklin appeared even older than thirty-five. His attempt at a look of affection across the café table, his fingers caressing the small plate on which his cappuccino rested, caused any attempt she might have to answer this affection to stall.

“I’d love to be your friend, Beth,” Mr. Macklin said.

A few girls whom Beth knew had talked about this situation, especially Cecily, a senior she had met by chance at the Student Union café a year ago. From Las Vegas, when she had learned that Beth had grown up in San Francisco, Cecily had told her how much she enjoyed that city. In one of their conversations, she had also mentioned how one of her professors had actually asked her for a date, a brief back-and-forth that had made Cecily very uncomfortable. “I didn’t think that was right. He was my teacher in an art history class.”

“What did you do?”

“I said, “No!’.”

“And what did he do?”

“He flunked me.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“And then what?”

“I reported him to the chancellor’s office.”

“And what did they do?”

“Nothing.” Cecily frowned, her head in slow back and forth sadness. “Well…. Not nothing, in the end. An ‘F’, you know, means that you didn’t do your work, didn’t show up to class, didn’t whatever! That’s what they told me, anyway. An ‘F’ is always a deserved ‘F.’ And I had done everything I was supposed to do in that class and was fascinated by what we were reading. You know, about Picasso and Caravaggio, all those guys.”

“But what did you do then?”

“I told my parents.”

“What did they say?”

“Well, my father…. My father’s an attorney.”

“Oh….”

“And he had a friend who agreed to help me sue the university.”

“Sue them!”

“Yes.”

“And then what?”

“They decided to void any record of my having been in the class, so that my ‘F’ wouldn’t appear.” Cecily lowered her head, and Beth recognized genuine disgruntlement. Both women remained for the moment silent. “I got erased from Art Appreciation,” Cecily whispered.

“And the professor?”

“He’s still here.” Cecily’s breathing had seemed to tighten as she shrugged. “The whole thing just…ceased.” She lowered her head. “Everything went back as it was, as though nothing had happened.”

“You didn’t stay in the class, did you?”

Cecily offered a brusque smile. “Are you kidding?”

Beth and Cecily were still in touch. Cecily had graduated with honors last year and now was in law school at Boalt Hall.

Beth sipped from her coffee. “But Mr. Macklin….” She frowned and then so slowly replaced the cup on its saucer that the cup seemed itself to grumble, as though emptied with offended disappointment. “Like I say. You’re the teacher. I’m the student.”

“I know that.”

“That’s the way it should stay.”

Mr. Macklin frowned, his lips wrinkling tightly against each other.

“I don’t want to go out with you.”

Mr. Macklin sat back, a note of bothered frustration in his eyes. He sipped the rest of his cappuccino. “I don’t mean anything by it, Beth.” He sat up straight, adjusting his tie and swallowing, looking away.

“It’s ‘Miss Cronin,’” Beth said. Thinking of Cecily, she leaned forward over her own coffee. “And what do you plan to do now that we’ve had this conversation, Morley?”

Mr. Macklin did not respond, at least with anything that was to be voiced. His fine posture suddenly grew bent, a bit to the side. He let out a breath that, although silent, nonetheless sounded offended. He crossed his arms.

“What now?” Beth said.

“What do you mean, ‘What now?’”

“Are you going to flunk me?”

“Of course not.”

“Even when I…. Even when I drop the class.”

“It’s too late in the semester for that.”

“So what? I’d get an ‘F’?”

“According to the rules, yes.”

“Whose rules?” Beth, thinking a moment about her friend Cecily, decided to up her resistance a notch. “Yours?”

“No. But rules are rules, Beth.”

She thought a moment about the rules and then considered for a longer moment her rights. She felt she had one important one, which was to not be hassled by a good-looking, notable, authoritative, knowledgeable, smarmy professor. Rules! She thought. Whose? His?

“And what if I…” Beth turned to the side, once more looking at the other table, where her classmates were now involved once again in conversation with each other. Two of them were girls, and Beth wondered if, once being rejected by her, Mr. Macklin would then pick on one of them. “What if I get a lawyer?”

Mr. Macklin gathered himself into a look of offended mortification, as though this girl before him were threatening him with a crime. Beth knew this was no crime. He was just flirting, although manipulatively. But there was such a difference in their situations here at Berkeley. Beth an undergraduate sophomore. Mr. Macklin a celebrated scholar, noted on campus for his scholarship and authority. But she enjoyed the sudden turn to defensiveness that now blanketed Mr. Macklin’s silence.

“Beth.”

“No. Miss Cronin.”

Mr. Macklin swallowed. “I—”

“Guarantee me an ‘A’, which I’d get anyway, I’m sure you’d agree.”

“Miss Cronin.”

“Guarantee me the ‘A’, I’ll leave the class the minute I leave this table, and you’ll be free.” Beth was plain amazed by her own behavior, and could hardly wait to talk with Cecily, to tell her what help she had been in all this. Mr. Macklin had returned to his previous formality, sitting across from Beth as though he had just finished a brief observation on the beauties of “Ode to A Nightingale” or some other. Suddenly, he was Mr. Macklin again, not the flirt Morley. He gathered his keys and wallet from the tabletop, nodded agreement, and stood from the table.

“Otherwise, you and the university will be hearing from my lawyer.”

“Beth, I—”

“Miss Cronin.”

“Yes, I…. I—”

“Is it a deal?”

Mr. Macklin jiggled his keys, surveying them in his right hand.

“Is it?”

Mr. Macklin nodded…. “Okay,” he muttered and, with morose hurry, turned away. As he fled, Beth noticed how this walk was like his walk in the classroom. Professor Macklin. Verve. Knowledge. Suave authority.

“And thanks for the coffee,” Beth whispered.

Copyright ©2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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They had fallen in love at Lowell High School, in senior drama class. Beth remembered particularly the scene in the annual school play that year, 1963, Romeo and Juliet, when Friar Laurence offers his thoughts on how fine the romance between the two is, yet how dangerous it may be.

“For this alliance may so happy prove,/To turn your households’ rancour to pure love.”

Those lines had made Beth almost weep. The hopefulness in them. But so had the following line from the friar a while later: “These violent delights have violent ends.”

“But she’s so young!”

“Actually younger than you are, Beth,” the English/Drama teacher Mr. Curtis said.

“She is?”

“She’s just a girl. Romeo’s a boy. It’s one of the facts that makes the play so difficult. I mean, the meanness between the two families. The jealousy between them and what it causes these two kids to do.”

While Beth was playing Juliet, Shay had a smaller part as Balthazar, Romeo’s servant. He also helped change sets between scenes and move things around. There was something to his actual part, Balthazar’s witnessing of so much sorrow. And Shay did have three memorable lines:

“Then she is well, and nothing can be ill:/Her body sleeps in Capel’s monument,/And her immortal part with angels lives.”

Once, in rehearsal, he had noticed that Beth, sitting in her jeans and a sweater on the floor at the side of the room to watch, was watching him after he had uttered these lines to Romeo. She had put fingers to her eyes, to wipe them of tears. She knew that Balthazar did not know that Juliet was still alive, and that this news from him would drive Romeo and Juliet both to their suicides.

Beth enjoyed talking with Shay. A kind of attractive listlessness came with his own speech, as though he were in the act of dismissing himself. But even then, even as an eighteen-year-old, she knew this was not true of Shay Flood. They had been in the same English class with Mr. Curtis the year before, and she had noticed how Shay was the only boy who seemed able to answer Mr. Curtis’s questions about what they were reading.

“How many of you know about these Oakies that Steinbeck’s writing about?”

“What do you think of Uriah Heep?”

“Who likes Jane Austen?”

The other boys in the class, most of them, sat slouched at their desks in embarrassed resentfulness while the girls waved their hands in the air. Shay held his up as well. Noticing this, Beth had planned a way to walk with him, especially after the class in which he had answered Mr. Curtis’s question, “Why do you like Romeo and Juliet?”

“The ways they find to stay together. Especially when each of them thinks the other is still alive.” Shay’s silent look to the side had offered what seemed to Beth like worry. Sorrow, even…. The boys in the class were uninterested in his answer, although Mr. Curtis, brushing dandruff from his jacket’s right shoulder and then straightening his tie, nodded with approval. “Well….” He looked the class over. “Let’s talk about that, what Shay just said.”

Shay and Beth had become friends after this, and Shay had asked Beth to attend the senior prom with him, their first actual date. Not much had come of it. He gave her cheek a kiss at her front door before she went back in. He had gotten a job as a camp counselor in Maine for that summer and would enter NYU in the fall, while Beth would start at Berkeley.

They did like each other, and at the Christmas break, back in San Francisco that first year of college, Shay called Beth and asked her if she would take a walk with him. He had been thinking about her, despite the brevity of the time they had had together. Shay had understood how difficult the part of Juliet must be, Juliet’s naiveté and charm in the same moments that the onrushing doom is coming. He remembered especially the moment when Beth had paused, looking down and waiting as Juliet considered what she was about to say, what maybe she was too frightened to say. “My only love sprung from my only hate!“ Shay had admired the sophistication with which Beth had given the line. Looking down with a hint of sorrow, she had taken in a breath before putting a long, worried pause between the words “love” and “sprung.” “My only love…sprung from my only hate!“ The fury between the Capulets and the Montagues had been an unquestioned part of Juliet’s life until the moment she had first seen Romeo. Shay agreed with the prince’s last lines in the play: “For never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

That day they explored parts of Golden Gate Park. Both Beth and Shay had been born and raised in San Francisco and, so, knew the park well. Shay, at NYU, had spent considerable time in Central Park, and felt that the San Francisco park well held its own against the New York City one. He was amused that the biggest difference between the two seemed to be where they were located. San Francisco is a wonder, he knew, celebrating it in conversations with his NYU friends, few of whom had ever been in that city. He especially enjoyed telling them of the unique way-out-west pioneering wonders San Francisco celebrates as well as its sophisticated, somehow European manner. And the park ended abruptly at the Pacific Ocean, which of course has its own thorough authority.

But Central Park is in New York City and, for Shay, there was really no comparison. New York opened him in ways he had not expected and would never abandon. Simply walking through Washington Square on a bright Sunday Spring afternoon, every foot of it crowded with people speaking every imaginable language, jolted him alive. He loved Washington Square. He cherished New York, all of its chaos, all of its talk, all of its noisy, rough insistence.

But for Shay, San Francisco was where Beth could be found. They had enjoyed each other just for those two short weeks of the Christmas break. And by the time that break was over, Shay had discovered in himself a version of Romeo’s woe. He would miss her, and he knew it. He told her so, and this was the reason for their first real kiss. And their second.

They wrote to each other. A lot about school…what they were reading, what they were discovering. Their romance was a successfully hidden impulse, not spoken of or written about much in the letters between each other but, in Beth’s mind especially, something she enjoyed. This Shay was a good guy. He did things that few other guys did…like, ask her questions about herself. Talk about what they were reading. Her emotions, what she felt, what she wished for, what she thought she was finding about herself at Berkeley. She told him how the fellows at Berkeley were nice enough, even a few she had met at fraternity beer busts on Friday afternoons. She attended just three or four in her first year there but found in many of “the brothers” the self-involved clueless self-importance that, she was to discover in later years, was common among many of the men she would come to know.

Both Beth and Shay could hardly wait for the coming summer, when they would see each other again in San Francisco.

Back in town, he called her. He had explained to his father how much he enjoyed NYU and how the students there were not like most of the ones he knew from San Francisco. There was a sophistication among them that had at first intimidated Shay until he had taken on a form of that sophistication for himself. Shay had learned fast and his father expressed actual respect for how that first year in New York had changed him for the better. “You’re an adult, Shay,” his father had said, clapping him on the back. “Proud of you.”

Shay and Beth agreed to meet at The Caffe Trieste, an Italian place on the corner of Grant and Vallejo Streets that had gotten a little fame a decade ago. It had been a locally notorious beatnik hangout, and even now some of the men customers, slouching toward middle age, still wore sullen black, appearing always darkly engaged in intellectual mysteriousness. They had greying beards. They appeared mournful, even as they read books or doodled with their own manuscripts, which some of them did for seeming hours while nursing a single cappuccino. Beth saw a few berets here and there, a nod, she knew, to Paris, a capitol she had visited with her parents as a twelve-year-old. She recalled how the Frenchmen who wore berets had all been working for a living…behind counters in cafes, driving trucks, refurbishing vegetable stalls in open-air street markets, moving furniture. In The Trieste, the berets seemed to be thought of as a mark of poetic insistence, as though it was not available to the average San Francisco schmuck. The beret added self-regard and knowing sophistication to their mutterings about this new Vietnam thing, wherever that place was. The beret was also a self-congratulatory companion to the beatniks’ scribblings and their now-and-then disavowal, contained in actual bothered mutterings, of everyone else in the cafe.

As young college students, Beth and Shay stood out in The Trieste. They were studied by a few of the regulars with disapproving silence before turning back to their Allen Ginsburg book, their Lawrence Ferlinghetti book, their Gregory Corso book, or their own slashed at, much revised, angering and sworn-at manuscripts. Shay himself enjoyed the place. It added to his youthful sophistication because it mirrored a few of the places he had gone to in Greenwich Village. But he and Beth were so young and so obviously college students that they were ignored at The Trieste. New York or not, Berkeley or not, they were just college kids.

Until the afternoon they made love.

—

Shay’s mother had flown to Los Angeles to meet her husband, who was away for the week on business, for a weekend just by themselves. Beth’s parents were in Carmel at a wedding, and Shay and Beth had met each other for another afternoon walk, this time along the broad sidewalk above Ocean Beach. The tide was out and Beth explained to Shay how the tides so fascinated her, the way they shifted with such silent inexorability. “Even the ocean just comes and goes,” she said as, hand in hand, they walked down the sidewalk. “All of it invisible.”

“Gravity,” Shay said.

“Sure. But there’s got to be more than just gravity. The water comes in, caresses the beach, and goes back out…so silently. It touches the beach…so gracefully.” She sighed. “Don’t you think the tide just might want to come and go?”

Shay had not once in his life considered such an idea.

“For a kiss?” she said, smiling. But as she continued looking out to sea, he watched her and realized how much she cared for what she was seeing. Shay had read enough in the novels he liked about emotions like longing and wishfulness, so that even at nineteen, he valued what such feelings were. Few of his high school friends had ever talked with him of such things, although he sensed that the girls did so talk, at least with each other. Guys didn’t at all. But just now, as she looked out into the distance, Shay realized how much he cared for Beth. They were just nineteen. But he smiled as he recalled how Romeo and Juliet had been even younger than that, and if they could fall in love, why couldn’t he and Beth? He suspected he already had.

He took her hand and, as she continued looking…maybe even beyond this ocean…Shay realized he did love her. His sentiment. His wish to embrace her here and now on Ocean Beach. Beth glanced at their joined fingers. So…he did embrace her, and the two fell into a long kiss. A brief, finessed impulse seemed to take Beth, and she put her arms around Shay’s neck and held to him a long moment.

“Shay,” she whispered. “Please.”

They lay together in his bed a few hours later. Both had been so excited, neither being very sure of what to do, how to proceed. But they had proceeded, and Shay knew that what was happening was to remain very secret, something just their own. He was scared, and felt that Beth maybe was, too, although she lay in his arms as though she simply knew what had happened between them and had wished for it. She had given him soft, loving instruction in how to touch her, such good instruction that, with his fingers and her own, she had lost herself in a way Shay had not expected and, at least for a few moments, had not understood. Beth explained what had happened, how it was that she herself was able to do such a thing for herself, only without this new moment in which they had finally, truly found each other. Despite the initial pain that that had caused her, Beth had held to him closely.

“My mother told me that would happen.” Lying still, a bit exhausted, she had caressed Shay’s forehead with two fingers of her right hand, studying the caress and then his eyes. “Don’t worry, Shay. It was fun.”

—

The romance continued, although they were unable to do again what they had now done just once. Holding hands, kissing, sharing stories, laughter, and affection were enough for the next several weeks. They cared for each other.

He got a phone call from Beth, though, one morning, that right away had a tone of possible menace and worry. “Will you meet me this afternoon?”

“Of course,” he said. “Where?”

Beth named a lookout on The Lands End Trail. It was a favorite of theirs, from which they could see the Golden Gate Bridge to the west, the Point Bonita Lighthouse across the way, and the rough Pacific waters below the trail. He had sensed concern in her voice and had asked her about it.

“I’ll tell you when we see each other.”

Shay fretted for the few hours between the phone conversation and their meeting. He wondered if, for some reason, Beth was about to break up with him, that she was feeling constricted. When they met, she hugged him, even as he could see she was in deep worry about something, about this very meeting maybe.

“Shay, I….” Beth lowered her head as she stepped away from his embrace. He saw that she was falling into tears. He took her hand and waited. They were going to break up. Yes, Beth wanted to. The silence was interrupted here and there by an intake of breath by Beth. She put a hand to her mouth. “I missed my period.”

Shay remained silent and continued holding her other hand. He did not need more information. He knew all he needed to know, and for just a moment he considered leaving the responsibility for it in Beth’s hands alone. She was pregnant, so the responsibility was hers. His thoughts swirled with this, knowing really that he was moving in a hurried line toward cowardice. He was himself just afraid. The couple stood in silence, Beth’s hand still in his for a long moment, until Beth looked up at Shay. “Are you going to say anything?”

She was terrified. Her hair was disheveled, as though she had been running her fingers through it back and forth, even with rough self-punishment. Her lips appeared swollen, and Shay knew…could see how much she was blaming herself. He immediately felt like a fool, a kid who plain doesn’t know what he’s doing. He had known what he was doing but had been so excited and so wishing for Beth that he hadn’t really thought about what could happen.

Dumb stupidity.

Beth’s worry was as clear to Shay as it was to Beth and, as his previous idea of leaving the thing in her hands evaporated, he moved a step toward her and took her into his arms. “Come on,” he said.

They walked on the trail toward the bridge, talking.

“Beth, do your parents know?”

“Of course not.”

“And it’s because of me.”

“Of course!”

“And you’re sure.”

“Shay!”

As they walked, Beth looked down at the fractious sea. The trail is many feet up the cliff bordering the bay’s entrance. On a day like this, when the overcast is thick grey and even sullen seeming, the sea below has a kind of dull violence. Bright sunlight and clear air make it appear festive. Instead, on a day weighed down by cloud cover, the ocean attacks the cliffs and pulls away from them, to attack once again and again, as though there is simple inexorability in its wishes. There is strength in them. There is intention. But they roar as though their movement has little clarity in it, little real interest in what is being asked of it by the tide or the weather. Beth was terrified.

She sat up that night in bed, the book she was reading opened, pages down, next to her. She was crying. Shay had held her in a long embrace. He had told her he loved her, and she now thought about the complications that her own body was giving her. She didn’t much enjoy the blood that came from her every month, even as she knew that it was an indication of the possible complication, joy, distress, and love that she could experience someday. But this…now…. How was she going to tell her parents? Her father might not be so angry with her. Her father…Beth cared for him deeply. He’d be upset, for sure. But he would want to talk with her. Who Beth worried about was her mother who, sometimes disapproving of Beth in general and not nearly as joyful and fun as Beth knew herself to be…. Her mother would be furious.

Beth knew about the problems that girls can have with their mothers because a number of her friends had those problems. Sometimes, of course, it was the girls who could be snide toward their mothers. But other times it seemed the other way around. Some moms expected their daughters to simply toe Mom’s line, no matter what it was. Beth had one friend, Meg, whose mother seemed to think there was but one way for a proper girl to be, which was “proper”. Beth and Meg both understood the definition of that word. But Meg’s mother seemed to think of it the way people had thought of it a long, long time ago. Her idea of “proper” was way stodgy and she often badgered her daughter Meg for being “too showy”. Beth knew that Meg was in no way a show-off or promiscuous. She was smart and a lot of fun. Meg told Beth that her mother was just old fashioned, especially here in San Francisco in the 1960s where there was so much going on that someone like her mom could never hope to understand. So, whenever Beth would go over to Meg’s house for a visit, she could expect Meg’s mother to be somehow miffed by the visit, in ways Beth could never figure out. Meg herself would shrug and be nice to Beth…. She always was.

Beth knew well…now…that she would never say anything to Meg’s mother about what was happening inside her. She wouldn’t even tell Meg herself, until…well….

But Beth had to tell her parents, and she did not know how to do that. Her tears came from her anger with herself, how foolish she had been not to be more careful. She put her hand on the book, to take it back up. But then she pushed it away. Beth knew that she was not unique in making love with her boyfriend. In Berkeley, she suspected more girls did so than not. But this…. A baby! She closed the book, turned off the light, turned over on to her side, her head resting on her folded arm, and wept.

They argued. Each blamed the other, even when Shay blamed Shay and Beth blamed Beth. Neither could put aside the guilt. Shay did say to Beth that he should have been more careful, and Beth told him it was all his fault. He said that that wasn’t true, and she apologized for saying what she had said, and so did he. They made up…and soon returned to arguing.

“How can I go back to school?” Beth asked him. “Walking around with a baby in me.” She wept. “You don’t understand anything!”

“Beth, I—”

“You’re not carrying some little kid around in you. How could you understand?”

I—”

“It’s your fault.”

“But—”

“Yours!”

Shay walked her home. It was his fault. He knew it. Beth knew it. His!

“Even though I should’ve…should….” Approaching her house, she moaned and let out a long, self-condemning sigh.

“Yeah, you should’ve.”

“Shay!”

Shay looked to the side, embarrassed and furious with himself. “I’m sorry, Beth. I—”

“Shay!”

That night, Shay, lying in bed, knew he would have to marry Beth. The sheets and blankets were insubstantial protection against this worry, no longer the warm providers of simple sleep. He looked around his room, which was only partially lit by the table lamp by his bed. He had gotten into bed a few hours before, and sleep had been no option. Shay’s responsibilities whirled about him like noise-ridden retribution. They were only nineteen…but so be it. Abortion? Not allowed. 1963? Here in California? President Kennedy? As far as Shay knew, not anywhere! Catholics, his parents wouldn’t allow it. Nobody would.

Beth and Shay both had had plans, Beth herself wanting to teach English and Shay, in New York City, smitten with the idea of acting. But now, with this, he saw the two of them stuck with darling little Jimmy or sweet tiny Cindy in Beth’s arms, suckling her and laughing at Shay.

He didn’t know how he would explain it to his divorced parents. His father, so recently congratulatory of Shay’s New York manner, would be upset with him and this foolishness. His mother, who now lived with a man whom Shay liked but did not know very well, would surely be angry with him. Shay’s whole future was now obstructed and confusing before him, and he felt like an idiot even thinking about that when Beth was the one carrying their little baby. He was just the carrier of the wetness that had joined hers in a moment of blind swimming, wetness that would result in a complete human being held by teenage parents. Shay swallowed, looked to the side, and offered a snide, profane swear word aimed at himself. He swallowed again, looking toward the lamp. He wondered if any of its light would ever reach him. Would there be light for him and Beth? Would light ever be possible again?

They met twice in the next week. There was little exchange. The conversation avoided the facts. None of the conversation was happy, none an exchange of pleasantry. Worry invaded everything between them.

—

They met nonetheless again, after another week. Shay had tried to prepare himself for the guilt that now besieged him. They had to make a decision, he knew. They had to do something.

“I woke up this morning, Shay.”

“So did I.” He actually smiled, surprised by Beth’s mention of so plain a moment. “I usually do.”

“Me, too.” Beth looked to the side and then stopped, took his right hand into her left and brought to her lips. “I was bleeding.” She kissed his hand.

Shay remained quiet. The word…”bleeding”…one that he had always equated with wounds or accidents with knives, with unintended, quick pain.

“I’m okay,” Beth said.

“You…. You mean—”

“Amenorrhoea, my mom calls it.”

“What’s that?”

“When you miss your period. When it…when it comes late.”

“Late.”

“She laughed when I told her. She said it had happened once or twice to her, too.” Beth smiled, swallowing as though some rough, unlikeable bother was being removed from her throat. “And she asked me if you and I had…did we—”

“She did?”

“Yes.” Beth did smile, although the smile itself appeared with what seemed like a touch of personal amazement.

“And what did you—?”

“I said, ‘Yes.’”

“Oh.” Shay looked to the side. ”Jesus.”

“I did.”

“And what did she say?”

“At first, nothing.” Beth offered a sideways nod. “At first.”

“But then what?”

“For a long time, nothing. And then she asked me, was I using protection?.”

“She did?”

“And I said yes.”

“You did?”

“Yes, and that’s true, isn’t it? When we do it again, what we did that time.”

“We will?” Shay scratched his head. “Again?” He felt like a desirous bumpkin.

“Yes.”

Copyright ©2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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Pablo Neruda

The news a few years year ago that the Chilean government had exhumed Pablo Neruda’s remains, to determine whether or not his death was caused by poisoning, brought a new, but not surprising, twist to Neruda’s life, even forty years after his demise.

Neruda died just days after his friend Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, was murdered in the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. Neruda had been in poor health for some years, and it was assumed that he had died of natural causes that perhaps were worsened by the emotional trial of losing such a close compatriot and friend.

But Neruda was no stranger himself to extreme punishment for his political views, and rumors have circulated since his death that he too was murdered while in hospital after Allende’s death, also on direct orders from Pinochet. His exhumation aimed to determine whether Neruda indeed had died on his own, or had been assassinated.

Neruda was almost killed in 1949, when he was already a world-famous poet and a senator in the Chilean congress. Having been elected as a Communist, he had then been asked by Gabriel González Videla, the leftist candidate for president in the 1946 elections, to become his campaign chairman, while maintaining his seat in Congress. Neruda agreed and, bringing the Communist vote to the leftist coalition supporting González Videla, he helped ensure González Videla’s victory.

Once in office, however, González Videla abandoned the very supporters that got him elected. He not only failed to enact the policies for which he won office, he actively turned against them. The ongoing Cold War between western democracies and the Soviet Union brought great pressure upon González Videla, causing him, essentially, to betray his own electorate. He became the trinket of and enforcer for the Chilean wealthy and the U.S. (especially American mining and other corporate interests in Chile.) Disgruntled national figures like Pablo Neruda were basically marginalized.

Pablo Neruda was an extremely colorful, humorous, and celebratory man who was not about to take such treatment without a response. He wrote an inflammatory article for a Venezuelan publication, in which he denounced González Videla’s presidency. On January 6, 1948, he stood up on the floor of Congress and delivered a stem-winder of a speech in which he accused the president of political betrayal, cowardice and even genocide against his own people. González Videla had re-opened a concentration camp that had been used by an earlier president to incarcerate homosexuals. Located in the appropriately named coastal town of Pisagua (Pisswater), the camp was famous for its miserable, even murderous conditions. In his speech, Neruda gave the names of all 628 prisoners being held there, many of them miners from the Atacama Desert region that had elected Neruda. (This region later became world-famous for the 2010 rescue of miners who had been trapped underground for 68 days.)

Within weeks of this speech, González Videla got the Chilean Supreme Court to strip Neruda of his senatorship. His home in Santiago was set ablaze, causing him and his second wife Delia del Carril to go into hiding. In March 1949, after a year spent in isolation in various safe-houses around the country, Neruda had to run for his life. He escaped from Chile into Argentina, on horseback – escorted by a group of local trackers – through the high, dangerous reaches of the Andes Mountains. It was the beginning of winter, and during this harrowing crossing, Neruda came close to death on a couple of terrifying occasions. He did make it to Argentina, however, and eventually was re-united with Delia in Paris.

Pablo Picasso (L.) and Pablo Neruda, Salle Pleyel, 1949.

On April 25, 1949, at the World Congress of Peace Forces at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, Neruda was introduced to an astonished audience. Everyone – including Gabriel González Videla – had assumed he was dead. Amused by the opportunity to put that rumor to rest, Neruda reveled in the introduction he was given by none other than Pablo Picasso. The audience erupted in sustained, noisy applause.

There was later controversy about the exhumation of Neruda’s remains. All the principal players in the 1973 military coup had died, and democracy had returned to full strength in Chile. So, some commentators said that there was little good to be served in bringing up those murderous times yet once more. But there was at least one thing that was served well. Ultimately, history seeks the truth. If Pablo Neruda had died of illness, it would leave Augusto Pinochet innocent of at least one gruesome crime. If Neruda had been assassinated, Pinochet’s legacy would be darkened even more than it already was…and appropriately so.

The resultant tests on Neruda’s remains were inconclusive.

I first learned of Pablo Neruda’s escape when I began researching his life for a novel I planned to write about him. For me, the challenge lay in how to write a novel from the point of view of one of the greatest imaginative minds of the 20th century. This was either extreme hubris on my part or plain nuttiness. But I wanted to present Neruda’s vivid, unruly imagination, and to show how it could both exacerbate and ameliorate the extreme danger in which he and the others found themselves, deep in the disastrous Andes. That was the plan. That’s what the novel would describe.

It is in English, titled The Splendid City, and available. If you would prefer to read it in Spanish translation (by noted Chilean novelist Jaime Collyer) you can find it here.

Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. His fame now is greater than ever.

Copyright ©2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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I moved from San Francisco to New York City in 1998. I was working at the time as a marketing person for a large American corporation that provided the conversion of printed documents to digital ones, digital storage capabilities, and corporate mailing services.

I recall too well how boring all that was. I was aware of that already, of course, and although they didn’t know it, I had talked the company into moving me to New York simply so that I could live there. My job was to call on the headquarters of Fortune 500 companies, which may sound thrilling to some. But Fortune 500 companies are as tiresome as any other simply because they are business entities. That they are cash-cow monoliths does not make them any less dull. In whatever case, my interest in my company’s bottom line and a high-rise corner office suite had always been minimal, even though business had allowed me to live with a certain amount of style in San Francisco and now in Manhattan.

I knew on my first morning as a citizen of New York City that I had made the right decision, even though the temperature was in the low teens. It was a rattling cold New York winter day, in bright, cloudless sunlight. The evidence of snow from a few days before was still there on the sidewalks and as blackened ice at the street corners. I wore a new wool overcoat buttoned to the top, my neck buffered by a soft wool scarf.

I was happy.

Just then, I met the first New Yorker with whom I was to have a significant encounter. He was a bilingual madman. Dressed untidily, his hair like scum-lined, twisted wires, his overcoat splotched with mud and, maybe, dried soup, wearing sunglasses, he attacked me as I was walking down East Eighty-second toward Fifth Avenue and the Metropolitan Museum.

The first thing he did was to take a swing at me. I fell away—gracefully, I thought—with enough physical panache that the assailant missed. Very angered by this, he began shouting and gesturing at me with a fist. I was, he thought, a son of a bitch, a rich white boy pussy, a faggot, and then a pendejo, a cuero, an hijo de puta, and a mama ñema. I speak Spanish, and knew all those phrases, except for mama ñema. When I looked it up that afternoon, I found that such a person, in the Dominican Republic, is a man who offers sexual services to another man with his tongue and mouth. The phrase itself carries considerably less politesse than does my explanation of it.

My assailant then turned away and ran across Eighty-second, headed toward Central Park.

A young couple walking their dog hurried up from behind, to make sure I was okay. They asked where I was from. When I told them, they apologized profusely for my attacker’s behavior, and told me that New Yorkers were simply not like that. “New York is safe,” the man said. “You can walk in this city.”

I subsequently found that was true. I was never so approached again during the three years I lived in Manhattan.

I knew that I would write about New York. One of my reasons for wanting to move there was to do just that. I had traveled to Manhattan many times for pleasure and business, and loved the place as a tourist. I expected that would be the case even more so were I to live there, and that also proved to be true. But my encounter with this fellow (despite the fact that I was no mama ñema) was memorable. A fictionalization of it for the first New York story I was to write (titled, appropriately, “The High Line”) was my first effort to describe the experience of living in Manhattan.

Soon enough I was to learn that approximately eight hundred languages are spoken in the five New York boroughs, a result of the city’s numberless immigrations. My previous fiction often features Americans living outside the United States, in circumstances in which a major portion of their difficulty is the fact that they don’t fit in, linguistically or culturally. (For examples, please see When Clara Was Twelve.) That was a feature of my own early adulthood when I lived for a few years with tribal peoples on Borneo, on the Malaysia-side of that huge island. I learned then that to be in a position in which I must learn how other people speak, live, feel, think, and treat each other is a true privilege. That understanding has been a major factor in all my writing.

Because of those many cultures in New York, the city is for me its own foreign country. Even those speaking New York-style English from birth are outside the general North American identity, because of the way they talk and, occasionally, act. Throughout my time there, I was often singled out for the way I dressed (“You don’t own a tie, pal?”), the way I proceeded through conversation (“Hey, get to the point.”), and the principled naivety I displayed with regard to how things get done in business in New York. (I once asked a senior marketing guy at one of the Fortune 500s for advice about whom I should call on in the company, to tout our services. He gave me a name, and offered to make an introduction for me. I gladly accepted, and then he suggested that next time I visit his office, I bring along a gift certificate for a full set of Callaway golf clubs and a Wilson bag in which to carry them. Flummoxed, I stammered that I thought the services I was bringing with me would greatly improve his company’s bottom line, and I would make it clear to everyone with whom I spoke that he was personally responsible for such an improvement in operations. After a lengthy silence, he told me he had a meeting to go to. I never saw him again, and never got any business from that Fortune 500.)

I frequently was asked where I was from. (Native New Yorkers thought I talked funny.) A typical response to my answer was given me by my client at ASCAP, which at the time was located in an office building directly across Broadway from Lincoln Center. Joe was a New Yorker from the Bronx…a good guy, no nonsense. When I explained that I was from San Francisco, his response was “I don’t get it. You’re from San Francisco, and you came here to live? Why the f**k would you do somethin’ like that??”

The book I wrote (a story collection) is titled New York, and is available everywhere.

Copyright © 2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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Unfamiliar with the name, Beth had enjoyed Nicanor’s explanation of it after they had met at The Caffe Trieste. They had been seated at a table toward the back of the café. He had spotted her carrying a cappuccino in her hands, looking for a spare seat. Nicanor had a lovely voice, a humorous somberness that complemented his dark brown hair. As they talked, she learned his name was from the Greek (although she had just learned that Nicanor himself was from Santiago de Compostela, that he lived here in San Francisco, and was indeed Basque.) When he had briefly reminded her of who the Basques are and what they have against the Spanish, Beth mentioned the occasional difficulties that her Irish forebears have had with the English. “And…now and then…still have,” she had said. “Does your name have a meaning?”

“Nicanor? Yes. It has to do with victory.” He had a lovely accent. There was refinement in it, although Beth did wonder if that were actually so or if she were just assuming it was. “My family name is Amestoy.” He fingered the coffee cup before him. “It’s true Basque. Many centuries old.”

Beth enjoyed the accent, one she had not heard before. She had traveled much in Europe and could usually tell the difference, at least in terms of nationhood, between one accent and another. She had spoken with Spaniards, although that had been only in Madrid and on the beaches of Cádiz, and only in English. As she had luxuriated on the Playa de La Victoria, the gaditano Spaniard beach boys had enjoyed Beth in her bathing suit. Even their suggestive sighs had sounded broken, like their English. Nicanor’s manner of speech was kindly. When he smiled, Beth felt her heart tingle.

“Although I myself am not centuries old,” he said.

“I noticed.”

“And yours?”

“My name? Beth Cronin.”

“Irish. What does it mean?”

Beth sipped from her coffee. She had researched the name “Cronin” and knew it had something to do with being swarthy. She herself was not and figured that somewhere centuries before a great-great-great-whatever-Cronin had married a sweet Irish girl fine as the morning itself, and the only thing left now of his lovely tan was his name and perhaps a few of his genes, much-hidden in Beth’s Irish interior.

She explained all this to Nicanor.

He was interested. “And why are you here at The Trieste?”

Beth was trying to write and had heard about The Trieste a few days before, that it was “a nest of scribblers,” as her friend Marianne had told her. Just now, Ronald Reagan was president and the two women, both thirty, had known each other since their time at university in Berkeley. Marianne had explained that the poets at the Trieste (”I guess they’re poets. They’re all scraggly. So they must be.”) barely talked to each other…although just now she could sense a fair amount of spleen in the cafe, mostly aimed at President Reagan himself. Beth wondered if the fact that she, like Marianne, dressed well, was a pleasure to notice in a crowd, and knew from her time at Berkeley a good deal about such as Ernest Hemingway, whom Beth felt was a short-sentence bore, and James Joyce, a longer-sentence one in Ulysses, which she had read, and Finnegans Wake, on which she had begun giving up when she saw that Joyce had forgotten the apostrophe…. She did like Molly Bloom and Gretta Conroy, though, wondering through all his wordy, confused bluster how Joyce had learned to write so well about women. Beth figured Nora Barnacle had schooled him.

She worried, though, whether she could ever succeed in writing an actual novel, being intimidated by names like “Brontë” and “Dickens.” Just now in The Trieste, Beth (at the moment the office manager at a downtown law firm and not a lawyer herself) saw her novel, of which she had so far written seventeen pages, as a far-off chimera.

“A friend told me there are writers here,” she said to Nicanor, “and that maybe I should talk with a few of them.”

“You write?”

Beth shied from the question. Yes, she did write, although no one else knew the flows and interstices of what she put in her diaries. There was a difference between what she wrote…Scrawls, she thought…and what you could find in a good novel. But Beth was purposeful and felt that her scrawls were actually becoming well-written. She had begun wondering how she could differentiate between one character and another, how each would talk, how each would dress, appear, walk, how to make the description of an object seem actually to reflect a character’s thought….

“I do,” she said.

Nicanor was in his thirties. He was the only man in the café wearing a coat and tie, and his were so well-chosen that he seemed some sort of spy contemplating all the other customers, none of whom except for Beth herself appeared to care for how they looked. They all appeared to place considerable importance on being slovenly. Maybe they thought that would help romanticize their writing. A hard life, on the road, Jack Kerouac and all that…hard-bitten romance, love attempted, poor grammar, rough blather, hurried sex…blah…blah…. She had also noticed how many beat-up paperbacks rested on the tables next to half-consumed cappuccinos. Beth, who had conscientiously dressed down in order to fit in, still felt she presented a bit too much luxury for the rest of the crowd at The Trieste, except for this Nicanor. And she had left the hardcover she was reading just now, The Color Purple, recently bought, brand-new and shining, at home. She preferred such hardcovers because of their quality looks and because you could use the cover’s extension flap as a placeholder inside. Their expense was therefore justified.

“And you’re published?” he said.

“I’m not.”

He sat back and gathered his hands on the table between them.

“Are you in publishing?” Beth wondered if Nicanor knew about the loneliness of sitting at a table over a typewriter and spilling out word after word? The grumbling that accompanies the certainty that the paragraph you’ve just written should be shorter, could be more concise, ought to be better planned, should be longer, really needed to be more to the point, less…whatever…. Did he—

“I’m not,” he said. “And I don’t write.”

His looks offered fine solemnity, for Beth even beauty, which she for a moment assumed had something to do with his being Basque. She knew, though, that this could not be the truth, believing that Basques had to put up with all the possibilities for plainness from which every people suffers, even as they may now and then be singled out one-by-one for looks as fine as Nicanor’s. It all depends on the individual gifts one has received in the hurried explosion between a man and a woman that accounts for so much, carried in such small splotches.

“I was a priest,” he said.

Jolted, Beth swallowed. Right away, she imagined Nicanor in his vestments offering Communion. She looked into his eyes.

“Catholic?”

“Jesuit.”

“And why…. Why—”

Nicanor sat back, one of his hands still resting half-opened next to the saucer and cup. The hand had a kind of renaissance sculpted look, although it was nowhere near the white of the marble that Michaelangelo would have used. Nicanor’s hand engendered in Beth a wish to be touched. She did hold herself back, realizing that if he had once been a priest, he might still be hesitant to fully realize a sensuous notion, being maybe still a little too…sacerdotal. She occasionally wondered if Catholic men become priests in order not to have to caress anything. But the way he contemplated his cappuccino just now, his gaze steadily resting upon it, made Beth wonder if those eyes could ever find in her what they were contemplating in the coffee.

She also wondered how loving sensuous touch could possibly be considered a sin.

“I left the priesthood because I realized the mistake I had made.”

“What mistake?”

Nicanor sat back, worrying an answer. His lips lowered at each end, his eyes surveying the tabletop. “I wanted to live.”

“Live!”

“Because being a priest necessarily means that you embrace avoidance.” The silence between them for the moment mingled with the crowd noise. “You avoid the heart.” He took in a breath. “You avoid yourself.”

Beth had never once contemplated such a thing. For her, a life lived must be wondered over. Pain, enjoyment, fun, celebration, worry, loss…. She could not imagine attempting to avoid whatever emotion she was experiencing, no matter what it was…or they were, understanding how mixed her emotions could be at any moment. Beth was capable of worry, contemplation and fantasy alike and every feeling that leads to them…usually more than one at the same time. The sense of them was direct, each of them, and when a few or more were combined, the confusion she suffered nonetheless led her to some kind of actual awareness. Sadness, consideration for someone else, disappointment, and the wish for elation with that someone, the wish for whatever…all could come in the same moment, along with bright dismay. She knew all this and now and then suffered from it, although seldom with the wish to brush any of it away.

“What were you avoiding?” she said.

Nicanor sat back, removing his hand from the table.

“In yourself.”

He looked the hand over, back and front. “You’re imprisoned in those vestments, Beth. You’re restricted….”

“By your clothes?” Having interrupted, Beth looked away. “Not your feelings?” The café’s noise, the conversation everywhere and the coming and going of customers, the rattling of cups and saucers, the voices, the very light coming through the window from Grant Avenue, none seemed to have heard that word “imprisoned.” “Imprisoned for what crime?”

“Crimes! No.” Nicanor swallowed. “Misplaced trust.”

Beth wondered how it was that she had become engaged in this conversation so quickly. Nicanor Amestoy, defrocked by himself. The trouble for her was that she was attracted to him yet felt from this one admission that doubt may be the one actual factor in his personality that could make a relationship with him ungovernable…although Beth had no interest in governing anyone with whom she might carry on an affair. Governing meant restriction, while an affair…an affair should be liberation. But Beth was no fool. She had had a few trysts from which the particular fellow’s suffocation of her wishes had driven her away. Indeed, she contemplated finishing her cappuccino just now and leaving.

“But Beth, it seems too early in any conversation that we may have to shut things off so…” Nicanor gestured out to the room. “…so prematurely.”

“To what?”

“Well….” Nicanor smiled. The look was lovely. “A date, maybe?”

—

They went to a Grateful Dead concert in Golden Gate Park. Again, Beth and Nicanor were the best-dressed couple in the large crowd, although Nicanor had decided not to wear a tie. Everyone else among the many thousands, the men especially, was dressed poorly. There was much angry talk about President Ronald Reagan. The crowd’s sloppiness nonetheless insisted upon the political purity of their disgust. The women were just as messy, although far more colorfully so than the men. Their ankle-length dresses, very long hair, and ersatz-hippy jewelry at least gave them an air of some attention to personal taste. But the taste, for Beth, was only so-so. She wondered if any of these girls knew how to use an iron. The finesse of her clothing was far better thought out than that of most of the other women. She got grumpy stares from many of them as she and Nicanor walked through the crowd. Some of the stares were nonetheless even admiring.

The weather was grey and cold, the music choppy, too long, and way repetitive. Beth wondered how just four men could pour out so much tooth-loosening noise. The crowd seemed to love it, at least those in the crowd who were paying attention. Beth found it boring as, she soon learned to her delight, did Nicanor. After a half-hour or so on the same song, he touched Beth’s elbow. “The Trieste?”

“Please!”

They made their way through the crowd, past all the blankets, beards, jewelry, and opinions, and drove to the café, which was as crowded as it had been the day Beth and Nicanor had met, with many of the same customers.

They stood in line at the counter holding hands, awaiting their coffees.

Beth liked him. Nicanor’s European-ness was a plus. He seemed to have read as well as had Beth, which for her was a plus. And as they talked about books, they found they also enjoyed movies…she French ones (the gorgeous Jean-Paul Belmondo), he American (the quick-witted Tom Cruise). Even more, they drove one day to the reaches of Point Reyes, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, where they strolled along a miles-long Pacific coast beach that was empty of other people. This too was a grey day. But the bleak silence of the sky was so different from that of the sea, so calm by comparison to the sea’s wild stirrings, that Beth wished to sit for several minutes, just to feel the differences between the heavens and the waters. Nicanor seemed to understand why this was important to her. Looking out to sea, he did not attempt conversation. For Beth, the sea’s grey and black were as colorful, maybe more so, than its colors would be even on a day of full sun. In its fury there was the movement of soulful contemplation. Out here, the Pacific was anything but pacific, it’s wild back and forth, its collisions and white-capped interruptions of itself so constant and seemingly so angry that Beth wished only to look out upon it in silence as though, were she to try to address the ocean, it would reply dangerously. Nicanor understood the joy Beth was getting from it. The constant rumbling violence was real. He saw that she thought it beautiful.

At one point while walking hand in hand back up the beach, he asked her if he could kiss her, and Beth said yes.

But why had Nicanor wanted to be a priest? Raised Episcopalian, Beth thought the rigors of the Catholic Church silly, about the details of which she actually knew very little. Her prejudice came from the glib self-acceptance of many of the Catholics she knew personally, when she would ask them about their faith. The certainty among so many of them…that theirs was the true church because it had been founded by Christ himself. This was true enough. But Jesus was now long gone, risen up, the Catholics would assure you, in His silly “Ascension” and replaced on this planet by the many popes. Some of them, Beth had learned in her European history classes at Berkeley, had lacked anything like principle. The un-rattled ease of respectful Catholics with the rigors of their faith fascinated her, and she wondered if Catholics weren’t even a little proud of the punishments they got. There wasn’t much self-doubt among them when it came to their being condemned for their sins. Episcopalians were different because they did not feel themselves de rigueur delivered to perdition just for relishing, for example, the wish to play with themselves. Episcopalianism was a far looser system, and its followers could be exonerated from their punishments more easily than could the Catholics. Beth couldn’t speak for the Anglican version of the faith, which she supposed might be more rigorous, being stoutly English. Maybe more condemning of its followers and their foolhardy sins. But Catholics universally seemed to feel they should suffer the punishments meted out to them by their priests. Proud of those punishments and the drama of them. The drama of being forgiven, too, of course. She wondered if the priests understood this and whether some of them therefore enjoyed inflicting upon the faithful the rigors they so solemnly imposed.

Beth was shy about asking such things of Nicanor, even as she felt it important to know. If they were to continue a relationship, she had to understand his prior priestliness. More important, she had to understand whether that state of things had now really been consigned to the past. If not, she worried about how she was to feel about him. She only nodded at her own Episcopalianism, believing the laissez-faire attitudes of that faith’s clerics actually more genuine than some Catholic priest’s dull pulpit-announced edicts.

She was glad she wasn’t a Catholic.

—

She was walking in The Presidio a few days later when she saw something shocking.

The Presidio itself was as usual fine and quiet, its deep, complicated greenery so peaceful that, as always, Beth wondered how it ever could have been a military post…and for two civilizations. Founded by the Spanish in, of all years, 1776, it had served that monarchy’s wish to be in command of the San Francisco Bay which, for Beth, was a kind of small ocean in its own right. No wonder the Spanish had wanted it. From this bay you could control the entirety of the west coast of both Americas, if you had enough sailing crafts and armies. Sadly for the Spaniards, their presence was not well enough backed up, and the generalísimos and almirantes not very crafty, so that in the end, in 1848, what had once been northern Mexico…half of all Mexico… had become California, Texas, Arizona and the others. Beth supposed that Zachary Taylor must have been pleased by the immensity of what he had inherited when he had won the U.S. presidential election some months later that year. The Spaniards less so, who could do little about it, having lost the 1846 War to those malditos gringos.

This was one of the San Francisco days that most pleased Beth. It was by no means warm…normal for the city. But the sun was out and there were few clouds. Those there were hovered over the entrance to the bay like curled cotton, a sort of wispy headpiece for the Golden Gate Bridge. Beth pulled the bulky sweater she was wearing close, two sizes too large for her on purpose, with broad fiery red and vernal green horizontal stripes, and hid her hands inside its sleeves. Having been born in San Francisco and grown up there, she was accustomed to the allure of the weather’s appearing summer-like but in fact having a winterish chill. This is usual for San Francisco, and she approached The Presidio’s parade ground and flagpole, heading for the sidewalk that would take her out to the bridge itself. From the Lombard Gate entrance, that sidewalk passed numbers of elderly wooden military buildings, many of them empty and actually decrepit, and occasional forest. She left the sidewalk so that she could walk on one of the trails that took the hiker through various stands of trees. The peace offered by them, the way they stood a kind of solemn guard over the occasional stroller making his or her way along, caused Beth to relish their colors…the vernal herbage between the trees, the blood-brown thick trunks, the redwoods’ and pines’ needles so precise yet so plentiful, the occasional stand of crowded eucalyptus trees, bushes, flowers…. She had known all these since she had been a little girl.

As she approached the bus stop halfway to the bridge, the few empty one-story military buildings nearby in casual tan plainness and needing fresh coats of paint and, here and there, a replacement window were dismissive of her arrival. The bus stop pole and its rust-detailed metal sign were tawdry, leaning a bit to her left. She leaned against it and it shifted, causing Beth to have to right herself. She knew the bus was not due for ten minutes and walked to the side of one of the buildings, to get a look at the bridge.

This was a favorite view in San Francisco for Beth. The Presidio, being for the most part several feet above sea level, gives moments that are expansive of much of the bay. For Beth, the urban precision to the south, filled with every kind of downtown building, was in pleasing conflict with the vernal spectacle of Marin County across the Golden Gate to the north, which was almost empty of any kind of man-made structure. She thought the bridge an interlocutor between two civilized arguments. The city, which Beth preferred, was like the novels she loved reading, noisy interpreters of fractious lives, while Marin County rested quietly in its own sleepy, well-defined peacefulness…in the straits of lovely boredom. Boring to Beth at least, although she did enjoy walking on the trails of Mount Tamalpais, Marin County’s most singular object. There had once been the Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway, a time during which she wished she had been alive so that she could have ridden on it to the top of the mountain. But it had gone out of business many years ago, the tracks to be dug up and taken away, the rail bed to become a wide walkers’ trail, on which she periodically would hike to the top.

There was more at the back of the military building than just the view of the bridge. A woman sat on a fallen, trimmed tree trunk, her back to the bridge view, in tears. She was looking up, quietly berating the man standing before her, his back to Beth, her hands held out in gleaming supplication. The gleam came, Beth knew, from the tears that had been squashed by those hands. She was dressed quietly…a long wool skirt, a white blouse and leather coat, a flowered scarf hanging long from around her neck. Her tears still coursed. She was not beautiful in any vivid way. But there was in her long brown hair and its cared-for brilliance, and especially in the way her finely aligned, reddened eyes expressed such a pleading wish, a kind of crushed surprise. Beth guessed the surprise had come about with what the man had just been saying to her. Beth saw the woman’s one word…”Please!”…that from the distance she could not hear. The beauty the woman did have seemed to Beth to come from her dismay.

The man, Nicanor Amestoy, looked up from her to offer a silent, glum look at the bridge. Beth, astonished, turned away herself. But she looked back and saw that Nicanor remained in stolid refusal of the other woman’s wish. Beth had seen such refusal herself from one or two of her boyfriends in the past. It was those boyfriends who were the most reliable examples of what Beth occasionally resented in men. Stunned, clueless indifference made cruel-seeming by emotional confusion.

She retreated from the scene. The bus was arriving.

—

“Who was that woman I saw you with yesterday?”

Nicanor glanced with jolted surprise at Beth.

“In The Presidio,” she said.

He looked to the side. Doubt, a darkness that Beth had not yet ever seen in him, clouded his glance at the floor.

“Who is she?”

Nicanor stepped toward Beth’s living room windows. She expected his reply would be notable for avoidance.

“Nicanor?”

“A former girlfriend.”

“Former!” Beth felt her own scattered breathing. “How former?” She now expected a mottled explanation from him, filled with half-truths. The usual from someone caught in the act. She knew there are duplicitous women who also act in such a way, keeping secrets from their boyfriend or husband, some of them to be shamed for it. But theirs was less than what the practice among men is so well known for. She disliked having to admit these sorts of actions into her opinions of men, some of whom she had clearly liked. And there were those she had known who were innocent of such behavior. But this from Nicanor came as an added surprise because of…well, his former profession. She supposed that priests now and then do lie. Even ex-priests. What person doesn’t? But Nicanor’s truthfulness (something she realized had not really been tested so early in this relationship) had seemed genuine, as had his care for Beth’s silences and her obvious care for the sea, something he shared with her.

“Before you and I met…” Nicanor said now. Beth was surprised that he didn’t react as one caught in a subterfuge. “…she and I were lovers.”

“I sensed that.” Beth’s attempt at irony seemed right away phony to her. But she was hurt. “When?”

“A few years ago.”

“When you were a priest.”

A silence. Nicanor’s breathing was calm. He seemed hardly embarrassed.

“And not now,” Beth said.

Nicanor’s eyes lost none of their finesse as he remained silent. She felt he was considering his response and was surprised that there seemed to be no search for an excuse, for a lie, for—

“Well, yes. Now.”

“Nicanor….” Beth’s own shoulders now lowered as she gathered her hands together. “You’re having an affair with her?”

“I was.”

“But…now?”

“Yes. Also. Now.”

“What’s her name?”

Nicanor put a hand to the back of his neck, looking toward one of the windows. “Now? Or before?”

The questions were confusing. Had she been married before? Had there been an affair between her and Nicanor that had brought an end to her marriage? With Nicanor the priest?

“Both names,” Beth offered. “Then and now.”

Nicanor swallowed. He seemed caught while yet calmly considering the truth of what he was about to say. “Sister Mary Teresa.” He sighed, disappointed. “And now Julia Merriman.” He shook his head. “Which she had been before she…she….”

A nun! Beth imagined the two of them as religious figures in some medieval etching, although in hurried undress, their gear tossed to the floor, the nun’s habit like a black, smothering blanket hanging from the end of the bed with the added punctuation of the coif and, What’s it called?, the wimple…the priest’s many-layered vestments tossed aside with self-importance, punctuated on the floor by its parenthesis-like clerical collar. Brazen nakedness emerged when the underwear fell. The difference between being dressed and undressed, were the two of them not in such a hurry, would have been notable for sinful shame. But, Beth supposed, that kind of worry would not be first thing in their wishes. Rather…Beth swallowed, hurt as she now really was…they would be hurrying to rut.

“She was a nun!” Beth said.

“Yes. A B.V.M.”

“What’s that?”

Nicanor raised his right hand to the side of his head, scratching at it. “The order of The Sisters of Charity of The Blessed Virgin Mary.”

“Virgins!”

Nicanor actually smiled with this. It was a moment Beth recognized, having seen it in one or two other men who, acknowledging they had been caught lying, hoped for some kind of contrition and, possibly, forgiveness. In each of those cases, Beth had quickly rid herself of the guy. So just now, Beth grimaced when she saw Nicanor’s version of it.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry, Beth.”

She saw remorse in him but could not be sure it was real. The action she had witnessed in The Presidio was clear, his involvement in it without question. Sister Mary Teresa’s anguish had been vivid and unquestionable. Sister Mary Teresa, Beth thought with dismissive grumbling even as…suddenly… she realized it was the ex-nun with whom she actually sympathized. She was caught clearly in love with Father Nicanor in ways, Beth had seen, far deeper than Beth’s feelings for him. Beth did not love Father Nicanor. She was (or had been, she now thought) headed that way. But only headed there.

“Do you love her?”

Nicanor seemed stunned by the question.

“I guess I mean…” Beth wetted her lips. “…it’s clear that she loves you. Or did.”

“Yes.”

“Well…. Which one?”

He turned to the side, his lips confronting each other in a show of troubled confusion. He struggled to answer. “What do you mean, ‘Which one’?”

“Who loves who, Nicanor?”

—

“Hello, Beth. This is Julia Merriman.”

Beth held the phone close to her ear, looking down at the typewriter and the single sheet of paper residing in it with its single new line of her novel’s text. The text was made up of half a sentence.

“Can we talk?” Julia’s voice was straight-forward and calm.

“Of course.” Beth sat upright, compelled to listen. “But I can say that I haven’t expected us to have a conversation.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

Beth recognized self-assuredness in Julia’s voice, so much so that she sensed this would not be a contentious exchange.

Julia remained calm. “I hope we can meet.”

A moment of silence. Beth knew what they would be talking about. The subject of the conversation would be Nicanor Amestoy for sure. But which version of Nicanor? The self-defrocked priest? The nice man in The Trieste? His solitude? The once frocked priest? The duplicitous lover? Beth did not spend a lot of time wondering about this, especially in view of the fact that she herself was not Nicanor’s lover. And especially not now! she thought. She had been thinking about that prospect until the moment in The Presidio. And she had been angered from the very onset of that moment, realizing that she had been enjoying thinking about what sort of lover Nicanor could possibly be. His former priesthood had been less important to Beth than the way he looked at her. His eyes carried thoughtful consideration. He was kind. He read and enjoyed talking about what he was reading, a plus that was not universal among the other men Beth had known. Hardly universal, having led her to wonder whether the education that those others bragged about was education at all. Harvard? “Money-making job-training” was the better term. Yale? Berkeley?

“Pardon me for any rudeness, Julia. But what would we talk about?”

“Each other.”

They met at The Caffe Trieste. Julia was taller than she had seemed when Beth had first seen her, with all her weeping. Much less distressed. Indeed, she appeared friendly, as though the two women were pleasing acquaintances who had not seen each other for a time. She wore a pair of svelte Levis, sashed by a black leather belt, and a blouse that Beth recognized from the upper-Fillmore Street boutique in which she herself had been shopping a few days before. High heels. A color-beset slim wool sweater was folded neatly and hung from Julia’s right arm. Instead of the wretched creature in tears, pleading for herself and her wishes, Julia was now more a friendly acquaintance seeking conversation. She had also done her eyes, so that they were actually sophisticated magical, with none of the blotchiness that had filled them in The Presidio. These eyes made her quite appealing, with sophistication and self-awareness, the very same eyes that had broadcast on that day such undone sorrow.

“You say you want to talk about us,” Beth said.

“Well…we have much in common.” Julia set her purse to the side on the table and laid the sweater next to it. Beth noticed how well she had done her nails. Her fingers themselves were long and delicate.

“We do?”

“I’m a fan of the Caffe Trieste, too,” Julia said.

As before, when Beth had walked into The Trieste, she had gathered the attention of many of the other patrons. She had realized on that previous occasion that if she wanted to be like the writers here she would have to dress more sloppily than she would ever wish to, with more rugged disapproval of presidential politics than she actually felt. She had thought about Ronald Reagan, but as little as possible, picturing him as something of a handsome mafioso even though he’d make a bad Italian. On this occasion she was sitting at an empty table along the Grant Avenue window, waiting for Julia, who herself, upon entering the café, gathered the same sort of attention Beth had gotten when she had walked in. The intense sadness that had defined Julia when Beth had first seen her in The Presidio was gone.

“You know about me, I think,” Julia said, once she sat down.

“I do. At least, the basics.”

Julia smiled. “And what are those?”

“That you were a B.V.M.”

Surprised, Julia nodded. “You know the order?”

“I don’t. I’m a Protestant, Julia.”

Julia nodded, smiling.

“Nicanor told me…the last time I spoke with him.”

A refreshed sigh came from Julia. “That was the last time?”

“It was. And I still don’t understand how a nun can have a lecherous affair with a priest.”

Now Julia frowned, and Beth quickly sensed that this whole thing was not Julia’s fault and that she should be treated with at least some kindness. After all, she had been led astray in the same way Beth was being led astray…until recently.

“Excuse me, Julia. That wasn’t fair, what I just said.”

Julia looked to the side. “It happened, Beth, because I’m a human being.”

Beth sat quietly, imagining the feelings of want and desire that Julia must have had for Nicanor. Beth herself understood such feelings and had often celebrated them herself.

“He didn’t suggest anything that I did not want.” Julia took in a breath. “I know…. There are all sorts of expectations for nuns, how they’re supposed to be so virginal and faithful only to Jesus Christ and all that. Mother Mary herself being the prime example.”

Beth nodded. “That’s right. She was a virgin, wasn’t she, even after her little boy was born?”

“Visited by God the Father.”

“And you believed that?”

Julia smiled once more. “Not really. But tradition required it.”

“Tradition.”

“Yes, and the vows we took.”

Vows to impossibility, Beth thought. Unbelievable certainties. Silliness believed holy. She tried imagining the conflicts in Julia’s mind when she had first felt her damp wish for Nicanor. Father Nicanor standing before her; Sister Mary Teresa seated at a table, her habit like a black curtain shielding her from any notion of fine desire…although just in that startling moment, not shielding her very well. The way he was looking at her, Beth thought. She herself was well aware of such a wish and, when genuine feeling for the fellow engendering it came about, she celebrated it. She felt in her own version of desire that it needn’t arrive hand in hand with love. Beth thought with considerable affection about those few with whom she had celebrated such a moment, although especially if she had been in love with one or the other. Love? Not always, and when it had been there, it had not always lasted. But she knew that that too could be expected…the end of love, which is as common as its beginnings, Beth had learned. None of this had interfered with her search for it. Beth loved love, finding in it so much a sense of emotional beauty that she could not imagine being without it, even as she herself had most memorably abandoned it on one occasion…memorable because of the deep sadness with which it had left her, she had later sorrowed. She had gotten it wrong about that fellow…lovely Jordan, so young… and still felt the foolishness of having left him. The poor decision had been hers, not Jordan’s, and she had grown to understand how dumb it had been…her decision. A good guy. Difficulties, yes. But good.

She had also gotten rid of one or two who weren’t so good. Quickly.

“How much in love are you with Nicanor?” Beth said.

“Very.”

“But how does—”

“That is, until the other day in The Presidio.” Julia exhaled, looking away for a moment and then examining the nails on her right hand. “He told me you saw us.”

“I did.”

“And you wondered why I was weeping.”

“That’s true, Julia. That word ‘Please’ and the way it came out of you.”

Julia remained silent, seeming barely to breathe. “Have you ever had to speak that word to a lover? I mean, in the way I offered it to Nicanor.”

Beth swallowed. “I’ve been disappointed in love, yes.”

Julia smiled, a slight gesture to the niceties of the conversation.

“It’s part of love itself, maybe, the disappointment,” Beth added.

“Isn’t it!” Despite being a declaration, this response was whispered by Julia as she surveyed her purse. The purse was, like her clothing, stylish. Leather, small, with brass chain extenders and a brass closure in the shape of a rose. It had some sort of Italian product name, engraved on the elongated circular piece of brass attached to its side. The purse, on the table next to Julia’s cappuccino like a precious small animal, appeared to be listening.

“The reason I wanted to talk with you, Beth, is that we’ve both been…. What is the word? Jilted?”

“We have. Yes.”

“By that same fellow, that nice Nicanor. By those whispers of his. By all his kindnesses.”

“Yes.”

Julia swallowed, as though considering the difficulty of what she wished to say. “His kind deceptions.” She tightened her lips, an expression that accompanied the sudden appearance of an unwanted truth. “His sweet lies.”

Beth nodded. “When he goes to Confession, does he go to himself?” She glimmered a moment, amused by her remark.

Julia suddenly broke down. She brought closed fingers to her eyes, weeping.

Beth touched her arm. “I…. Julia, I—”

Julia opened her purse and brought out a handkerchief. Of white cotton, it was neatly folded and, after a moment, blotched with tears, wrinkled and damp.

“Julia.”

“I love him, Beth.”

Beth saw that this was the truth. She had seen it the other day in The Presidio when Julia had also been in tears. Beth knew the feeling. She had shed them once or twice herself, so angry with having been jilted, yet so unable to demonstrate that anger with anything but embarrassing lamentations.

Men! Fools! Beth knew that already. Although not all of them. Not all of them.

“What are you going to do?” She looked into Julia’s questioning, grief-beset eyes. “About Nicanor.”

“Beth, I—”

“Why is it you love him so much?”

Julia leaned forward over the table, bringing the kerchief once more to her eyes. Beth noticed that a few of the people at other tables were observing the straits in which Julia was floundering.

“I forsook the vows I took, to be with him.”

“Vows.”

“Poverty. Obedience.” Julia looked to the side, embarrassed. “Chastity.”

Beth grumbled. As goals go, she thought, poverty is silly. Obedience is self-deception. Chastity? Ridiculous.

“I expect that’s difficult for you to understand.”

“Utterly,” Beth said.

“Nonetheless, for me, those vows were the very opposite of ruin.”

Beth remained quiet. That word…”ruin”…jolted her with surprise. This woman…this Julia…how could she have been beset by ruin? Ruin! She exhaled. “Even now? The way you’re dressed? This sophistication of yours?”

“Oh, Beth. It’s window-dressing.” Julia sipped from her coffee. Her calm appeared so sophisticated that Beth could just now not even conceive of how Julia must have looked in her B.V.M. shroud. The imprisonment of women. Silence in the service of blind servitude.

“Would you wish to go back to the B.V.M.s?”

Julia replaced the cup on its saucer and sat back, taking up the purse and examining it. She put it back on the tabletop, clearly considering an answer to Beth’s questions. “It was a phase, the B.V.M.s…although a longish one.”

Beth reached to the purse. “And this?”

Julia sat back, puzzlement clear in her eyes.

“I mean, the way you are now.” Beth caressed the purse. “Another phase?”

Julia’s lips tightened. She took in a breath that seemed to signal plain dismissal of Beth’s question. “Let’s try to get through this, Beth. Please don’t derail me. I’m a real person. I’ve had a complicated life, as maybe you haven’t. Different from yours, to be sure. But…but….” She leaned over the table and glared into Beth’s eyes. “I’m a serious person and know where I stand.”

“About the B.V.M.s?”

“Yes. And about being a woman disappointed in love.”

—

They confronted Nicanor in The Presidio. For this occasion, Beth had sent him a note explaining that she had questions for him, and would he meet her at the foot of the flagpole on the parade ground? It was a Sunday, so there was no American flag. The pole was like a perfect toothpick. The grass was green. The sky was grey.

Julia waited in Beth’s car, a deception, since Nicanor was not to know that both women wished to speak with him, albeit together. Once Nicanor had arrived and given Beth an affectionate hug…once they had started a conversation…once Nicanor had been deceived, Julia emerged from Beth’s car and approached them. This time, Nicanor’s back was turned toward Julia, and Beth, once noting her arrival behind the Basque, looked at him and shrugged. “Nicanor, please….”

He appeared stuck. Looking into her eyes while searching his words, he was about to speak when Beth looked beyond him. “Oh! Hello, Julia!”

Turning about, Nicanor realized what was happening. Glancing again at Beth, he took in a breath. He was clearly caught. Julia nodded and circled past Nicanor to join Beth.

“What is this?” His eyes seemed to narrow. His lips tightened…two pale straps. Suddenly the urbane, well-spoken Nicanor Amestoy was, so to speak, surrounded by the results of his kindly expressed, sweet-spoken, intelligent offerings to the two women before him.

There was a moment in which simple silence took over the conversation. Beth and Julia remained in wordless disdain…disdain colored by humor, the sort that can accompany a successful springing of a well-planned trap. Knowing that Julia would be finely dressed for the occasion, Beth had made sure that she herself was arrayed in well thought-out informal finesse, equal to her co-conspirator’s fashion consciousness. This was the first time in her life that Beth had ever had to compete with a nun for ascendancy in the matter of how to dress. While Julia had outfitted herself in a silk, summer-seeming flowered dress with a slim gold chain about her neck and what Beth guessed as French high heels, Beth herself had decided on an informal combination of fine-fitting Levis, a white collared silk blouse, and a light wool, white sweater a few sizes too large for her, and equally fashionable spotless white high-top Keds.

Nicanor was dressed as he usually was. Handsome and all that. But it was clear to both women and to Nicanor himself that he had been caught lying to them.

“Yes,” Beth said. “We have met each other.”

Nicanor remained wordless. His silence displayed the wish to be away from this.

Beth gestured toward Julia. “You’ve lied to both of us.”

Nicanor glanced at the flagpole.

“That’s so, isn’t it?” Beth turned to Julia for support and suspected that Julia was still suffering from betrayal. It strengthened Beth’s intentions.

“I….” Nicanor glanced at both women and then looked away, across the parade ground. “I….”

“Oh, Beth.” Julia laid a hand on Beth’s wrist. She wavered in clear doubt. Beth sensed that suddenly, now, Julia did not want to confront Nicanor, that she still cared for him. Beth grumbled in silence, way disappointed. She was outnumbered, so immediate a change that she worried she would have to just walk away, leaving the two…the two lovers…in silent connivance with each other. Connivance on Nicanor’s part; foolishness on Julia’s. Beth opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by Julia, who turned to Nicanor. “Beth’s got it right, Nicanor.”

“What?”

“You and your disavowals.”

Nicanor took a second look at the flagpole.

“Of me,” Julia muttered. “And of her.”

Beth, grinning with surprise, enjoyed the pole’s emptiness, the stark simplicity of it. The pole was just a stick, signifying nothing, ignorant of Nicanor’s plight.

“You and your priestly lies,” Julia offered.

Copyright ©2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “digression” as, “in discourse or writing, a departure or deviation from the subject.”

Fair enough. Clear as day.

My favorite digression in all literature is the entirety, from first word to last, of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel El amor en los tiempos del cólera…Love in The Time of Cholera. (If you don’t have Spanish, Edith Grossman’s translation to English of this book is one of the best from one language to another I’ve ever read. It is lyrical, kind-hearted, accurate, literate, humorous, and imbued with the many pleasureful oddities of García Márquez’s unique Spanish-language style.)

In this novel, Florentino Ariza is introduced as an enclosed, shy boy attempting manhood in a small late-nineteenth century city in Colombia. He is in love with a local beauty, Fermina Daza. The novel begins as a boy-meets-girl story, progresses through the boy-loses-girl phase, and ends with the boy-wins-girl denouement.

The simplest story ever.

But this series of events takes fifty years, nine months, and four days to unfold and arrive at its successful end. Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza are by the last pages, of course, elderly. But their love is consummated…finally. During the half century of Florentino’s pursuit of Fermina (during which time he has six hundred and twenty-two affairs with other women) the reader learns about every kind of historical, political, social, and religious event in the Colombia through which the great Magdalena River flows. Cholera is always a factor in the background, and García Márquez uses the disease as a metaphor for love itself…the heat, the heart’s affliction, the very choleric intensity of love’s involvements.

Florentino bides his time for that half-century. After the failure of his youthful efforts at romancing her, Fermina marries a local doctor, Juvenal Urbino, who is one of the most celebrated citizens of their city, an urbane, Europeanized sophisticate. Their marriage is a rich one, with many problems. In the meantime, Florentino begins work as a telegraph operator and is eventually employed by a local riverboat company (freight and passengers, up and down the Magdalena.) In time, he becomes its president, all the while pursuing the many very remarkable women he encounters during the half-century of his bachelorhood.

It is the period of time between the breakdown of Florentino and Fermina’s dalliance as youths and the death of Juvenal Urbino a half century later that the great majority of the digression I mention here takes place. The reader waits, and waits some more, only to wait even more, through hundreds of pages, as Florentino sometimes wanders, sometimes surges through his varied fascinating affairs personal and public. Fermina’s marriage is described in equally specific, breathtaking detail: her fervid happiness and unhappy disappointments, her mistaken rage-filled jealousies, the arrival of her children and their ascension to adulthood, her involvement in the church and her social standing as the important Doctor Urbino’s wife.

Here and there, infrequently, Florentino and Fermina encounter one another by chance. Little happens on those occasions. Little can happen. But Florentino’s fervor for Fermina only increases as the years pass.

The great Magdalena River, which runs south to north through the entirety of Colombia, figures importantly twice in this narrative. Although his entire professional life revolves around the riverboat company, Florentino Ariza makes only two trips up the Magdalena and back (one on his own as a younger man, the second with Fermina Daza, both now geriatrics.)

Both voyages are beyond memorable.

García Márquez uses the changing descriptions of the Magdalena during these two trips as rich backdrop to the emotions, triumphs, and disappointments through which Florentino Ariza passes during his entire life. In the first trip, the river is a life-filled treasure of forested, flood-filled flora and fauna in which a younger Florentino is overwhelmed time and again by lustful carnal pleasure. In the second voyage, decades later, the river has become a half-hearted sorry flow, de-forested and ruined. But it is on a riverboat going up this magnificently sad failure that Florentino receives, finally, the considerable deep love of which Fermina Daza is capable. The detailed sensuous transition in descriptions of the river is one of the novels many strengths.

Novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote this: “There is nothing I have read quite like [the] astonishing final chapter (on the Magdalena), symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too….This novel is revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality—youthful idiocy, to some—may yet be honored much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable…. Love in the Time of Cholera [is a] shining and heartbreaking novel.”

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that, “Instead of using myths and dreams to illuminate the imaginative life of a people as he’s done so often in the past, Mr. García Márquez has revealed how the extraordinary is contained in the ordinary…. The result is a rich, commodious novel, a novel whose narrative power is matched only by its generosity of vision.”

Both these reviews, written when the book was published in 1985, are understatements. Love in the Time of Cholera may not be everybody’s cup of tea. The digression does go on for more than three hundred pages. You may be inclined to tell García Márquez to get on with it. But, while the pursuit of each other by the two characters is important and masterfully done, the digression itself is the novel, epitomized by its very last word, which is “forever.”

This is my favorite Latin American novel.

Copyright ©2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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“Excuse me,” the man said. He stood across from me in an elevator of the building in which I was working, at 8th and 34th in Manhattan. “I think you are not American.”

His accent was Hispanic.

“How so?”

A large smile appeared. “For one, you say things like ‘Good morning’ and ‘How are you?’” I had seen him many times on the elevator in the few months since I had moved into my office, but we had not spoken.

“Aren’t you talking more about someone who isn’t from New York?” I said.

“Could be, and I am from Cuba.”

“Yes, and you say ‘Good morning’ now and then. I’ve heard it.”

“Occasionally, even though I’ve lived in New York almost all my life.”

“Well, you’re right,” I said. “I’m from California.”

“Ah, that explains it.” The man’s grin exposed many perfectly aligned teeth.

“Explains what?”

“Your seeming so foreign.”

I lived in Manhattan for two and a half years during the late 1990s, and felt—the whole time—that I was little more than a tourist. I was aware of John Updike’s remark that “the true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” Now that I was living in New York, I understood how accurate his observation was. There is no town in the world like this one. Sure, San Francisco has its rattling cable cars and Golden Gate. Paris its Louvre and that famous revolution. London its now-sapped British empirical glory. Dublin its Irish. Istanbul the Straits of Bosporus.

But hey! None of those is New York.

I came back to San Francisco and sat on my experiences of New York for 10 years, thinking that surely I’d be kidding myself if I attempted to write anything about the place. To do so, I thought I would have to have lived there all my life. I worried that the city is too enormous and too varied to be understood by anyone, without his having walked its streets since birth. But then I learned that almost half of New York’s population was born not only somewhere else, but in a language other than English. Hundreds of places somewhere else. I figured, if they can live here and not be kidding, so could I… and moreover, I had the ability to describe the experience.

Almost all the stories I’ve written about New York feature characters who are from elsewhere, almost all of them speaking English as a second language. But as was the case when I lived in Manhattan, these people in my stories are citizens of New York City in essential ways, the fact of their exotic birthplace being one of the most important. The languages alone in New York City (perhaps every language in the world is spoken in those few square miles by somebody) exemplify its ethnic and cultural madness…a very good thing, in my view. Those of our citizens who decry ethnic diversity, and who grasp desperately at the idea that the United States is an English-speaking, Christian nation whose white people are its political and cultural arbiters, clearly have not enjoyed a couple days in Manhattan. Of course, with such ideas as theirs, those few days might be terrifying for them. But for those who realize that the United States is, as touted, a nation of immigrants from every continent, New York is the city where you can find the resultant burst of extraordinary world fruition.

Two books helped me immensely, although neither had much to do with flights of fictional fantasy in contemporary New York. Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City contains everything you ever wanted to know about Manhattan as it was on September 12, 1609, the day that Henry Hudson dropped anchor off the island. The geological history of the island, how it once lay on the ocean floor, then was part of a vast mountain range, finally the sea-level vestige of that mountain range, and many other iterations along the way, are all included in this book. As well, the book tells how the verdant natural settings of the island have been changed by the influx of human beings since that day in 1609.

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace is THE history of what those humans did in New York up to the end of the 19th century. Overall, it is my favorite book of history ever, and I had the pleasure of reading it while I was living in New York. That allowed me to go to places and surround myself in my imagination with occurrences that are so vividly portrayed in Gotham.

And Mike Wallace’s own Gotham At War is a fine follow-up to that book.

All three of these volumes are fueled by the juggernauts of geology and history that made New York what it is today. For my fictional purposes, each presented the fluid, immense noise and excitement of New York, whether it be an island propelled by a tectonic plate into the east coast of what would become the American continent, or an explosively imagined settlement where much of the history of the American continent would be determined, written…and written about.

For a writer of fiction, one of the beauties of living in San Francisco, as I now do, is that San Francisco is a small, sophisticated city holding—barring the next earthquake—to the edge of the west coast. It has fine music, great opera, a ton of writers, wonderful art and terrific food. In my case, because of its relative quiet, it also provides a place of one’s own in which to think calmly about New York.

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Copyright ©2017 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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From my collection titled New York.

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Before dawn, the American Dan was awakened by the voice of the Malay Hajji Mahmet bin Saleh, the crier at the mosque next door to his house. At first, Mahmet’s morning recitations had annoyed him, coming as they did so early every day. But Dan, an engineer working for the new Malaysia government in Sarawak, had grown used to them and, after living in the village of Saratok for a year, he actually enjoyed them. In Arabic, sung in a high nasal drone, the calls to prayer were made even more meaningful by Mahmet’s having made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But Dan could not understand a word. They represented only sound and verve to him. But what sound! They seemed to come from the forest beyond the village, as the drone of the cicadas did, like the monsoon rains. Mahmet’s voice was warm and delirious. It floated through the liquid forest. Each phrase was a clipped, upward bleat, that gave way immediately to another lush passage decorated with the sounds of laughter and argument coming from the kampong, with the putter of boat engines starting the trip downriver, with the lyrical Malay music—light voices, gongs, and violins—coming from the radios everywhere.

Dan’s own short-wave radio carried American news about John Kennedy and his now two-year-old presidency.

And he brings light to the village, Dan mused as he watched the sun rise over the river. Initially he saw the black-gray silhouettes of the palms, which appeared frozen in the morning darkness. Then gloomy sprays of green against the brightening sky. The gray gave way to the sunlight finally, then to the glare. Mahmet was able to bring it about, Dan liked to think, with the simple urging of his voice.

Dan’s house was a wooden frame building on stilts, which protected it from the river’s daily high tide. He rented it from the mosque, so that Mahmet was also his landlord. The Malays were honored to have Dan living in their kampong. Dignitaries such as he were normally put up in the government guest house or at the district officer’s large home overlooking the river from the hill at the end of the bazaar. But it was the political importance of the Malays that had made Dan decide to stay in their village. They did not own nearly as much land as the Chinese or even the Ibans, the local tribesmen. But the Malays—a passive, friendly people—had ingratiated themselves to their British rulers over the years with their trustworthy, efficient lassitude. Now, the governing of the country was theirs, a gift to them from the recently departed colonialists.

Dan liked the Malays a great deal. Mahmet often dropped by Dan’s house with gifts of sweet cake or flowers, and he never asked for the rent. Noting Mahmet’s shyness as a businessman, Dan always made a point of paying on time.

Dan got up and dressed, then prepared a cup of coffee and two slices of toast and jam. Afterwards, he walked the path through the Malay village toward the Chinese bazaar. He approached his office, which was on the second floor of a cement-block government building. A single palm tree twenty yards from the building cast its shadow on the blistered ground. Otherwise, there was no respite from the sun anywhere near the building. When Dan arrived in his office, he turned on the ceiling fan immediately. It would continue turning all day at full force. He had placed his desk directly beneath it, and the small piles of paper, neatly arranged, were each held down with a large stone.

At nine-thirty, Dan heard Jim Eustace’s footsteps on the stairs, and after a moment the missionary stepped into Dan’s office. “Not too warm for you, I hope, Dan.” He sat down across Dan’s desk. His forehead gleamed like a wet plate. His shirt appeared to have been dipped in water, especially around his neck where sweat ran down in small streams. Dan, with whom he had tea every morning, placed a tray before Eustace, a pot, two cups and saucers, a tin of sugar cubes, and a can of evaporated milk. Eustace himself brought the leaf tea, a tin of the Earl Grey he received in the mail from England every few months.

“Makes you perspire, you know,” he said. “Good for you, that.”

Dan, who always reacted to the tea with an unstaunched flow of sweat himself, could not understand the virtue of so much secretion. Eustace removed the tin from his shoulder bag and spooned out enough for a full pot. Pouring the water into the pot, he sat back to watch the slip of steam rising from the white spout. “It’s God’s will.”

“What is?” Dan sat down to his own cup and pushed a packet of salt-crackers toward Eustace.

“Sweat. It makes the body sing. Music of the spheres, you see. You hear it all the time out here.”

“If you say so, Jim.” Dan glanced out the window at the hills across the river. They were low and green, one after another. Far from graceful, the jungle had a throwaway quality, something slovenly and dull.

“You do!” Eustace laughed. “Listen for it, Dan. The forest here, for example, is in a state of grace. Everything can be explained by it.” He was a round man with white hair that shot from the sides of his head like wires. Bald on top and sweating, his head reminded Dan of fine porcelain. He was sixty-seven years old and had lived in Sarawak half his life, with the exception of the years during the war when he had been an Anglican chaplain with the British army in Malaya and North Africa. Eustace spoke all the local languages, as well as Cantonese and Mandarin, fluently. He was quite short and ragged looking. His body had the shape of a lumpy bowling pin, ill-carved, hand-hewn.

“The news, Dan, is that…” Eustace settled back in his chair with the cup and saucer resting on his lap. “I’ve decided to pack it in.” He lifted the cup to his nose, smelled it, then lay it back on the saucer. He took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his forehead. “I’ve written the letter to the Mission, and I’m going to post it this afternoon.”

“You mean, retire?”

“That’s it. I hope that doesn’t come as a surprise.”

“No, not really. After all, you’ve been out here for years. You’re getting...”

“Older, yes.”

“I was going to say you’re getting so well known that everyone takes you for a Muslim.”

Eustace chuckled. “Then you don’t deny I’m getting older.”

“No, but it doesn’t matter.”

“And I can still chop down an ironwood tree as well as anybody?”

“Of course, yes, that’s true.”

“Right you are.”

Indeed, Eustace’s hands were like a laborer’s — cut and chipped — because he enjoyed working in the woods with the local tribesmen and the Malays. He was not the sort of man Dan associated with sanctity.

“I’ll be leaving in a month or two, I think.”

“Where to?”

“London. My sister is there. She was married to a clergyman as well, poor man.”

“What, that he was a clergyman?”

“No, that he’s dead.”

“I see.”

“Like so many others.”

Dan sipped his tea. “It’s difficult to imagine so complete a change, though, Jim. The jungle to London. It’s like heaven to hell. Or hell to heaven.” Dan grinned. “Or something. It makes no sense.”

‘Yes, it’s cold there.”

“Will you miss things here?”

At first the question got no response. The airiness of the conversation had not prepared Dan for Eustace’s sudden regretfulness. The missionary set the cup and saucer on the desk and laced his fingers behind his head. He looked out the door into the sunlight.

“Missionary work carries a lot of drudgery with it, Dan. You don’t see much that’s miraculous out here, I’m afraid.” Eustace paused, staring out the door. His eyes were red with the morning heat. “Except for the occasional cup of tea with the occasional American, one’s enjoyment of the work sometimes flags.” Eustace appeared to lose his breath for a moment. He looked into his cup. “Besides, I’m afraid, you see . . . I’m afraid God will take me.”

Dan sat back and grinned. “I’m sure He will.”

“Yes, but I’m afraid He’ll take me too soon, you see. Now.” A small loop of steam caressed Eustace’s face. “Before I’ve done what I want to do.”

In the silence that followed, Dan became embarrassed by his own gleefulness. He had been expecting the sort of patter their conversations usually contained, fueled by Eustace’s intense enjoyment of his Earl Grey. Both men had come to depend on these morning conversations: Eustace to complain breathlessly about the foolishness of being a missionary, Dan to laugh at the Englishman’s comic dismay. He did not believe that Eustace actually could be disappointed with himself. He was a success out here, and Dan envied him. He was known up and down the river. He was loved.

“But Dan, you see, half the people here are Muslims. And there’s little I can do about them. Some of the Chinese are interested, but I worry it’s only for business reasons or something. And that leaves the tribes out in the hills. Wonderful people, hard-working and all that. But they don’t care much for Christ’s teachings. They’ve got….” Eustace frowned. “Their own heaven and earth. Their own sooth-sayers. Their own miracles.” He nodded, a simple movement that seemed filled with deep understanding. “They’re worried more about their rice and their rubber than they are for Our Lord Jesus. And I for one — well, I can hardly blame them. There’s just too damned little of it — the rice and the rubber, that is.”

He placed his chin on the palm of one hand and exhaled. For a moment neither man spoke. Outside, a burst of hurried talk came from across the yard.

“So sometimes I worry.” Eustace looked toward the door. “That the only success I’ve had as a man of God is with myself.”

Dan stood and walked to the door. Beneath the palm tree, Mahmet and several other Malays shouted back and forth at one another. They clung to the minute oval of shade and appeared intimidated by Dan’s office. They looked at it often. They debated. Dan stepped out onto the porch and Mahmet, clearly relieved, hurried toward him. He was a very small man, wearing long black pants and a white shirt. His arms were crooked at the elbows, a habit of carrying himself that made him look older than he really was. His legs and arms were very thin, and he resembled a rickety statue. “There is a white man up in the forest, Tuan, a crazy man.”

Dan leaned on the wooden railing. In the morning sun, it felt like crusted rust, and he pulled away from it.

“In the caves.” Mahmet pointed upriver. “And he won’t come out.” He shielded his eyes. The other Malays had followed him across the yard and now stood in a group behind him. Dan recognized several of his neighbors.

Eustace walked from the office, his cup of tea in his hand. “What is it?”

“Will you help us?” Mahmet nodded toward the Englishman. Like most of the Malays in Saratok, Mahmet recognized Eustace’s religious kindness. Though a Christian, he was an affectionate man, and he could be trusted. They felt he and Dan were alike in that. Mahmet walked toward the stairway and Dan gestured to the others to come up as well.

The Malays ascended the stairs and turned into Dan’s office. The American put a fresh pot of water on his butane burner, and the men sat down on the rattan mats just inside the doorway. Dan took a new packet of Rothman’s cigarettes from his desk, opened it, and placed it with a box of matches before the men. Several took cigarettes from the packet, gave polite thanks, and waited for their tea as Mahmet explained the situation.

“He’s very strange, Tuan. A tall man, but quite thin.” Mahmet made an enormous circle with his hands about his face. Smoke from the newly lit cigarette fluttered into the air. “And he has a beard, very thick. Like a bird’s nest.”

“But what’s he doing up there?” Eustace asked.

Mahmet waited a moment in silence. He seemed at first not to understand the question, and his dark, lined face remained stolid. “He talks. But he makes no sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he doesn’t speak Malay.”

Dan finished preparing the tea and arranged several cups on a tin tray. He placed the tea on the mat before the semicircle of men and poured a cupful for each.

“But that is not the problem, Tuan.” Mahmet took his cup from the tray. “The problem is that he talks continuously. In English, of course. But I’ll wager...” Mahmet placed his right hand on his chest and nodded toward the two white men. “I’ll wager even you will not understand him.” He pressed his lips together and shrugged. “He barely waits for us to ask him a question. He just talks. Points across the valley and talks. Addresses us as though we were studying Allah’s words, as though he were the master and we... “ Mahmet leaned forward and nudged the ash from his cigarette onto the floor. “And we were the pilgrims. He doesn’t understand that we don’t understand him.”

“The man is up there raving!” Eustace said in English.

Dan sipped from his own tea and went to the coat rack to get his shoulder bag. He placed his sunglasses in it, a second packet of cigarettes and a notepad. “Well, we ought to go see.”

“He won’t let us approach the caves, though,” Mahmet said. The others sitting with him grumbled agreement, and Dan sat down with them.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“He has a rifle.” Mahmet lowered his head. “I mean, we think he has a rifle”

‘You’re not sure?”

“No. But we’ve approached the cave, and he stands before it and gestures us away. He pretends he is shooting at us.”

Dan lowered his cup to the floor.

“You see,” Mahmet explained. “He aims at us as though he has a rifle in his hands. And he makes a sound with his mouth, like a shot. But really it is not a rifle.”

“What is it?”

“Air.” Mahmet shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Where is he?” Eustace asked.

Mahmet pointed at the hills upriver. “Fifteen minutes’ walk. In my cave up near Kampong Ulu.”

“Come on then, Dan,” Eustace said in English. “Let’s have a look.”

Mahmet led the way as they walked into the forest. After several minutes they saw yellow-white cliffs pushing up from the tree line far ahead. The cliffs appeared to have collapsed inwardly, into the caves, as though the very weight of the rock had crumpled them. Only one cave was large enough to be entered on foot, and it was normally used by Mahmet and the others to store their rice. Dan strained to see the mysterious white man.

A voice was the first indication of his presence. It was high, complaining, like a preacher’s on the street. “Don’t come up here. Get away.”

Dan and the others stopped to listen. The voice was nasal and clear, though it was barely loud enough to be heard.

“I know you’re coming to get me.”

Mahmet crouched behind a tree and waved to the others to gather around him. “That’s him, Tuan,” he whispered. “Listen. He’ll say more.”

The man muttered and stormed. Sometimes he shouted as though the forest were empty. He said he was Joe. He said he loved mankind. “No question about it, though. Sons of bitches don’t deserve it. Never have.”

“What does he say, Tuan?” Mahmet asked.

Dan shook his head. “I’m not sure yet.”

The men continued slowly up the trail. Their efforts at quiet were ruined by the cracking of twigs and ferns. Dan cursed to himself as he stumbled over a root. They heard more noise from Joe, disconnected mutterings and raves. Finally, when they cleared a rise and had an unimpeded view of the caves themselves, they saw him.

He rose up from the cave entrance with disheveled dignity, in rags in the open sun. His feet were bare and filthy, and his shorts, green fatigues that hung loosely about his thighs, appeared not to have been washed in months. His Hawaiian shirt was much too large. Its garish flowers were crusted with filth. The left sleeve had disappeared altogether, while the right clung to the rest of his shirt like a rag hanging from a line. His beard was as Mahmet had described, but far larger. On the ground in front of the cave were the remains of a campfire from which a thin line of smoke rose into the air. Joe’s gesturing hand passed through the smoke as he talked. “Beautiful place. Yeah. Me too. Beautiful.”

“Australian,” Eustace whispered to Dan. “I would have thought so.”

They moved closer. Dan had seen people like Joe before, but never in as remote a place as this. They approached him in cities like Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok, hitting him up for a cigarette or a place to stay. Usually wasted and dirty, they made jokes about drugs. They were world travelers, but they had no money. Dan avoided them whenever he saw them, which in Asian cities was frequently.

Standing in the sun, Joe continued talking. He wandered through private conversations that were truculent and serene at the same time. He railed against the world but seemed to want to explain it. His explanations made no sense. He preached, and his words disappeared into the woods. In his madness, he conversed with the air.

“I’d better try to talk with him,” Dan said in Malay.

“Be careful, Tuan,” Mahmet whispered. “Remember the gun.”

“But you said there was no gun.”

Mahmet nodded. His lips turned down. “Yes, but you should be careful with a man like this.”

“At least I’ll be able to speak English with him.” Dan turned to Eustace. “That’ll help.” He stood to walk toward the cave entrance.

“Maybe,” Eustace said.

When Dan was thirty yards away, Joe spotted him. Stepping to a boulder, he reached into a pack leaning against it, pulled a pistol from the side pocket, aimed at Dan, and fired.

Dan jumped into the underbrush off the trail. “Did you see that?” he shouted to the others.

The Malays scrambled about in the underbrush, shouting confusedly. They ran down the path and disappeared into the forest. Mahmet remained behind with Eustace, while Dan crawled toward them, using the ferns for cover as Joe shot at them again.

Eustace’s voice came out of the jungle below. “My God, Dan, what’s going on up there?”

Dan’s heart pounded. He brushed his hair back, and dirty sweat came away in his hand. His knees shook, and as he lay to the side of the path, he rested his forehead on his palms. The thought raced through him that he could have been killed. He brushed several fingers across his own mouth, then touched his tongue with the fingers of one hand. There appeared to be no saliva, and he wiped his fingers on his shirt.

Finally, Dan was able to crawl back down the path and join Eustace and Mahmet. The three men waited a half hour. Joe’s vigilance gave way after a while to more conversation. Dan listened, trying to pick threads of sense from it, some idea of who Joe was.

“Comin’ around here trying to toss me out,” Joe said. He whispered a few moments. The beard below his chin jabbed the air. “Won’t have it, dammit. Never listen to me.” His voice raised to a shout. “Listen! I’ll show you the way!” The man rambled with semi-phrases and small bits of information, mostly argument and reverie. His shoutings were filled with despairing wonder. He’d been mistreated all his life. He begrudged the world.

“What are we going to do?” Eustace whispered.

Dan turned and sat up with his back to the boulder. “We’ve got to get him out of there. But I don’t know how.” He looked down at himself. Sweat dripped from his face to the ground. He realized he had cut his knee when he had dived for cover, and he examined the wound with a muddy hand. “We’d have to go down to Simanggang to get the police, and that would take us a couple of days.”

“I might be able to speak with him,” Eustace said. He looked up at the caves.

Joe could not be seen, but his voice sputtered into the trees. “I’d forgive ‘em if I could, dammit. I would and that’s the truth.”

“He’s so lost.” The sympathy in Eustace’s voice, sincere as it was, worried Dan.

“But it’s far too dangerous, Jim.”

“Maybe.” Eustace swallowed and glanced with great worry at the caves. “No. Of course, you’re right, Dan. I can’t go up there.”

Mahmet, who had been watching the caves as well, exhaled with surprise as Joe stepped again into the sunlight. Now he wore no clothes, and sweat gleamed from his body. Nonetheless the whiteness of his skin shone through the streaked, muddy dust. His shoulders and stomach particularly glistened, and a dark V-shaped line of tan down his chest showed how long he had been traveling. He carried his shirt in his hand and, looking out into the forest toward Dan and the others, he threw it in their direction. The shirt fluttered a few feet into the air, and then caught on a bush and hung there as Joe shook his fist.

“Come up and get me, you bastards.”

The sounds of loud crashing and men running hurtled from the forest. Dan and the others crouched down with alarm as the Malays returned carrying shotguns and rifles. Mahmet threw his hands up to stop them. But immediately they fired at the cave entrance. The puffs of smoke from their shotguns rose into the ferns and trees. A scream of fear came from above, and Joe, sprawled in the mud, hurriedly crawled back into the cave. His voice rose to a wail as the gunfire continued.

Eustace had dropped down onto his stomach. He shouted at the Malays to stop, but they would not listen to him.

“Mahmet! Mahmet!” Eustace yelled. He crawled quickly to the Malay’s side and shook him by the sleeve of his shirt. “Stop them!”

Mahmet turned and shouted at the others, but the men continued firing. Joe’s voice rose through the gunfire in despair.

“Damn it!” Eustace stood and moved through the underbrush toward the path. “Goddamn it!”

The Malays stopped shooting. They ordered Eustace out of the way. But he continued walking slowly up the path, his hands in the air.

“Jim!” Dan wanted to knock Eustace down, to get him out of the way. Eustace staggered and kept walking. He appeared to be entranced. His white legs, protruding from his walking shorts like sticks, wobbled as he slipped again in some mud. Smoke from the gunfire floated through the trees and obscured Eustace’s body.

“Jim!” Dan struggled to his knees. “Stop!”

“Wait, Tuan,” Mahmet laid a hand on Dan’s arm. “He’s trying to save the man. Leave him alone.” His mouth hung open, his lips not moving.

“Ridiculous.” Dan stood and walked up the path toward the Englishman. He had almost caught up with Eustace when Joe stepped out from behind one of the boulders. He pointed the pistol at Eustace, who abruptly stopped.

“Joe, wait. I’m a priest. I can help you.”

Joe pulled the trigger. The pistol did not fire, and Joe pulled the trigger once more before gunfire erupted from the Malays.

Grabbing Eustace, Dan pulled him into the underbrush.

“Let go of me!”

Dan lost his grip, slid through a patch of mud against a tree trunk, and then struggled to his hands and knees.

Eustace stood up again in the line of fire. Mahmet exhorted the Malays to put down their guns, and the echo of gunfire rumbled through the forest, diminishing farther and farther away. Dan pursued the missionary. So much smoke swirled about that it was difficult for Dan to see ahead. He arrived at the cave a moment behind Eustace.

Joe lay crumpled against a boulder. He had been hit in the chest, and had died immediately. His mouth was open, as were his eyes. Dan’s breath came in gasps. He could not put the chaotic noise of the gunfire from his mind. The danger had been so extreme and so quick that only now did he comprehend it, and he tried slowing his breathing to ease the shaking in his chest.

In the sudden quiet, Eustace’s voice sounded drained by disappointment. “I don’t know who he is.” He leaned over and took up Joe’s soiled hand. “Could have saved the bloke, and I don’t even know him.”

Dan took up Joe’s backpack, which had ripped on one side and been sewn haphazardly back together with a leather strand. He knelt down and flipped open the cover. He pulled out a shirt, quite dirty, and a pair of rubber flip-flops, one of which had no heel. Dan pushed aside the other rags and clothing, trying to avoid the sodden odor that came out of it. There were small hashish scales, some tobacco, a few tinfoil-wrapped packets, wet rolling papers, and a half-eaten rice-ball. At the bottom Dan found a passport.

He stood again and moved to Eustace’s side. The photo showed a clean-shaven man with glasses. Joseph Maurice. Thirty-three.

“Tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it?” Eustace whispered. He took the passport. Dan looked back at the Malays below. Mahmet stood apart from them in disgruntled silence. He came up the path, followed by the others.

Looking over Eustace’s shoulder, Dan examined the passport once more. “But he wasn’t listening to you, Jim. He could have killed you.”

Eustace turned away from the body. “Poor man’s reason deserted him.” He too looked over the passport photo, laying an index finger below it, as though to caress it. “Life, happiness... Dan, I don’t know. Everything deserted him.” He knelt once more and placed his hand on Joe’s lips. “We deserted him.”

“Jim—”

“We did!” Eustace whispered a profanity. His lips turned down with disappointment. His eyes widened like dark blemishes. “I’ve worked with these people for years.” He gestured into the shaded forest. “I never let them down. But this poor chap, this…”

When Mahmet arrived, he placed his hands in his pockets and murmured an apology. “This is a terrible thing.”

“I know, Mahmet. Your men, they couldn’t…they…” Eustace placed his hands in the pockets of his shorts, surveying the ground. “These people have meant so much to me, Dan. But poor Joe. You think he wanted to kill me. But the gun…the gun was just a gesture.”

“Jim, forgive me. Please. That’s nuts.”

“And he was one of ours.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Shooting at me didn’t matter. I could have brought the poor fool back.” Eustace turned to Mahmet. “I could have saved him, no?” he said in Malay.

Mahmet, a man of the cloth himself, nodded agreement, with the same note of remorse in his lowered head that now took Eustace over.

Eustace knelt, to touch Joe’s bleeding chest. His fingers rested a moment on the wound, and Eustace suddenly grimaced. “The truth is, though, I probably couldn’t have.” He glanced at Dan, who was struck by the loss that appeared in Eustace’s eyes. “I mean I didn’t save him, did I?” He sat down next to Joe and fell into silent mournfulness. “That’s just the plain truth, Joe.”

No one spoke for several minutes.

Finally, Mahmet motioned to the others to take up the body. He laid a hand on Eustace’s arm. The Malays slung their weapons onto their shoulders, placed Joe’s arms over his chest, and picked him up. Dan took Joe’s pack, and they began descending the path. Eustace’s profound and very dark sadness was so obvious to Dan that he himself could do little about it. They followed the path through the heat-beset forest, farther down toward the river and the village. Eustace’s shoulders slumped, and he seemed to pale into old age.

© 1988 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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From my collection titled The Day Nothing Happened, to be re-published in a new edition in 2027.

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Ed descended the stairway from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, meandering through the few hundred visitors sitting on the steps who talked so vibrantly with each other that the clouds of steam emanating from their mouths flew about like conversant puffs of feathers. For a February morning, the cloudless sky had the clarity of springtime, as though really it would be a fine day for a swim were it not for all the ice in the streets.

He bundled the collar of his overcoat around his throat along with a knitted wool scarf, and secured his tote bag on a shoulder, excited on this, his very first day as a citizen of New York City. He set out across Fifth Avenue and up Eighty-second Street. The street itself was lined with well-tended, leafless trees and substantial brownstones, each of which shined with settled dignity and high regard for itself.

Halfway up the block, he pirouetted across a puddle of sidewalk ice and took flight.

“Oh my God! Are you all right?”

A woman had been getting her mail and now hurried down the half-dozen steps of her brownstone and through the tiny front rose garden. She was about fifty, slim with a dancer’s kind of body and very long, curly blonde hair. She had thrown on a wool sweater many sizes too large for her, over a pair of black tights, and had wrapped her shoulders in a wool scarf, yet still wore her slippers. There was ice on the pathway to the gate as well, which she negotiated. By the time she reached the gate, Ed had picked himself up and was just now rubbing his knee. He had begun to recover.

“Are you hurt anywhere? I’m so sorry!” She laid her mittened hands on top of the gate, and then took them away, startled by the cold that radiated from it. She crossed her arms, each hand sheltered in an armpit.

“No, I…I’m fine.” Ed examined himself. “It was more…more a surprise than anything else. I was just at the museum.” He pointed back toward Central Park. “There’s an Edvard Munch show.”

“Oh, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“A little terrifying, maybe.” For a moment, silence hung in the middle of the encounter. “The way he does women.” He recognized her. But where have I seen her? He examined his scraped right palm. “Thank you for… I’m Ed Pensil. I just arrived yesterday.”

“To the neighborhood?”

“No. To New York.”
“Where from?”

“London.”

The woman’s mouth hurried to a smile.

“You know it?” Ed said.

“I do. I’ve danced there many times.”

“Danced!”

“Yes, with the New York City Ballet. I loved it, London. So beautiful.”

He cradled the shoulder bag between his arms, holding it against his chest. “May I ask your name?”

“Annie Cross.”

That was it! He had seen a film in which she had appeared, A Dance in New York, on the BBC, in which she had talked about dancing for Jerome Robbins. She had been a star for the New York City Ballet for many years until she had retired in 2001. She had had a talent at the celestial level, noted particularly for her quite legendary performances as a very young dancer with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Ed even remembered an article by a London Times critic about those performances, in which the fellow had written, “The American Annie Cross, still just a girl, seems able to deliver her heart entirely into the hands of the man with whom she is dancing, as though she herself has ceased to exist. It is the most loving disintegration I have ever witnessed.”

“Oh…Miss Cross.”

“Well…Annie.” She pointed at the smear of ice on which Ed had slipped. “It’s so embarrassing to have something like this happen to a tourist.”

“No, I hope that, starting today, I’m local.” He looked down at the ice. “You would think that I’d know what I’m doing.”

Again there was unbidden silence. Each seemed to wish the conversation to continue.

“A cup of tea helps after a fall like that.” Annie gestured toward her doorway. “And milk.”

“Sugar?”

“Yes, I have that, too.”

They talked in her kitchen over tea and cookies, where Ed explained that he had traveled to New York for medical conferences many times for a number of years.

“You’re a doctor. So, when you fell down out there, right away you were your own best ambulance.” The casual, good-hearted tone in Annie’s American accent surprised Ed. She seemed hardly star-struck by herself in any way. “I could have used you on several occasions,” she said.

“Maybe. But I’m not so good with bandages and splints. You know, blood scares me.”

“How’s that?”

“That’s why I’m a psychiatrist.”

Annie crossed her arms, and at first the gesture seemed a casual, welcoming one, an invitation to more conversation. But briefly her arms tightened and became barrier-like. She said nothing for several seconds.

“And I’ve written a couple books.” Ed was unsure where the warmth of the conversation had so suddenly gone. “Henry James in England. Lucian Freud.” He added that he had always wished to live in Manhattan. “Coming here for just a few days at a time is too sparse, you know…too little.”

“I felt the same when I got here from Chicago. I had wanted to come to New York forever.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen. My mother was with me.”

Annie told him that she had just this week completed a book of her own, the only one she had ever written, a memoir about touring China with Jerome Robbins’s Chamber Dance Company in 1981, when she had been twenty-one. “A marvelous man. Tough, though.” The book was coming out in the spring. “Jerome was like a lot of men.”

“How so?”

“They think they understand love.”

Ed sensed what was coming. Men…their cluelessness…. He had heard it in his office from many women.

“And in what I did for a living, and the art those men made for me…Jerome Robbins. Mr. B.…that they make for all the principal women dancers…. It perpetuates the dancers’ lack of…lack of….”

“They typecast you?”

“Lack of depth.” Annie frowned. “Of course. One beautiful girl after another ushered into true love in those ballets by intrepid, handsome heroes.” Annie took up a cookie and broke it in two, proffering one of the halves to Ed. “Since…I don’t know…whenever ballet started.” She brought her own half-cookie to her lips. “The trouble is, I love that role.” Annie offered a smile. “In ballet, it’s the greatest role of all, and any ballerina chosen to play it, who would turn it down, would be a fool.” The cookie disappeared. “We spend our youth striving for it, thousands of girls, and only a few actually get it.” She poured more tea. “Every young dancer’s wish.”

A few days later, Annie called Ed and asked him to come to Lincoln Center. “I’ve been teaching there for ten years or so now. You might find it interesting.”

The next morning, he crossed the plaza and entered the building with a large plaque in front: The School of American Ballet.

The lobby and escalators were awash with teenaged children, boys and girls, all walking and gesturing with considerable gayety and delicacy. They were laden with backpacks, schoolbooks, and cell phones, the escalators’ satin movement lifting them like unhurried, gesticulating birds in laughing conversation to the second floor.

He walked into the studio to which Annie had directed him, and a dozen and a half young women sat sprawled like leggy starfish on the wooden floor. Stretching, they wore black leotards and white tights, woolen leg warmers of every color bunched below their knees, their hair uniformly done up in tight buns. They glanced at Ed, who smiled, stunned by so much athletically sleek beauty.

He realized that he must surely represent dumpy middle age to these students. He wondered what he would look like in a pair of pointe shoes. He often reminded new acquaintances of someone they had seen in the movies. “Can’t quite remember who,” the acquaintance would say. “Not Colin Firth… not Branagh… somebody else.” He felt that really he reminded them of the fellow who at the end of the romantic comedy serves as Colin Firth’s best man or, at the end of the Devonshire murder mystery, Kenneth Branagh’s barrister sidekick. Handsome enough, but not the star of the show.

The ballerinas promptly forgot about him and returned to their stretching.

Annie stood by an upright piano in a corner of the room below its large windows, at the end of one of the fully mirrored studio walls. She too glanced at him, although she was in conversation in French with the pianist, a portly woman wearing red-framed thick glasses, a baggy wool coat, a much-curled black wig and thick-soled brown walking shoes. Her make-up reminded Ed of a painting by Jackson Pollack. The two women were discussing some sheet music, and Annie spent a moment specifying which parts of what compositions she wanted the woman to play.

Annie was indeed tiny, a feature of her body that had actually drawn a lot of attention when she had been on stage. Like all great performers, she had appeared more grand when she was dancing than indeed she was, her singular talent multiplied by an astonishingly beautiful internal drive. But here, leaning over the sheet music on the piano, she appeared too small, too fragile ever to have done the things that she had been so famous for doing.

She turned from the piano.

“Hello, Ed. I…” She nodded toward the dancers. “Girls, please welcome Dr. Pensil. From England. He’s here to…” Her hands gestured toward him. He recalled how the fingers, in the Robbins film, had themselves expressed acquiescent, forgiving emotion. Robbins himself had congratulated her for it on camera. A quick grin hurried across her face. “He’s here to analyze us.”

Disinterest oozed from the students.

“So shall we get going?”

Ed sat down on a folding chair just inside the door.

The girls stood and positioned themselves in three rows before Annie. Each observed herself in the mirror. Disconcerted vanity overtook the few seconds before the piano began playing. Fluttering eyes. Adjusted hair. No smiles. Self-castigation. When the music began—a waltz from some Tchaikovsky ballet, Ed couldn’t remember which—the dancers suddenly burst into motion.

Immediately Ed could see the differences between those girls who danced with special ability and those who did not, although not one of them could be said to be bad. Indeed, even the worst was clearly terrific. Motion, flight, delicate landings, twirls, arms outspread like slim wings, hands shaped like oiled mist, lower backs curved into burnished clouds, the suggestion of sweat on their temples assuring the presence of the sensual, heart-demanding wish to do well…all this to the accompaniment of the slightly out of tune piano. Parts of the instrument actually rattled as the woman at the keyboard played it with heavy gumption and occasional wrong notes.

“Too fast, Chelsea. Too fast.” Annie followed one of the taller girls around for a moment. Chelsea hurried to make the adjustment and to slow down.

“That’s it. Listen to that phrase again.” Annie turned to the pianist. “Olga, hold on for a minute, please.”

The piano tinkled in mid-phrase to a rough stop, as did the girls.

“Always listen to the music!” Chelsea, the principal recipient of this piece of advice, jammed her lips together. Annie turned and addressed the entire corps of dancers. “How long have you all been here? Do you know how to listen to music?”

Mixed with the few disappointed sighs of the girls was a good deal of wounded silence, especially on the part of Chelsea.

“All right. We’ll do it again.” Annie gestured toward the pianist, who began the sequence once more with the same level of bored-sounding inaccuracy.

After forty-five minutes, Annie brought the class to an end. The students passed before Ed and headed out of the room, several whispering behind their fingers to each other that Annie had been a little rough today. Like, what more does she want? Like didn’t we, like, do it right?

Ed had especially admired how Annie sometimes would shape the dancers physically, laying a hand across the lower back of one and suggesting that it be more curved, more sensuous, or sculpting an outstretched hand so that the very fingers revealed the emotion in the dancer’s pause. Ed envied the ability to do that so directly and precisely. In his own work, the arrival of such awareness on the part of a patient was far more elusive. Often the patient had no clue about what the psychiatrist Ed wished him or her to discover, no measure for finding the difference between dismay and self-acceptance, or the confusing, difficult passage to actual happiness. So, it seemed to Ed in this moment, in Annie’s practice studio, that psychiatry was much less precise than the dance these girls were doing, and often, he sensed, more disappointing.

“You know, Ed, they’re just sixteen and seventeen. Children, no matter how they look.” The last of the students progressed down the hallway. “Talented. But kids.” Annie turned toward him. “Do you have children?”

“A daughter. She works in Hollywood.”

“An actress?”

“No, an aspiring agent.”

“Where’s her mother?”

“In London.” Ed took up his shoulder bag. “We’re divorced. What about you?”

“Oh, I was married too. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Jeremy Blackwell?”

“Blackwell Securities.”

“That’s right.”

“Famous.”

“He founded it.”

“You were married for long?”

Annie took up a sweater from a bench beneath one of the windows. She put on the coat as though she were angry with it. “Seven or eight years.”

“And what about…forgive me.” Ed allowed a smile. “What about now?”

“No. Nothing.”

“So Jeremy is no longer…no longer your—”

“No.” Annie stepped toward the studio doorway, taking up a large white canvas shoulder bag printed with the words “New York City Ballet” in red. It contained a book and a small leather purse. “He broke my heart, and then moved into Trump Tower.”

That night, Ed watched a YouTube of Annie with Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1980, a pas-de-deux from Balanchine’s Theme and Variations. Annie swirled quickly through Tchaikovsky’s music with such deftness, her feet and arms composed in such a way throughout that she appeared incapable of doubt. When she flew, she flew slowly, with the delicacy of air itself. She possessed the stage, or at least that part of it not occupied by the incredible Russian, with ethereal precision.

“I married Jeremy a few years after that,” Annie explained the following evening over dinner at a bistro on Seventy-second Street. “It was worth it for a while… A life that most people would envy, I guess, even desire. A great deal of money. Parties.” Annie looked out from the banquette at the other diners. “Notoriety.” Many of them recognized her. She waved to one or two. “But he didn’t spend a lot of time wooing me.” Her eyes hovered over her glass of wine. “When he knew all along that that’s what I wanted.” Annie took up her fork. “Even though he knew I was crazy for him.”

Ed waited, not knowing how to move from the moment’s distress. He kept his eyes on Annie until she looked up at him and attempted a smile. She succeeded with it, although the warmth that usually accompanies a smile was replaced by the sense, Ed felt, that Annie suspected Ed himself…that he could be negotiating a way to betray her.

They went out together for several weeks. Ed worried about the relationship, not sure that he wanted to deepen it. He had learned that Annie Cross was only occasionally willing to move past the surface of a conversation, and Ed suspected she felt that anything she had to say, especially about herself, was of little note. Despite what she explored in her dancing, she had little wish to examine unlighted corners in her conversation.

She had vast knowledge of the places in which she had danced and of the people she had met. Her descriptions of these people were often unusually inventive. The suit that the president of Iceland had worn at the Ballet’s premier in Reykjavik “had puckers in it, like black wounds.” The Argentine ambassador to the United States, an economist, had been “dangerously mild. His smile was like…well, like a sheet of sweet paste.” Annie spoke eloquently of Florence, where she had stayed in a medieval palace in which the damask wallpaper of her room reminded her of “fields of blood-red, fresh-blooming, dying roses.” Cleveland left her cold, “like the industrial weather there.”

She once described her marriage as one filled with tender imbecilities. “Even though I did love him.”

But Annie’s eyes often fluttered whenever Ed asked her a question about her emotions, and when that happened she would skitter through her answers. She very frequently pondered an answer at considerable length, as though searching a way to reveal as little about herself as possible.

Ed suspected that she was simply afraid in the end of encountering her own depths, with all the mud and watery disintegration that he worried those profundities maybe contained. But how am I to know? he castigated himself. Especially when he watched the videos of Annie’s dance, Ed wondered at the gulf between what she exhibited about her feelings so successfully on point and what she seemed so unwilling to explore in her kitchen. So…they went to movies. They walked in Central Park. They had lunch in her brownstone.

Ed dined alone one evening at a French place on Eighty-seventh. Sipping from a glass of Bordeaux, he turned the page of the novel he was reading, The Great Gatsby, a book he re-read every two years or so because of its fine writing and, he always hoped, of what it could teach him about Americans. He realized that Gatsby was a fraud. But he also thought that most Americans who had brought themselves up from nothing—which is to say, most rich Americans—were in some ways frauds. So often so little knowledge. Not much sense of the heart. Bludgeons in search of money.

Luxuriating once more in the wayward desperation of Gatsby’s love for the empty, pretty Daisy Buchanan, he lifted the glass of wine to his lips and, sipping from it, saw Annie Cross and a very wealthy-looking, middle-aged man enter the restaurant.

They were shown to a table in a corner, beneath a large lithograph showing a Folies Bergère dancing girl of The Belle Époque. In golden light, she raised her skirts, revealing many confused underskirts. Beneath her bonnet, her teeth gleamed brightly enough to appear to be flashing with light.

Annie was clearly upset, frowns scurrying across her face as the conversation between her and her companion so intently continued. As the waiter brought glasses of water, she extended her arms onto the table, emphasizing things with her fingers, jabbing the tabletop with an open right hand as she spoke. Her companion, in a black suit, a white dress shirt and a flourishing purple necktie, was attempting self-control. But he too appeared to believe that he was being thoroughly wronged, to such a degree that some of the other diners in the room were now talking about the couple in the corner, wondering what could have sparked such an argument. The argument was quiet, without shouting, and virulent.

As the waiter served them their salads, Ed finished his chocolate mousse and awaited the bill. Annie, looking away from the continuing fight, spotted him. Surprise sputtered from her eyes. Ed nodded to her, although he was grateful for the waiter’s bringing him the check and, so, blocking the view that Annie had of him.

“That was my husband.” She had called him early the next morning and asked him to join her for coffee. “My ex-husband.”

“I see, I—”

“I’m sorry you had to see that, Ed.”

“There’s nothing to be done about it, Annie. I just happened to be there.”

“Yes, but you must think there’s something terribly wrong with me.”

“Why?”

“The way he was talking to me.”

“But I don’t know what he was saying.”

“Couldn’t you tell from the gestures? His indifference? The way he wouldn’t listen?”

“No, I—”

“A psychiatrist like you? Aren’t you supposed to discern things? I mean, the way people hold themselves, the shoulders, his tightened lips?”

“Tightened lips?”

“Yes. Aren’t you supposed to figure out how people really feel?”

“Annie—”

“How I feel about him? How wrong he is?”

A week later she asked Ed to water her plants. “I’m going to Belgrade. To teach. I’ll be gone for three weeks.” He agreed and, as she hugged him on her front stoop, she told him how much she would miss him. “I love going places with you, Ed. I wish you’d come to Belgrade with me.”

He gave her a return hug. Annie turned away, disappointed.

Ed often contemplated the troubles to be associated with creativity. It was the phenomenon that most interested him as a psychiatrist. He had counseled out-of-work artists, down-and-out musicians, the occasional complaining novelist. Men and women both. Many such, and his writing about them had found an audience.

He loved trying to understand what causes creativity in the creative, and now especially in Annie Cross. When he had been writing his book on Lucian Freud, he had met with the artist on a couple of occasions at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The conversations had been perfunctory. Lucian had appeared quite unused to opening his feelings, at least to someone who was a certified psychiatrist. Given the fact of the identity of Lucian’s grandfather, Ed had found this amusing, and had told the artist so.

“You’ll have to figure it out, then, won’t you, Ed? It’s not my job to help you understand these things.”

Luckily, Lucian had enjoyed Ed’s book, especially his detailed descriptions of the mottled, rugged skin of so many of Lucian’s nudes, the oily patches of it, the ugly turning-to-age that seemed to engulf so many of his subjects’ bodies.

“That’s where their personalities reside.” Lucian pointed to his large painting of a corpulent nude woman lying on a mussed bed, her skin resembling a sun-bleached, crumpled plastic drop cloth. The gallery manager, a Londoner with a precise upper-class English accent, had flitted about Lucian and Ed like a self-obsessed bird until he had determined that Ed could not possibly afford any of the paintings in the gallery. “None of those people are happy,” Lucien continued. “And you can tell it by the way I do their skin.”

He had congratulated Ed for the book. “Most of the writers, they’re afraid to say things like what you said. They’re afraid to be appalled.” Lucian had clapped Ed’s shoulder. “But not you, mate!”

Annie had given him a key to the front door, for use while she was away. He walked up the hallway, carrying the empty watering can that she had left for him. The dark walls were hung with numerous drawings and small paintings by Clyfford Still, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and others. In the living room, a piano held framed photographs of Annie performing, or arm-in-arm with George Balanchine (he smiling and explaining) or Michael Smuin (Annie clutching his arm and smiling for several clamorous photographers) and others, at this or that reception or party.

A noise came from the kitchen, and suddenly Jeremy Blackwell came into view. Dressed in Levis, a blue patterned sport shirt and loafers, he too carried a watering can in his hand.

“Oh…sorry,” Ed said. “I’m a friend of Annie’s. I—”

“How’d you get in?”

“She gave me the key.” Ed hurried the key ring from his pants pocket. “Here. See?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a friend. Ed Pensil. Sorry. From England.”

“I gathered that.”

“And you’re Jeremy.”

Jeremy put the water can on the kitchen table.

“I don’t mean to intrude,” Ed said.

“You’re not intruding, pal. She told me about you.” Jeremy took up a mug of coffee from the table and sipped from it. “You’re the psychiatrist.”

“That’s right.”

“What have you found out?”

Ed fingered the water can. Suddenly he didn’t know what to do with it. “Found out?”

“Yes. Anything you can…” Jeremy sighed and sat down. “…tell me about her?”

Silence—the silence that occasionally accompanies astonishment—filled the kitchen. The far-away rumble of traffic outside formed a rough whisper.

“I don’t understand.”

Jeremy pushed a hand through his hair, which left it rumpled. “She says she’s in love with you.”

“She does?”

“And that she hopes you love her.”

“She’s never revealed that to me.”

Jeremy’s shirt hung out over his belt in back and, Ed noticed, was quite wrinkled, details so unlike those of the well dressed, composed tycoon who had been with Annie in the French place on Eighty-seventh.

Jeremy frowned. “You can’t be much of a psychiatrist if you didn’t notice that.”

“But I—”

“I’ll give you some advice, pal.”

“Thank you, I don’t—”

“You’ll need it. Annie is changeable.”

“I….” Ed glanced at Jeremy’s watering can.

“You’ll need to know that. She….” Jeremy leaned over the table, his lower lip folded between his teeth. Sadness fumed from him. His back seemed to buckle as he lowered his head. Ed was convinced, suddenly and without warning, that Jeremy was still quite in love with Annie. “She doesn’t want what she has.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know—”

“She says I treat her like some kind of pretty little crystal goblet.”

“Beg your pardon?”

Jeremy sat down at the table. As he spoke, his dismay deepened. “With nothing in it. I’ll bet you know about this.”

Ed hunched his shoulders, turning away. “Look, I’m not sure I’m the person you should be talking to. I mean, this is something private to you and—”

“You’re the psychiatrist. You’re the one who can help.”

“But—“

“Women write about this, see? Annie’s made me read about it. The whole concept of….” Jeremy held up his right hand, the end of the thumb semi-surrounded by the ends of the other fingers. He stared at the fingers a moment. “‘Woman,’ as she calls it. The artistic ideal, see? I mean, some man’s artistic ideal of a woman, emptiness jammed up with, well, with what men call love and, uh, and….” Jeremy looked up, lowering his hand. “Desire. You ever heard such a thing?” He sat forward, joining his hands on the table. “Annie used to lecture to me a lot about that. Which was, you know, exactly what her dancing required her to do. Exactly that!”

“And she didn’t think you could provide her with—“

“No. Not for her heart.” Jeremy ran a hand through his hair, and then placed the end of an index finger against his chest. “Not in here.” Restless silence took the kitchen over. “Jesus. The way I loved her.” Jeremy’s hair hung down before his forehead, disturbed, like his thoughts. “And it angers her that she’s so famous.”

“For her dancing.”

“Yes. But even more so, for the clarity of her emotions.”

“In person?” Ed said.

“No!” Jeremy sat back, placing his left hand in a pants pocket. He examined his right, as though it were some sort of disappointed oracle. “On stage.” He shook his head. “In those roles.”

Three weeks later, Annie greeted Ed from her front steps. He was filled with questions about Belgrade, the students there, about the dignitaries she had met. Ed’s cab pulled from the curb, and Annie came out to the gate. She had clearly been waiting for him. She hurried into Ed’s arms, her breathing short with anxiety, her head resting against his chest. “Ed, darling.”

He embraced her, and she escorted him into the brownstone. He smelled coffee.

Annie indicated a chair at the kitchen table. A plate with pieces of sliced coffeecake and a few cookies rested on it, with two cups on two saucers. A ceramic white sugar bowl and a similar creamer were arranged next to the cookie plate. There was no spoon. As Ed dropped his shoulder bag to the floor, Annie turned toward him and wrapped her fingers around the top of the second chair.

“You don’t enjoy talking to me, do you, Ed?”

Ed, expecting more of a pleasantry, shrugged, looking toward the plants in the hallway.

“I don’t know anything about you, Ed.”

“Annie, I—”

“Nothing.”

“But—”

“You haven’t said one interesting thing to me since we met.” Annie turned away, waving a hand above her head. “And you haven’t told me the truth.”

“About what?”

“Like what you were doing while I was in Belgrade.”

“I was watering your ferns.” Ed sat down at the table and awaited more of an explanation.

“One of the neighbors saw you here, with another woman.”

“Me?”

“I didn’t ask you to water so that you could…” She looked aside, her hands at first joined on the chair-back, then quickly separated as the thought continued. “Carry on some little affair you’re having.”

“Annie, I—”

“My neighbor saw you.”

“What neighbor?”

“A friend. A woman I’ve known for years.”

“I don’t know any of your neighbors.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Annie, I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”

“And then…” Annie stepped toward a kitchen drawer, from which, noisily, she pulled several sheets of paper. “Look at this.”

They were out of order and crinkled, having been balled up and then re-flattened. For a moment, there was no sense to them. Finally, when Ed had put them in order, he saw that they were monthly bank statements, and a letter from someone in the same bank.

“So?” Ed said.

“You got my bank information. My identity.”

“Me!”

“Money was taken. It was clearly you who took it.” She took the papers from his hand and placed them on the table. She sped through a search of them. “Here. See this?” An index finger pointed at a few columns of numbers, many numbers. Ed could not understand them. No context. No explanation. Just numbers. “It was you, Ed. And I trusted you.”

Ed, hurrying to defend himself, moved to speak.

“You think I’m that foolish?” She pointed at her left temple with an index finger. “That I’ve got nothing going on in here?” She glared at him, although evidently not actually seeing him. Her hands, circling about each other, appeared like ruined twigs. She took up the papers again and thrust them back into the drawer. “I gave you the keys to my house.”

“Annie, this can’t be…. I didn’t.”

“I thought there could be something between us. I thought you cared for me.”

“But—”

“You don’t care for me?”

“Annie.”

“You lied to me?”

“I did not.”

“Manipulating, awful—

“Annie!”

“You did, Ed. Don’t try to tell me you didn’t. You did. And now I want you out of here.”

“But Annie—”

“Get out!”

The following morning, the stairway from the sidewalk to the Metropolitan Museum was filled with seated, chatting visitors, passersby, lovers, students, and tourists. The frivolity of all the conversations brought a spirit of disorder to the phalanx-like arrangement of the meeting place. Ed had always enjoyed this phenomenon, the way the steps and the museum entrance were so formal and ordered, while the imaginative, unruly crowd was like the art inside the building.

This time, he noticed especially one couple. Annie was seated next to Jeremy. His gestures were animated, an accompaniment to what seemed loving regard on his part. He was trying to explain something to her. Annie nodded now and then, and finally Jeremy took her left hand into his hands, to caress it as he spoke. Her reply was heated, yet seemed to be making sense to Jeremy. She calmed, and then looked away. Jeremy remained silent until, suddenly, Annie leaned toward him and kissed him.

Jeremy hadn’t expected it. But after a brief moment of surprise, he grabbed for her. Others around the couple witnessed their embrace, commenting on it with considerable affectionate humor, and joyfully envious of it. Ed, though, noticed the rigidity with which Annie endured the return kiss.

Not a chance, he thought, immediately angry with himself. Annie retreated from the affection, as though she were miffed by it. She looked away from Jeremy, who, surprised by her reticence, reached again for her hand, as though pleading with her to allow his touch.

As Ed walked from the museum steps, indeed he didn’t think that Jeremy and Annie stood a chance. Jeremy—like you, Ed thought of himself—was not up to it.

That evening, Ed watched a silent, amateur black and white YouTube of Annie warming up. She was about thirty in the film. The room looked like an old warehouse, with internal columns providing the support for the roof. The floor was clearly made of the right kind of wood, and appeared to be sprung. A few other dancers, men and women, sat round the edges of the room, leaning against the walls watching. Jeremy was there as well, seated in a folding chair. He was casually dressed and, of course, much younger than he was now. Less harried looking. When the camera passed by him, Annie swirling along in the frame, Ed could see that Jeremy was amazed by his wife and what she could do. Along with everyone else in the room, he appeared spellbound.

Ed fumbled with the empty wine glass in his hands. He still was hurting from Annie’s accusation of him.

In the video, Annie turned about with such languid feeling—made more so by the slow motion of the film—that she appeared to be readying herself for some kind of assignation, a meeting with a maddening lover, with someone she clearly adored. She glanced at Jeremy once as she passed him by. When she landed on one or the other foot, her entire body softened like a passage of exhaled breath, heart-strewn and silent. She continued on, playing the role beautifully, a display of the heart, her acting so fine and tender, a woman more and more innocent, more and more smitten, more and more in love.

Copyright ©2017 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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From my collection titled New York.

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There is a laughable proposition that has recently surfaced, laughable especially in the composing of fiction…if not in every other kind of writing.

“Artificial Intelligence” has also been named…by Noam Chomsky, no less…as “Plagiarism Software.” This is a much more accurate term since it recognizes clearly the sources of all artificial intelligence…the entirety of which comes from the many millions of human beings who have put pencil to paper to compose (quill to parchment, or fingers to typewriters, to computer keyboards…whatever) . So, “A.I.” uses as a base for its own composition the written efforts of countless individual writers who have existed since time immemorial.

Thus, instead of clear ideas, pondered by an individually bright human mind and expressed with clarity and taste, with “A.I.” you have a hodgepodge of various sentences or phrases, many in conflict with many others, that gathered together are expressed with contradictory confusion, put together by a thoroughly un-human gathering process that has no specific idea of how to tell a story, how to set a scene, how to present a hero and a villain, how to offer original thoughts on love, ill manners, worry, death, grateful thanks, the arrival of one’s self-awareness, political strife, the frightful waste of war, the end of love, the worry for children, the sense of what it’s like to swim in the ocean, to ride a bike, offer a kiss, feel betrayed, to rob a bank, to dance a tango, to be killed, to be born, to nurture…. And most other events or feelings that affect the human heart, which is to say, all events and feelings.

The very suggestion that “A.I.” could handle such a task is worthy of laughter, while the evidence that individual humans are up to the task has been crystal clear throughout the millennia before “A.I.” ever came about…that would be two or three years ago. So, if you are someone involved in any sort of creative endeavor, you have little to worry about. Keep writing. Keep doing whatever it is you artfully do. “A.I.” will stagger along far behind, confused by everything and offering further amateurish (and copyright infringed) muddle as its signal result.

Copyright © 2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this piece.

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Also, please see Terence Clarke’s novel, The Guns of Lānaʻi, here on Substack.

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The Australian soldier rose up at the front of the bus like a forest animal, some sort of rare, muscled primate. His fatigues were crusted with sweat. He blotted out the window behind him.

“Where is he?” His voice gargled, as though the sweat that poured from his skin ran down his throat as well. He looked out the door of the bus into the sun.

“In the back, Captain Brownly.” Another Australian stood outside. He pointed the length of the bus. “On the left. The skinny chink with the straw basket, next to the white man.”

Dan noticed that Wo Sam was tapping the rim of his basket with his fingers and straining to see what was going on outside. The bus windows were so caked with dust that the figures surrounding the bus appeared as yellow shadows.

“Come with me, Perkins.” Brownly moved up the aisle. Most of the passengers were Ibans transporting their goods into Kuching for the weekend market. They were in awe of the man’s sweaty might. The noises of their animals—small pigs trussed up in rope baskets, fighting cocks clucking from their bamboo cages—only emphasized the silence of the passengers. No one spoke. Indeed, it seemed as if no one breathed. Private Perkins slung his automatic rifle over his shoulder, and the butt clattered against the seats. Dan became alarmed by Wo Sam’s obvious nervousness. The rimless glasses propped on the end of Wo Sam’s nose, and the very thin beard that grew from the center of his chin made him appear wise and reserved. But his hands were visibly shaking as he held tight to the rope sling of his basket.

Dan stood to intercept the Australian. He and Wo had ridden on this same bus through this same checkpoint many times, and there had never been trouble.

“Maybe I can help here, Captain.” He pulled a diplomatic passport from his shoulder bag.

“You’re not Chinese, are you, Yank?” Brownly smiled, two white men in conspiratorial humor.

Dan brushed aside the remark. “Of course not. This man’s traveling with me, and I can assure you—”

“Sit down then.”

Dan extended the passport toward the Australian. “I’m sure there’s been a mistake.” Dan’s fingers left grimy prints on the document. His arms were clotted with sweat and road dust.

“I didn’t ask to see your passport.”

“Look, I’m with the U.S. State Department and—”

The Australian looked beyond Dan at Wo Sam. “Papers.” Wo Sam did not move. “Come on, then, let’s see them.”

“He doesn’t speak English, Captain.”

“Documents,” Brownly said, this time in Malay. Wo Sam brought his Malaysian identity card from the basket. Brownly took it from him and perused it a moment.

“You see, Captain,” Perkins said. “Same description. Chinese. Not the same name, but I thought it’d be worth a few questions.”

Brownly’s eyes moved back and forth between Wo and the identity card. The Australian’s cheeks were purple, and his perspiration dripped onto the document. “Right. Take him off”

Dan grabbed Brownly’s shoulder. “Wait a minute. You can’t do this.”

“Don’t push it, Yank.” Brownly reached for Wo Sam, and the two Australians hauled him into the aisle.

“Mr. Dan, Mr. Dan.” Wo’s eyes jumped with fear, and, as Perkins pulled him up the aisle, Wo’s hand flew up before his face. ‘Where are they taking me?”

Dan followed the men from the bus. The camp in which the bus had stopped was made up of several palm-leaf buildings with tin roofs. The forest had been cleared to accommodate the compound, leaving no trees to shade the yellow earth. In the open sunlight, the buildings resembled bright graves.

Guerrillas, most of them indigenous Chinese, were fighting against the new Malaysian government in many parts of Sarawak. They hoped to take advantage of the war Malaysia was fighting against Indonesia, in order to take the state of Sarawak by force. But they needed food, and the government had retaliated by fencing off hundreds of square miles of rice paddy in suspect areas. Farmers going to work in the morning had to pass through gates in the cyclone fence to get to their fields. They were checked carefully every evening for clandestine stores of rice. Without the rice the guerrillas could not survive.

One of the most suspect areas was this one, along the main road south of Simanggang. The government had placed this checkpoint in the center of a valley populated by farmers sympathetic to the guerrillas. Soldiers of the Australian army, specialists in counter insurgency and much admired by the Malaysian government, had reduced guerrilla activity almost to a standstill.

Dan followed the two Australians across the compound to the largest of the buildings. They pulled Wo Sam up the stairway, and then turned to the left along the wooden porch to a doorway. Wo had dropped his basket, and Dan swept it up as he mounted the stairs. He turned through the doorway into an office. Wo Sam was being led to a chair next to an old wooden desk.

“What’s he being charged with, Captain?”

Brownly turned from the desk and placed his hands on his hips. “What do you want?”

“What’s the charge?”

Private Perkins sat down across the room. He was a tall man, very young, with a florid, whiskerless face.

“You have to charge him with something.”

“I do not.” Brownly turned to face Dan. “I have the right to question him. I have the right to question you, for God’s sake.” He laughed, and his teeth shone in his watery mouth. Dan’s clothing was covered with yellow dust. As he removed his straw hat, a light cloud of it billowed around his head. Dust had clotted the sweat on his neck. Thin lines of it wound in rings down into his shirt. He took off his sunglasses and folded them, putting them into a shirt pocket.

“But I doubt you’re giving help to the guerrillas, Yank.”

“Neither is he.”

“We’re not so sure of that.”

“I am.” Dan dropped his shoulder bag to the floor and leaned against a doorjamb. “Wo Sam’s never done anything like that.”

Wo Sam, the owner of the only cafe in Saratok, was a kind, very reserved man and a good friend. He had lived in Saratok for fifteen years. When Dan was not traveling, he had his meals in Wo’s cafe. During the day, Wo sat at his cash table reading the Chinese newspaper and watching the activity in the bazaar. He seldom moved from his chair, and he perused his newspaper from a distance, without humor, as a scholar would an original manuscript, with his glasses far down his nose. Wo also happened to be an exceptional badminton player.

Brownly pointed at him. “I’m questioning this friend of yours because we think he’s been helping the guerrillas out here. That’s reason enough.”

Wo sensed the hostility between the two men. He looked at the floor, and kept his mouth shut.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re defending him for, anyway,” Brownly said. “If he is a bloody guerrilla, you’d be one of his first targets.”

“Mr. Dan!” Wo’s voice jumped into the conversation, so that it startled both men. “Help me. Please. Don’t leave me out here.”

“Captain, you can’t hold this man. He hasn’t done anything.”

“We’ll let you know about that.”

“I insist you let him go.”

Brownly gestured to Perkins, who stood and approached the two men.

“Mr. Dan.” Grinning, Brownly nodded toward Dan’s passport, which remained in his left hand. “That’s the name, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Right. I think the best thing I can tell you is that there is one of you and many of us. So, Mr. Dan, we say you’re wrong.”

“Captain—”

“Back on the bus.”

Dan’s insistence was more bluster than he wished to admit, and it fell away as he realized there was nothing he could do. He clutched Wo’s basket. He turned toward the Chinese, who saw Dan had failed.

“I have to go, Wo Sam. They won’t let me stay.”

“Then see my brother in Kuching. His name is Wo Ting, on Merdeka Road. He’ll help.”

“But how can he—”

“Please. It’s important you see him.” Wo slumped once more, and a glaze of anguish came over his eyes.

Late that afternoon Dan walked up Merdeka Road from the Kuching wharf. The two-story buildings were made of construction brick and cement, distinguished only by the green mold and discoloration caused by the heavy rains. Each building contained a single shop on the ground floor and living quarters above. The fronts of the shops were open to the street.

This part of Merdeka Road was occupied by gold merchants, and the signs above each establishment told the name of the shop’s owner. The heavy Chinese characters, carved into wooden slabs and painted as well, gave the street a cluttered, jumpy look that belied the drabness of the buildings. Long sticks hung with laundry jutted from the windows of the upper floors, so that the sunlight was obscured by socks, underwear, and shirts.

One sign was painted with gold characters against a red lacquered background. Beneath the characters, in English, “Wo Ting, Proprietor” was written like an afterthought. The shop was full of customers. A fat Chinese man—a laborer, Dan thought—about fifty years old, sat on a stool to one side of the entrance. He wore a dirty white undershirt, dark blue shorts, and rubber flip-flops. He had an enormous stomach.

“Excuse me,” Dan said in Malay.

The man looked up and smiled quite broadly. All his teeth were lined with gold. “Yes, John.”

“Is Wo Ting here?”

The man stood and assumed—with importance—his full height of about five and a half feet. He placed a hand on each side of his stomach and cleared his throat. “Yes, John. I am Wo Ting.”

“You!”

“Yes.”

Dan glanced inside the shop. Clerks scurried about behind the counters. Dan had expected a more presentable man…a white dress shirt, long pants, moneyed aplomb.

“My name is Dan Collins.”

“I’m honored.” Wo Ting extended his hand.

“I work up in Saratok, in the Second Division, and I’m a friend of Wo Sam.”

The hand closed, and Wo Ting drew it back. “Wo Sam, you say.”

“Your brother. Yes.”

“What do you want with him?”

Dan laid his shoulder bag on the sidewalk, with Wo Sam’s basket. “Nothing. I’m his friend.”

“Has he done something?”

“No. Dan’s shoulders lowered, his head slightly bowed. “I mean I don’t know. But he needs help, and he told me you were the person to speak with.”

Wo Ting exhaled and sat down again. “Yes, we are brothers, Mr. Dan.” He gestured to the bench next to him, and Dan sat down. “But we do not get along.” Wo glanced at Dan’s wrinkled shirt and shorts. “You are British, yes?”

“American.”

“American! From San Francisco?”

Dan leaned back against the wall and crossed his legs. Although he was much larger than Wo Ting, his sandaled feet appeared more delicate than those of the Chinese. Wo’s thick toes spilled from the sides of his flip-flops.

Dan grinned. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Have you been there?”

“No. I’ve lived in Kuching all my life. But San Francisco is famous.” Wo rubbed his hands. “Many Chinese there.”

“That’s right.”

Wo nodded with goodwill. “An improvement to the city, no doubt.”

A breeze rustled through the laundry above.

“Goldahn Gate.” Wo said.

“About your brother…”

“Ah, my brother.” Wo sighed. He was disappointed that the conversation had turned back to Wo Sam. “What has happened?”

“We were on the bus this morning from Saratok. We were stopped at the Australian checkpoint below Simanggang, and Wo Sam was arrested.”

“That fool.”

“But why? He hasn’t done anything.”

“He’s under arrest.” Wo spit onto the sidewalk. “That means he’s done something wrong.” He stood and walked to the curb. A group of people gathered about a Chinese man selling medicine in the street. He had set up a display of photos, of people with ghastly skin diseases: warts, excoriations, boils, and rashes in fading, metallic colors. Dan joined Wo, to watch. Wo’s assertions had surprised the American. He had expected commiseration and an immediate offer of help. But Wo now stood on the curb absently viewing the sales pitch.

“What do you do in Saratok, Mr. Dan?”

“I’m an engineer. Do you know the Saratok road?”

“Yes.” Wo cleared his throat. “Progress.”

“We hope so. I’m in charge of building it.”

Wo turned and sat down again on his stool. “We must talk to my son.”

“Your son? Why?”

“He’ll know what to do.”

“But we have to do something now. What good will it do to talk to your son?”

Dejected, Wo examined his fingernails, which were brown and cracked. “Come back tomorrow morning. My son will be here, Mr. Dan.”

“Wo Ting—”

“Tomorrow.” Wo suddenly seemed gravely angered by Dan’s objection, so that, reluctantly, the American agreed.

That evening Dan sat in the bar of the Kuching Hotel. The ceiling fans turned about. The plants around the bar rustled in the breezes. The bar was empty, and Dan drank two large bottles of Tiger Beer, feeling more and more relaxed as the evening wore on.

He planned to return to Wo Ting’s shop the next morning. But he knew that the Australian Army would not respond to Wo Ting’s son. Indeed, they would laugh at him. Dan imagined a short, young Chinese man, also in a T-shirt and shorts, counting sacks of rice as they came down a gangplank at the wharf, and he groaned. The heir to the fortune!

“Mr. Dan. My son.”

The American turned toward the back of the shop, which had not yet opened for business. Into the room came a tall Chinese man wearing a light, double-breasted Savile Row suit of blue wool, a starched white shirt with black opal cufflinks, and a dark blue tie. His hair was close cut and neat, and his eyeglasses were framed with round, tortoise-shell rims. A white handkerchief pointed up from his breast pocket in three equal peaks. He looked about thirty years old, and extended his hand to Dan, whose surprise was so complete that for a moment he did not return the gesture.

“Mr. Dan, I presume. Winston Wo’s the name.” The educated London accent took Dan by surprise. “I understand my uncle Wo Sam is in a spot of trouble.”

“Rather!” Dan realized that he had employed the British usage, even to the point of extending the second syllable of the word to indicate emphatic agreement. He swore at himself “That’s for sure.” He gathered himself. “My full name is Dan Collins.”

“Collins! English!”

“Well….”

“Doesn’t surprise me a bit, what you’ve told my father about my uncle.” Winston’s right hand, extended toward Dan, hung in the air a moment longer. Dan’s jaw moved about as he ground his teeth in confusion. In his khaki shorts and white shirt—the sleeves rolled up to two different levels—and his soiled black sandals, he glared at Winston. After a moment he realized he was being rude, and grasped Winston’s hand. “My pleasure.”

“All mine, old boy. As it happens, I was coming over today on business from Singapore, and when my father told me about Wo Sam’s troubles, I thought, right, this should be a lark.”

Wo Ting surveyed his son’s gestures with obvious pride.

“But you seem surprised,” Winston said.

“Well, I am. You see, with your father in this shop, a local Chinese, untraveled—”

“Didn’t expect his son to be a chip off the old empire, eh?” Winston grinned. He sat down and crossed his legs. The crease in his pants remained straight.

“I didn’t know. But I must say your appearance is—and your English, the accent —”

“A doctorate in law. Cambridge. Post doctoral study at the LSE. Quite simple, really.”

Winston translated the conversation for his father. Wo Ting leaned over the table and addressed Dan in Malay. “Excuse me, Mr. Dan. I was angered by my brother’s arrest, and I just forgot. As you can see, Winston is a fine boy. But Wo Sam, I’m sorry to say, has been an idiot all his life.”

Winston nodded agreement. “After the war, you see, when the British came back, there was a long period of, well, disagreement between the Chinese and the Malays. And the British colonialists, of course.”

“In Malaya,” Dan said.

“That’s right. As to who would rule the country. The Chinese were frozen out of the government, you might say. Bit of collusion there between the Malays and the Brits. So, a lot of the Chinese simply decided not to put up with it, and they fought against it. The Emergency, it was called.”

“I’ve read about it. General Sir Gerald Templar.”

“Yes. Many Chinese were put in jail. Many were killed. That cyclone fencing and the checkpoint you see out there on the Simanggang road? It was everywhere in Malaya. For years. A police state, really.”

Dan tried to determine what it was about Winston’s speech that seemed so odd to him. Surely everything he said was accurate. If anything, Winston spoke English better than Dan did. But there was a tinny veneer to his expression that made it sound like a recording. No matter what he said, it sounded depthless and rehearsed, like something from a language class.

Winston took a moment to translate what he had said into Cantonese.

“Our family wanted nothing to do with the Chinese guerrillas,” Wo Ting said in Malay. “We’re business people. We don’t need politics. But my brother insisted on being a revolutionary. Once he even called himself the Chinese Sukarno.” Wo grimaced, and then threw his head back and laughed. “Such a fool. The Chinese Sukarno!” He laughed for several seconds more, although the glee eventually fell to unhappiness. “But they put him in jail in Malaya.”

“How long?”

“Three years,” Winston replied.

“He never told me.”

“And when he got out,” Winston continued, “the family insisted that he come back here to Sarawak. My father told him he had to go up to Saratok, that we would help him open a cafe there. But he had to stay there, my father said.”

“He’d given up the revolution?” Dan said.

Winston translated the question to his father in Malay.

“We forced him to,” Wo said. “Wo Sam made us look like fools. He even made me suspect in the minds of the British. Me!”

“What happened?”

Wo looked away. His folded hands quivered on the table top.

“My father was put in jail also, Mr. Dan,” Winston said.

“For what?”

“Nothing! For my uncle’s stupidity.”

“How long?”

“Also for three years.”

Winston translated again for his father, who sat silently, very angry.

“My father has little to say about Wo Sam’s past.” Winston laid his glasses on the table.

Dan considered the story, assuming it was the truth, even as it astonished him. “But in this case, Wo Sam’s innocent.”

“Oh, no doubt.” Winston ran a finger down the lapel of his coat, as though to smooth it. “And since you’ve been so kind, I hope you’ll permit me to…what do you Americans say? Help you out?”

“Yes, please. Help me out.”

Winston stood and walked toward the doorway at the front of the shop. He leaned his head out into the light, and then returned to the table to sit down. He joined his hands and leaned forward. “Wouldn’t do to have people listening in, would it?”

“I suppose not.”

“Have you spoken with anyone else about this, Mr. Dan?”

“No.”

“Good. No need to discomfit anyone, what? The way I see it, we have one option.”

“What’s that?”

“Suleiman bin Yussuf Suleiman.”

“Who’s he?”

“Rather high up in the Defense Ministry, actually. Liaison between the government and the colonial troops.” Winston paused, and then waved a hand before his face. “I mean the British, of course. Our democratic allies. He’s quite important. Mucky-muck in the government, to be sure. A man who’ll go far, and a friend of mine as well.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He studied in the States, in fact. And in London, where I met him. When you meet him, you’ll come to realize that Suleiman is a reasonable man. Under the correct circumstances, very reasonable.” Winston broke into a great, broad smile. For the first time Dan saw the resemblance between Winston and his father. The smile was like an exclamation point. “Meet me here in the morning, Mr. Collins, and we’ll go have a talk with him. He’s flexible. A good man.”

“Winston, we’ve got to do something this afternoon! Wo Sam’s sitting out there. I don’t know what they’re doing to him.”

Winston peered at his eyeglasses, which rested on the table, and then removed the handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Suleiman is the best the Malays have to offer. But we have to be patient with him.” Dan gathered himself to interrupt, but Winston continued. “To find how best to negotiate with him, you see.”

“I don’t see.”

“You will, Tuan.” Winston breathed heavily on the lenses.

The next morning, after a long, impatient breakfast, Dan walked with Winston up Merdeka Road to the government buildings. Winston wore a khaki bush suit, short sleeved with epaulettes, a white shirt open at the neck, and dark brown, tasseled loafers. His sunglasses were tinted more darkly in the upper half of the lenses than in the lower half. He carried a slim, leather folder, monogrammed “WW” in gold leaf. Dan wore the same crumpled shorts he had worn to Wo Ting’s the day before. He had gone out to buy a new shirt, however, and he had put on a pair of dark gray cotton socks that made his black, plastic sandals appear more formal. He had carefully shaved, and he had combed his hair.

“Now, Suleiman will probably be difficult, because he views himself as a keeper of the flame.” Winston adjusted the lapel of his coat.

“What flame?”

“The flame of Malay independence! Freedom from the colonialist yoke.”

“Malay independence!” Dan said. “But the Malays are only half the story.”

“Of Malaysia, you mean. Quite right, old boy. You’re wondering where the Chinese fit into it, eh?”

“Yes. And the others.”

“Quite. The others.”

The city of Kuching was small, with narrow streets and low buildings. It was saved from being entirely dull by the few hills on which it was situated, by the coconut palm trees that grew everywhere throughout the city, and by the extraordinary mixture of people. On his arrival in Kuching in 1963, Dan had thought it was a melting pot, so many races mixing so freely. Now he understood that the different peoples stayed rigidly separate in separate neighborhoods, that colors and religions and languages were strictly observed. The street was already filled with people. Malays rode bicycles from which hung plastic sacks, baskets filled with birds, tin cans. There were Tamil women dressed in saris. Some of the dresses were very elegant, with gold-thread brocade, others of stained and ragged cotton. Dan saw a red-skinned, alien British woman, the wife of a government officer, he assumed, doing her shopping, who stepped aside for a line of abashed Iban tribesmen in loincloths. Straw baskets were slung from their backs. They stared with awe at the woman. Chinese hurried everywhere from shop to shop. It was a very warm morning, with high clouds white in the sky.

The government office building was new, square, and gray, with dark windows and air-conditioning. At six stories, it was the tallest building in town. As they climbed the stairs, Dan’s sweat was like ice. Winston appeared unaffected by the change in temperature. Dan marveled at Winston’s consistency—always pleasant, always calm.

“Here we are.” Winston ushered Dan into an outer office. A view of the Kuching River was obscured by venetian blinds. A large photo of Prime Minister Tengku Abdul Rahman hung above the desk, at which a Chinese secretary sat typing.

“I’m Winston Wo. I’m here with Mr. Daniel Collins, of the U.S. State Department, to see Mr. Suleiman, please.”

The secretary excused herself and entered another office. There were some whispers and grunts of surprise.

“Winston Wo?” a man’s voice said. “I don’t believe it.”

After a bustle of movement, Suleiman appeared in the doorway. ‘Winston!” He stepped into the office and took each man’s hand.

“Suleiman, this is my friend Dan Collins.”

“From the States?”

“Yes,” Dan said.

Suleiman pumped Dan’s hand. “University of Tennessee.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“London School of Economics.”

After a moment’s silence, Dan looked to Winston for an explanation.

“Did you go to university?” Suleiman asked.

“I did, yes,” Dan said.

There was another pause, during which the American became embarrassed by the Malay’s expectant smile. Finally, Suleiman continued the conversation. “Where?”

“University of California. Berkeley. Class of ‘50.”

“Ah! Telegraph Avenue.” Suleiman said nothing about the street. He simply gave the name, as though affixing a stamp to some precise, narrow fact to which both men could clutch. “I was in Berkeley last winter. Postgraduate seminar. Do you know Ed Travers? Army Corps of Engineers?”

“No, I don’t. He lives in Berkeley?”

‘You know what I like about the U.S.A.?”

“No.”

“French fries.”

“Really!”

‘Yes. And San Francisco, of course.” Suleiman turned from Dan and addressed Winston. “What a shock to see you!” Suleiman’s face, open and guileless, was very round. His black hair lay across his forehead at an angle, and he frequently ran a hand across it to make sure it remained in place. His face contained no lines. He was dressed in a white cotton suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. “What brings you here?”

He showed the two men into his office. There followed fifteen minutes of small talk, in which Suleiman, between brief questions to the others, explained at length the advances in his career. “It was by a fluke, really. There are not many qualified people in the government these days.”

“True,” Winston nodded.

“Malays, I mean. The civil service is losing all the British now that Malaysia’s no longer a colony. So, really, I fell into this position.”

The three men sat in armchairs. Suleiman crossed his legs. His coat remained buttoned. “Do you know, I am the civilian officer in charge of military relations here in Sarawak? I have rather a lot of clout with the forces.”

“Yes, I do know that.” Dan’s arms were covered with goose bumps from the air-conditioning. “In fact, that’s why we’re here.”

Winston leaned forward. “We have something we’d like to speak with you about.” He looked at his watch. “We don’t want to take too much of your time.”

“You have a Bulova.” Suleiman pulled up the right sleeve of his coat. “So do I.” He held the arm out. Surprised, Dan and Winston looked on, forced to by Suleiman’s enthusiasm. “I bought it in Hong Kong. A job like this deserves a gold watch, don’t you think?”

“Suleiman, we’re here on an important mission,” Dan said. “Winston’s uncle Wo Sam is being held by the Australians, out at the Simanggang checkpoint.”

“No!”

“I’m afraid so. It’s a mistake, of course. It has to be. We’re hoping you’ll be able to do something about it.”

Suleiman joined his hands and looked up at the ceiling.

‘You know the Wo family. Fine business people. Very honorable.”

“Yes, I do know that,” Suleiman said. “But I also know about Wo Sam.”

“You do?”

“Not about this particular matter. But we do keep tabs on those Chinese who have given us trouble in the past.”

Winston stood up and walked toward the window. When he turned back, his eyes were motionless. Sudden anger sounded in his voice. “Why do you say ‘those Chinese?’”

“Winston, you know as well as I that the guerrilla forces are made up of your people. There’s no mystery about it.”

“Possibly there’s a reason for that.”

“What? That they’re criminals?”

“No, damn you. You damned Malays have stolen the government.”

Suleiman sniffed. “Racialist nonsense.”

“Winston. Please.” Dan sat helpless, surprised, as the two men began suddenly to argue.

“Half the population is Chinese,” Winston said. “We have almost no high government posts. Chinese aren’t even allowed in the army.”

“You’d have us arm them as well, Winston?” Suleiman said

“Wait, wait.” Dan sat forward, his elbows on his bare knees. “We’re not here to argue how the government is made up.”

“Besides,” Suleiman said, “you damned Chinese own everything. What more do you want?”

Winston turned away. Furious, he stood before the window with his back to the others.

After a moment Suleiman spoke again. “There may be some things I can do.” His voice rose to a speculative lilt. He surveyed the ends of his fingers.

Dan guessed Suleiman was dangling his power before them as a bullying child would do, and he resented it. However, he thought, if he can do something, let him have his way. “What sorts of things?”

“Oh, I could speak with the Australian command here.”

“We’d like you to do that today, Suleiman.”

Suleiman looked squarely at Winston’s back. Dan sensed the advantage Suleiman was taking of Winston’s need. There was childishness about this too, as though Suleiman were the long-suffering weakling finally in a position of power. “I’ve never visited your father’s shop, Winston.”

Winston continued surveying the view.

“I understand he’s quite wealthy. I wonder what sort of price your father would charge.”

Winston turned from the window.

“For a watch like this.” Suleiman displayed the Bulova once again.

“What does that matter?” Dan stood and walked to the window. ‘Watches! We should be concerned about rights, about justice.”

“Yes, Mr. Collins, of course.” Suleiman gestured toward Winston. “But my friend here and I are old friends. This is just a diversion.”

“He wouldn’t charge you much,” Winston said. “Indeed, old boy, I expect he could make you quite a bargain.” He removed his own watch and returned to his chair.

Dan, left standing by the window, felt the tension ease, for which he was thankful. But the two others now began examining Winston’s Bulova.

“Yes. I’m sure a price can be arranged,” Winston said.

Suleiman pouched his lips. “May I come to your father’s shop for a visit?”

“Why not this evening?”

Dan felt the conversation progressing entirely beside the point. “Winston, this is ridiculous!” He stood with his back to the window. Winston and Suleiman ignored him.

Wo Ting’s shop was filled with glass-enclosed counters. Each one contained a shelf covered with red felt, on which gold chains of various lengths and sizes were laid out. There were displays of chain and coins on the felt-covered walls as well, sheltered behind glass. In the candlelight a kind of sepulchral glow flowed from everywhere in the shop. The gold was of a wavering lightness that made it seem to hover in the air above the felt. The light changed moment to moment, and the gold appeared to move back and forth, to disappear, to reappear.

Dan sat alone at a table as Winston rummaged in the back for a bottle of brandy. The meeting with Suleiman that morning had discouraged the American. Dan felt he and Wo Sam were being made fools o£ All I do is wait, he thought. That the two men had paid so little attention to Dan’s worries irritated him, because he felt they were missing the danger of Wo Sam’s situation.

Winston entered the shop and placed a bottle of Courvoisier on the table with three glasses.

“I’m glad my father isn’t here.” He uncorked the bottle. “I’m afraid that, when it comes to Wo Sam, he’d side with the Aussies.”

A trishaw arrived outside, and Winston opened the shop’s front door. He beckoned once and Suleiman, nervous and sweating, entered the shop. His watch gleamed in the candlelight as he pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket. He wore no coat, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up above his elbows. He swabbed his forehead and looked back toward the door, which Winston closed behind him.

“I shouldn’t be seen here.”

“Why?” Winston turned back into the shop. “We’re respectable citizens.”

“Yes, yes. Of course.”

“Hello, Suleiman.” Dan rose up to shake the Malay’s hand and realized he had frightened him.

“Mr. Collins. I’m surprised to see you here.”

“I’m just trying to help my friend.”

Suleiman sighed. His eyes moved across one wall, pausing at the coins that glimmered most brightly in the candlelight.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Winston said.

The candles lit Suleiman’s hair and shoulders. His face was strewn with shadows.

Dan wished to interrupt the revery. “Let’s get on with it, Winston.”

“Yes. The problem.”

Suleiman’s head turned about so that he faced both men. He wiped his forehead with the handkerchief.

“The pleasant thing about an evening like this, Mr. Collins, is that we are all reasonable people,” Winston nodded. “Don’t you agree, Suleiman?”

Suleiman muttered an assent, barely audible. There was a phlegmy, constricted waver in his voice. He sat down.

“Educated. With a feeling for privacy,” Winston continued.

“Yes. Yes,” Suleiman said.

Winston brought a leather folder up from beneath the table and laid it on the tablecloth. He opened it quickly, and Dan took in a breath of surprise, then of shocked protest. The glow of gold coins broke from the dark leather. Winston laid his fingers on the coins and spread them around. He left the folder open on the table. The coins resembled small pools of flame.

Suleiman’s eyes glittered in the light. His hair had become disheveled. He leaned low over the table to look at the coins.

“My uncle Wo Sam has been a child,” Winston said. “A disgrace.” His voice had a sad tone, one of intimacy with close friends. “But he is no revolutionary.”

“What do you want me to do?” Suleiman took up one of the coins and caressed it with the ends of his fingers.

Dan moved his chair a few inches farther from the table. His hands dropped from the light. He wanted to distance himself from the others as much as he could. A bribe like this could cause terrible problems for him if it were known he had witnessed it—a State Department functionary party to the illegal release of a suspected terrorist. Dan felt the back of his chair digging into his shoulders. He moved to interrupt. But he held himself back. The fact remains, he thought, Wo Sam is not a terrorist. He’s an innocent man.

Dan realized that a conflict was occurring within Suleiman as well. In the dim amber light and the darkness, there was a struggle between the delicate beauty of the gold and Suleiman’s sense of himself as an important government officer. Greed burdened his perusal of the folder. But Dan sensed that Suleiman could not simply surrender to it. He had to be helped to surrender.

Dan looked toward Winston, whose eyes were bright and black. He seemed unable to speak, and Dan realized that he was caught up in his hatred of Suleiman. Of course, Dan thought, Winston’s planned to bribe Suleiman all along. But now Winston could not give the hint, the nudge, the push that would allow Suleiman to take the gold and get Wo Sam freed. A long silence, fully a minute long, ensued. No one was going to make the move. No one wanted to be responsible for it. Dan lowered his head onto one hand and struggled to calm himself. He hated the silence and the inaction. But he could not speak.

“Arrange Wo Sam’s release.” The words lurched from Dan’s mouth.

Suleiman’s eyes turned toward him. “I don’t have that kind of authority.”

“Yes, you do.”

“But what if he’s dangerous?”

Embarrassed, Dan addressed the tabletop. “You can do it, Suleiman. Wo Sam’s done nothing.” After a moment of silence, Dan reached across the table and closed the leather folder. He slipped it toward Suleiman. “It will rectify a terrible wrong.”

“Here, here!” Winston’s words were of great enthusiasm for the moment, although uttered as a whisper. He eyed the portfolio’s progress.

Suleiman rested a hand on the folder and for a moment fingered the leather strap.

“It’s for the good of your new democracy.” Dan’s voice and its uttered hypocrisy sickened him. Suleiman pulled the folder toward the edge of the table. Dan felt his guilt urging Suleiman’s action. “It will ensure Wo Sam gets a fair shake.” This last phrase came from him in English.

“What’s that?” The Malay dropped the folder onto his lap.

“It means ‘Justice’.” The word sounded to Dan like an epithet.

The next morning, Dan and Winston caught the first bus out of Kuching. It took three hours to get to the checkpoint, and Dan spent most of it listening to Winston talk. He went on for some time about public transport in rural areas. He chatted about the Earl Grey tea in the cafe at which the bus stopped for a break. He disliked the sweet coconut cake there, though he thought Dan’s iced lychee drink was passable. Winston liked the birds in the forest. He wondered why the Ibans lived in Borneo. Finally, he napped.

When they arrived at the checkpoint, Private Perkins and an Iban soldier came up the aisle of the bus checking the passengers’ papers. Dan told Perkins he and Winston wished to see Captain Brownly, and Perkins escorted them from the bus. They walked through the camp toward Brownly’s office. Winston sheltered his head from the sun with a newspaper.

Though there had been rain the night before, the high sun now shone on the tin roofs of the buildings. They were like slabs of blinding snow. The ground was dark red, and sunlight glared from the vast puddles.

“Ghastly place.” Despite his sunglasses, Winston squinted as they ascended the stairs to Brownly’s office.

Dan knocked on the doorjamb, and Captain Brownly, his forehead resting on one hand as he perused some papers at his desk, looked up at him.

“Good morning. May we come in?”

Brownly’s hand remained at his forehead.

“You remember me, I hope,” Dan said.

“I do.” Brownly surveyed Winston’s clothing, which was dotted with perspiration. “Who’s this?”

“Wo’s the name.” Winston extended his hand to the Australian. “Dan here tells me you’re responsible for my uncle’s release.”

“Your uncle, is he?”

Since it was being ignored, Winston let his hand drop. “Well, yes.”

“I don’t know how you got away with that, Collins.”

Brownly sat back in his chair. The spring that supported the chair-back creaked with his weight. He collected the papers on his desk and tapped them once. The movement, which was quick with irritation, crumpled the bottom half of the papers.

“There was nothing to get away with, Captain. He’s an innocent man.”

Brownly laid down the papers on his desk. “That little bastard is probably a murderer.”

Winston affixed Brownly with a stare of lawyer-like disapprobation. “I advise you to keep that opinion to yourself, Captain. It’s prejudicial. It would not bear up in a courtroom.” He joined his hands behind him. He appeared so little intimidated by Brownly that the Australian appeared for the moment stymied. He unbuttoned his shirt and adjusted the lapels to let in some air.

“I’m going to give you another opinion, then, Mr. Wo,” Brownly said. “When you deal with these kinds of people—guerrillas like these—you don’t worry much about evidence.” He gazed out the door a moment. “Because sometimes the first clue you have about who you’re dealing with is your own death.”

“Come now.”

“Court of law doesn’t mean much out here, Mr. Wo.”

“Where’s my uncle?”

“And that’s why we’re here.” Brownly stood up. “Because those chaps don’t give a shit about the law.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s right. Chaps like your uncle.” Brownly moved from the desk. “Your uncle is gone.”

“Gone!”

“They called us by radio-telephone first thing this morning. He was on the first bus.”

“Where to?”

“Saratok. He’s there now, I imagine.”

Dan and Winston followed Brownly onto the porch. As they descended the steps, Brownly leaned on the wooden railing. “Listen to me, Collins. Whatever you did to get that man set free, you made a mistake.”

Dan turned away without a response.

As the bus passed through the checkpoint and started up the road again, Winston shook Dan’s hand. “Suleiman came through.” He clapped the American’s knee. “As I expected he would. Now we go up to Saratok, have a little chat with my uncle the Chinese Sukarno, and be back in Kuching by tomorrow tea.”

When they reached Saratok, Dan asked the bus driver to drop them off in front of Wo Sam’s cafe. He noticed that Wo’s bicycle shop, usually a center of activity in Saratok because of its pool table, was closed. He stared at the shuttered shopfront as the bus moved through the bazaar. He pointed out the cafe to the driver. It was closed as well.

Worried, Dan thanked the driver, and the two men descended from the bus. They walked up the steps to the wooden sidewalk. Winston tested the small entry door in the front of the cafe. He knocked and waited, then knocked again very loudly

“May I help you, Mr. Dan?” The stationer Lew Ling emerged from his shop next door and approached them. A cigarette hung from his lips. He removed it and flicked it into the road before shaking Dan’s hand.

“Have you seen Wo Sam?”

“He was here this morning. But he didn’t stay.”

“He didn’t? Why not?”

Lew Ling pointed up the road. “He said he had argued again with his family.”

Winston, taller than Lew Ling and considerably more svelte, yet was shaken by this information. “What was that?” His shirt was splotched with sweat.

“Oh, Wo Sam fought with them many times. I’ve never met them, of course, but he often said they loved the tuans a bit too much.” Lew Ling nodded apologetically to Dan. “Forgive me, Tuan.”

“Never mind.”

“But he never cared for his family. Cowards, he called them.”

“What did he tell you this morning?”

“He said they’d betrayed him again. He told me there was some problem at the Simanggang checkpoint, and that they left him there to rot for a couple of days. ‘Me!’ he said. ‘An innocent man! My own family!’ he said. I tried to get him to stay. But he wouldn’t. He told me he was going down to the south, into the interior.”

Lew Ling shook his head and pulled another cigarette from the pack that was stuck beneath his belt.

“He worries me, Mr. Dan. Wo Sam’s argument with his family, it’s always been about politics. Always. Now he’s going back out into the forest, into the mountains.” Lew Ling’s match burst into flame. He nodded to Winston. “Out where they’re fighting the war.”

© 1988 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

From my collection titled The Day Nothing Happened, to be re-published in a new edition in 2027.

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The voice came through the window, with the sunlight. A whisper.

“Isabelita.”

Oh, Francisco, Elizabeth sighed. She awoke, grateful for the interruption. Darling Francisco.

She couldn’t move, but did not call Glorieta to come help her. The voice persisted. Francisco took her hand in his and kissed it, so sensuous, his hand like muscled silk, its fingers the very avenue to lovemaking. Francisco’s hair had been the blackest she had ever seen…or, more to the point, ever touched. When he had not responded to her letter, she had wept as she had realized that she would no longer have that hair in which to entangle her fingers.

As usual when Elizabeth thought of Francisco, she wondered why he had left her. But she knew why.

At The Spence School, all the girls had loved Elizabeth Ryan. Funny. Noisy. So beautiful. And so it had always been, so that now, when some item appeared about her in the newspaper or online, the occasion of a major opening at MOMA or The Whitney, the photo caption always identified her as something like “the vivacious” or “the exotic” Elizabeth Schuyler. The plaque on the wall of the new Islamic wing at The Met carried the names of a dozen major donors, among them Edwin and Elizabeth Schuyler. The information was not entirely accurate, since Elizabeth’s husband had died in the late 1980s. But she always included his name in any donation she made to whatever foundation, museum or orchestra because, even though she had inherited a fortune from her father and grandfather’s business successes, and had her own money from her investment firm—The Schuyler Funds, one of the first ever founded by a woman—Edwin Schuyler had made a tremendous amount of money all by himself.

Edwin had often said to her that he had done that in order to show her father that he was not the Protestant bounder that Harry Ryan had thought he was. Her father had thought so simply because Edwin’s family was Episcopalian, and because of the circumstances of their marriage. “What’s wrong with the Catholic boys up there at Yale?” he had often asked her before Edwin had popped the question. Elizabeth, who had loved her father, had known that he was quite wrong about the boy that she would eventually marry—despite her father’s disgruntlement—in 1942. With time, she had also come to love Edwin.

She had had to marry him, of course, but that was another story. Edwin had just graduated from Yale, and after their honeymoon in Maine, he had volunteered for the army. When he had returned home on leave from England a year later, Elizabeth had presented him with the little boy—Franco—with whom she had been pregnant on their wedding day.

An artillery captain, Edwin had eventually fought in The Battle of The Bulge, for which reason, he said for the rest of his life, he hated being cold. So their summer home in East Hampton, and the other one in Augusta, Georgia, where he enjoyed playing golf at the club, were essential to Edwin’s happiness. He had even played a round there with Arnold Palmer, a signal event in Edwin’s life.

Now ninety, Elizabeth was confined to a wheelchair, her body having, as she put it, “preceded my soul, rigidly, to the grave.” Franco had also preceded her there, a helicopter pilot killed in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam so long ago. Elizabeth remembered him as though the last time she had seen him were moments before. Every movement in his face, his black hair so entangled, especially when he would come out of the East Hampton sea, all tan and salt and affection. The day he had gotten his degree at Columbia, his future, his business acumen and intelligence had been clear to everyone. She especially remembered Franco’s hands, so like his father’s in the way his right took Elizabeth’s left—the firm touch of his hand—to escort her up the beach.

Despite his mother’s tears, Franco had insisted on Vietnam. “My dad went, Mom. I can go.” In Elizabeth’s office, he had told her about his plan to enlist. The office was a library study in the Sutton Place apartment in which the boy had grown up and in which Elizabeth lived to this day. Franco had entered the room despite his and Edwin’s respect for her working hours, eight to twelve every morning. She had been working on an idea for investing in movies, a script about a New York City romance between a wealthy art patron and a dashing but dastardly businessman. The eventual film had starred Steve McQueen, although Elizabeth had hoped for Cary Grant, principally because she had wished to meet him. “Too old,” the producer had told her. The movie had been a dog at the box office, and Elizabeth had shelved her plan to become a Hollywood mogul with others that she felt were equally screwy, like private space exploration and Argentine government bonds.

The tone of certainty in Franco’s voice, also like his father’s, nonetheless still had allowed for the laughter that everyone had enjoyed in him, even when he bragged about how not to worry about those damned Viet Cong. She had often imagined what he must have looked like that day, the helicopter’s wreckage everywhere. The blackness of the smoke and even of the flames, his fire-rupturing lips, the already destroyed eyes swept up in the conflagration…. She could return to peacefulness only through an insistent intervention by her heart upon these images. The word “yes”, the word “Franco”, the word “love” repeated over and over again by her, on purpose, unimpeded, as she would also recall the glimmer of good humor in most of what her boy had ever said, those walks up the beach, which they both had looked forward to, the way he had assured her—“It’s OK, Mom. I love you. Don’t worry.”—the day he had shipped out, the last time she had seen him, forty-seven years ago.

Although she could barely move now, and had to be helped in every endeavor, she still loved going for walks, with Glorieta.

Glorieta would dress Elizabeth and do her makeup, so that, although Elizabeth was stuck in what she called “the Cadillac”, she looked—as Edwin had so often said about her—like a million bucks. “The Cadillac” was a luxury adjustable wheel chair, on which she reclined rather than sat, sitting completely upright no longer a possibility. Elizabeth’s preferred clothing came from Bergdorf Goodman. Her personal shopper there, Cecily Townsend, knew her tastes very well and, once Elizabeth had given her a call and made an appointment, she could depend upon Cecily’s foraging for different surprises…everything with the stylish, considered flair in which Elizabeth so loved to present herself.

Just because she was ninety was no reason not to look her best, and she didn’t see why her confinement with this stupid, awful spinal condition should keep her down. Always in a kind of rattling pain up and down her back, her spine was now her lover, as she put it, a distant—and of course male—acquaintance that she had ignored all her life but to whose insistent disapproval she now felt compelled to pay attention. Glorieta had such talent getting Elizabeth ready for their walks that when they finally did get outside, for a sojourn around Sutton Place to go look at the river, or over to Madison Avenue or for a visit to the public library on Fifth Avenue for a lecture—in Elizabeth’s specially outfitted Mercedes delivery van—Elizabeth could be sure that the only thing she was missing that morning was, arthritis, the Cadillac and all, an invitation from someone like Helmut Newton to do a fashion shoot.

And of course, Elizabeth mused, Glorieta was no slouch herself. From Mexico, she had lived in New York City for twenty-five years, and now served as Elizabeth’s principal assistant and helpmate. The adopted daughter of an Hermosillo businessman, she had married an American from whom she was now divorced. Her two children attended the Cristo Rey High School on East 106^th. Elizabeth had found her as a referral from a friend for whom Glorieta had been a personal teacher of Spanish.

Glorieta did everything. She could get Elizabeth into and out of bed in ways that previous assistants hadn’t understood, so that Elizabeth was no longer shy about suggesting an afternoon nap for herself in bed rather than in the Cadillac. Glorieta wrote the letters dictated by Elizabeth to her nieces and nephews and the thank-you notes to her friends and the questions about investments to the fellow at Charles Schwab and the changes in her documents to Elizabeth’s attorney. Glorieta could mend anything, and she read to Elizabeth, her lovely Mexican accent rendering the English of the nineteenth century novels that Elizabeth so enjoyed somehow more romantic even than the author may have intended. Glorieta herself particularly liked Edith Wharton because Wharton wrote so much about old New York. Elizabeth—who had adored Edith Wharton since her days at Vassar—had told Glorieta that if she wanted to understand where those mansions on Fifth Avenue had come from, or all that art at The Frick, or Central Park itself, she would have to read Edith.

For some reason, though, Glorieta had a faulty memory about certain kinds of merchandise that Elizabeth would want from Bergdorf Goodman: a particular brand of hand lotion, for example, or the nylons that Elizabeth so preferred. Glorieta forgot things, as though she were wandering through interruptive thoughts of her own that had suddenly come upon her. Elizabeth would chide her at such moments for not being attentive enough, for not attempting to control such rushes of…whatever it was. Her chiding was patient, though, because Glorieta’s virtues were so special.

Most important, Glorieta listened when Elizabeth was explaining something she had cherished about her son Franco, about the days of suffering after he had died, and about the generosity of Elizabeth’s husband Edwin’s own mourning, and how he had taken such care of Elizabeth during the worst of it. His caresses and sweet whisperings had been intended for Elizabeth alone in her anguish, even as he too had been suffering so badly. When she talked with Glorieta about Franco, Elizabeth actually recognized some sort of dark form of sadness in Glorieta herself. As she listened, the occasional sigh that came from Glorieta indicated that death, profound disappointment, or something very like those, had been part of her childhood or her family’s fortunes. Glorieta kept it to herself. But Elizabeth knew nonetheless that, whatever it was, it was there.

Glorieta had been named for The Battle of Glorieta Pass, a not much acknowledged event in the American Civil War. It had been fought in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico in 1862, and, according to Glorieta herself, had been the Confederate loss that lead to the loss of the western Confederate states by the rebel government and, eventually, all of the Confederate states.

“How do you know about all that?” Elizabeth had asked a few months after hiring her.

Glorieta spoke English in a stately manner in which every word was carefully pronounced precisely. “Because of my great-great-great-great grandfather, who would like to have been part of it. He had been in the Mexican-American War—you know, in 1846—and was an officer in the San Patricio battalion.” Glorieta had been repairing a blouse as she had spoken, re-sewing a collar that somehow had come partially loose from the rest of the blouse. Elizabeth had complained that they could return it to Cecily Townsend. But Glorieta had said that she could mend the blouse to a state better than any replacement blouse would have. “And then, those will be my stitches resting softly against your neck, Ms. Schuyler, and you won’t have to worry about the blouse coming apart ever again.”

Elizabeth grinned. She had asked Glorieta early in her employment to call her Elizabeth. In public, though, Glorieta always referred to Elizabeth as “Ms. Schuyler”, and she loved it. The term had been around for at least forty years, but no one had ever used it for Elizabeth. Maybe everyone thought her too grand, Elizabeth chortled. If they only knew! “Ms.” still sounded so modern to her that Glorieta’s use of it made her feel a little like a feminist revolutionary, and at her age! Her childhood friends from Spence, now dead so many of them, would have silently approved…Becky Maynard, the true blonde who had finally gotten rid of that awful Wall Street idiot husband of hers who had gone to prison; Quentin Rose, with such beautiful skin, who really had been Italian with very handsome parents. She had left her husband too, only in this case for a fashion designer named Mariela Assisi; and little Electra Severance…. Well, Elizabeth thought, at least some of them would have approved. Maybe not Electra, who had become so tiresome with her Daughters of The American Revolution silliness and, just before she had died, her husband Marshall’s Tea Party silliness. Elizabeth recalled how Electra had gotten knocked up in her junior year at Spence. Elizabeth and the other girls had surmised that to be so, with no proof of any kind while Electra had been absent from school. Electra herself had finally admitted it to Elizabeth at Franco’s memorial service, twenty-eight years later in 1967.

“Does Marshall know?” Elizabeth had asked.

“Of course he does!” Electra had replied, giggling. “He’s Joey’s father, isn’t he?”

At the time, Joey had been in western Borneo with the Peace Corps.

“You mean, Joey is—“

“Yes! I got him back when he was six, and by then we were…well…” Electra’s grin contained a kind of conspiring, ditsy insouciance that infuriated Elizabeth. “By that time, we were husband and wife.”

Poor, dumb Electra.

Elizabeth had not known about the San Patricio Battalion, and Glorieta had explained that they were disenchanted Americans who had fought for the Mexicans against the Americans in the 1846 war. A great many of them had been Irishmen from New York, Glorieta knew, Catholics enraged by the treatment they had gotten in that city from its Protestants. She had understood that Elizabeth herself had been raised a Catholic, and so had felt safe in her assertions.

“Oh, but my husband was a Protestant.” A warm smile of pleased affection had come to Elizabeth’s lips. “Episcopalian in every respect.”

“Sorry, Elizabeth, I meant no offense.”

“Of course not, dear. I know that. But even my father, who would have made an excellent pope, and the very first Irish one, you know, would not have approved of those San Patricio men.”

Glorieta told how her parents had revered the name of Zoilo Enrique Gomez, her antecedent who had fought in that war against the Americans and survived, and gone on to business success in his native Sonora. He had been fascinated by the American Civil War too, finding it odd that there had been just one, while in Mexico there had been so many. “’Only a gringo…’” Glorieta had quoted him to Elizabeth, looking over her shoulder as though Zoilo might actually be in the room. “’Only a gringo would have just one civil war.’” As a very old man, almost a centenarian, Zoilo had helped fund the efforts of Pancho Villa, but had died before Villa had attacked New Mexico in 1916 and then escaped the American General Pershing. “Better left dead, sad old Zoilo,” Glorieta had whispered, to Elizabeth’s amusement. “Villa was a crook, you know.”

Weather permitting, the two women went out for a walk every day during the week, and were well known in the neighborhood. Elizabeth—her hair usually covered with a fashionable Hermes silk scarf—resembled a once-fabulous, still formidably beautiful and beautifully dressed movie star, down to even the Louis Vuitton Petit Soupçon Cat-Eye sunglasses and, in the warmer months, the Jimmy Choo pumps. Glorieta, less fashionable maybe, but elegantly lush nonetheless, also always wore Louis Vuittons, a gift from Elizabeth.

On a late April day, Elizabeth’s driver Mahmoud drove them to Central Park, where Glorieta wheeled Elizabeth once up The Mall and then back, before they were to lunch at The Carlyle Restaurant.

They paused near the statue of Fitz-Greene Halleck.

Much ardent sculpture has been placed in Central Park, some of the very worst of it, in Elizabeth’s opinion, in The Mall. “Ardent” in the sense of the sculptor’s wish to lay bare his seething post-Romantic emotions. A statue of Robert Burns looks off into the distance, his robes flowing about him like leaden lava. The one of Fitz-Greene Halleck also looks off into the distance, a pen in his right hand hovering over the ground, the hand hanging down from his chair as though waiting for some divine intervention to make it move. Elizabeth knew that Halleck had been as well known as Burns in his own lifetime, and had actually written about Burns:

“Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines,

Shrines to no code or creed confined—

The Delphian vales, the Palestines,

The Meccas of the mind.”

Halleck had known about where he lived, referring in a poem called “Alnwick Castle” to “this bank-note world.”

“Well, it’s New York City, isn’t it?” Elizabeth’s teacher Miss Hadwell had muttered to the class at Spence. Pretty, with somewhat bland, Mid-western girth and big ears, Miss Hadwell was generally hated by her students. “He was John Jacob Astor’s secretary, girls,” she had sniffed, looking at the students in their school uniforms as though each girl were an unseemly embarrassment. “And you would expect him to understand money.”

But a look of transfixed, clueless puzzlement wears on the face of Fitz-Greene’s statue in Central Park. Elizabeth worried, looking at him just now, that the ink would dribble from the quill in his hand to the earth below, so that when the light finally did flash into Fitz-Greene’s mind, he wouldn’t be able to write it down because the quill would be dry.

Sunlight dappled the statue. Elizabeth asked Glorieta to turn her toward the sun so that she could get its warmth on her face. Glorieta did so, also adjusting Elizabeth’s long, dark brown skirt so that it flowed properly the length of her legs to her crossed ankles. She buttoned the embroidered Tyrolean jacket—Elizabeth’s mother’s—that Elizabeth had so cared for through the years that it still appeared almost new. Noting Glorieta’s hands and the sweet manner in which they adjusted the skirt, Elizabeth realized that indeed she cared for Glorieta a great deal. Her hair was so beautiful, universe black with so many flowing curls. And that smile… She was like the daughter that Elizabeth would liked to have had, so that she wouldn’t have had to bear poor Franco’s death all alone.

“I’ve told you about Franco, haven’t I?”

“Oh, yes. A terrible story. So sad.”

Glorieta sat down on one of the benches, next to Elizabeth’s chair. A young Russian family picnicked across the way, its two girls running about playing tag while their parents argued. Birds sported in the branches.

“I’m sorry, dear.“ Elizabeth looked away. “I’m repeating myself.”

“No, you’re not. I love it when you talk about him. He must have been such a nice boy.”

A nice boy. So like his father. Elizabeth brought her right hand to her forehead, as though to smooth the grief-stricken furrow that had suddenly formed.

She had also remembered a party, when she had been nineteen. She had come home from Vassar for a weekend, and her father Harry had asked her to accompany him to a reception for Manuel Ávila Camacho, who was president of Mexico. She had had to break a date with her Edwin to do so, and it was a date that she had been looking forward to. She and Edwin had actually started a—Elizabeth had had to settle her excitement a bit—an affair. During a weekend at Yale, they had succeeded in eluding their chaperons and going to, of all places, a hotel. A friend of Edwin’s was working there as a day desk clerk, and Edwin had been able to get Elizabeth in without anyone noticing. So, while Yale battled Harvard on the gridiron, Edwin and Elizabeth lost themselves in the activity that Elizabeth had dreamed about since she had been a little girl. The experience with Edwin had been everything she had hoped for…everything, even though Edwin had been a little embarrassed at first. Considerably embarrassed, and shy. But Elizabeth, with quite a bit of good humor, had been able to relax him and, so, awaken his more manly intensities.

Now, in New York, her father Harry told her “Honey, to miss an opportunity to see the presidential suite at the Plaza is like missing life itself.”

Elizabeth had dressed in a Chanel gown that her mother Peg had bought a few years before the war, something that Peg told her would glorify “those shoulders of yours, Beth.” Her mother could not attend the reception. So, on her father’s arm, Elizabeth was greeted at the door of the suite by a tall black man dressed in black tie and tails who offered to take her wrap. The very size of the suite took Elizabeth’s breath. She could actually feel her eyes widening, stretched and round so as to take in as much as possible. The two chandeliers in the main room cast light across a hundred or so men, all of them grumbling with cheerful, self-accepting importance. There were women there too, gloriously dressed, overlooked. A chunky man in a beautifully tailored black suit, with a green, white and red sash displayed diagonally across his chest, shook hands and offered humorous greetings in Spanish and heavily-accented English. More black men in tails served hors-d’oeuvres and drinks, one being a rum punch of which her father allowed Elizabeth just one mint-garnished crystal cupful.

Elizabeth was thrilled by what she saw, never having been in such a place before, even in The Hamptons. This was statesmanlike splendor, and once she realized that the man wearing the sash was indeed the president of Mexico, Elizabeth felt that she had arrived—suddenly—at adulthood. Across the room, beneath another chandelier and above the enormous fireplace, a portrait of a formally dressed and disapproving John Pierpont Morgan stared at her. She enjoyed how the very materials in the portrait—the paint, Morgan’s name engraved on the bronze plaque below the painting, even the gold-painted, carved wood frame—seemed as ruggedly pocked with age as Morgan’s nose. Elizabeth also saw staring at her, from just below the portrait, the startling eyes of the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Ever.

He left the painting to its own devices, to approach Elizabeth. “Señorita, I am Francisco Herrera.”

A polo team had come from Mexico to New York, to play a series of matches against an American team. President Ávila Camacho introduced the team, explaining that they intended the matches to help raise money for the American armed forces, reeling just at that moment from the attack on Pearl Harbor. The applause had been grand with approval, and after the remarks, the team had stood in a reception line. Not all the players were handsome, and several spoke no English. But Elizabeth’s father assured her that these men were the very best “in a country where upper class polo players seem to grow from trees. It’s like Hollywood. You know, Douglas Fairbanks.”

Elizabeth knew who Fairbanks had been. Her own mother had professed to have been in love with the movie star once she had seen The Mark of Zorro in 1920. “Especially the sword fight at the beginning, Beth. You never saw a man like that.” She and Elizabeth had been examining an old photo of Fairbanks in a movie magazine. “Of course that was before I married your father,” her mother had hurried on, to clarify the sigh that had escaped her. “And even then, I knew that a man like Doug Fairbanks could never be faithful.” She looked up from the magazine. “Even to Mary Pickford, who was his wife, you know.”

The photo showed him wearing a gaucho hat, a roughly folded, patterned cloth tied loosely around his neck—a good portion of which showed from his button-less open collar—and a gold earring in his left ear. He was smiling very broadly, his teeth shimmering from between the dashing mustache and the chin stubble, as though a beautiful señorita had just come into view. Someone not Mary Pickford, Elizabeth imagined.

Because he had already greeted her, Elizabeth knew that Francisco spoke English. Indeed his accent was so attractive that she imagined he was on his way to becoming some sort of diplomat or perhaps even president himself. Maybe thirty years old, he was taller than most of the other players. He had Fairbanks-like looks, although he was already so much more urbane than the movie star and so much better dressed that Elizabeth concluded that Francisco must also be rich. She disliked herself for this, her family’s wealth being something for which she herself took no credit. The difference between Elizabeth’s privilege and that of an Irish washerwoman in Hell’s Kitchen had little to do, for Elizabeth, with the washerwoman’s lack of nascent ability. That woman was stuck there because her family had arrived poor, while Elizabeth was greeting the president of Mexico because she herself had arrived on this earth rich. I didn’t have anything to do with it, she thought.

She inched closer to Francisco.

His face had a lovely angularity that found its real beauty in his smile and the chin below it. The eyes, unquestionably, were one thing. But the smile was quite another. It was not large. It wouldn’t cause you to stop breathing a moment were it to glitter from the silver screen. But it was imbued with outright kindness. Once seeing a smile like this, you had to conclude that kindness flowed from the man like blue Pacific waters wandering from the sea into a delicate, accepting inlet. It also did not appear to Elizabeth to be plastered on his face, the way President Ávila Camacho’s smile was. No, Francisco’s lovely good humor came and went as the occasion called for it…also like the Pacific. The smile was simply a natural result of his taste in conversation, his appreciation of beauty.

His chin supported it like a chiseled, humor-filled pedestal.

Elizabeth advanced even further along the reception line.

“Hello, Isabelita.” Francisco took her hand in his.

Elizabeth sensed that her father, standing right behind her in line, flinched a bit when he saw Francisco. She didn’t care.

“Hello, Francisco.”

A moment later, as they re-joined the guests in the room, Harry leaned toward Elizabeth.

“Isabelita? What’s all that?”

“It’s the name he gave me.”

“You’d met him already?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“When?”

“When you were talking with President Ávila Camacho.”

Harry remained silent.

“Is the president nice?”

She didn’t tell her father—yet—that Francisco had expressed the hope that Elizabeth would come to the polo match that following weekend at the Commodore Club in East Hampton. He would enjoy wearing a handkerchief from her around his neck, he said.

“I didn’t care for you talking with that fellow,” Harry said an hour later. He was driving their Packard up Madison Avenue, toward home.

“But Daddy!”

“He’s Mexican.”

“Oh, Daddy.”

“You don’t know where he’s from or what kind of school he went to or—”

“But he’s sweet.”

Harry grumbled to himself.

“He’s a national champion!”

“At what?”

“Polo!”

They drove in silence for several blocks.

“And I was there when you got tickets to the match, Daddy.”

“I did, yes, but it’s for the war. I hadn’t much planned on going.”

“I’ve never seen a polo match.”

Two more blocks passed, with a long interruption at a traffic signal.

“Your mother won’t like it.”

“I’ll bet she’ll want me to go.”

“Elizabeth… Honey, I want you to listen to me.”

“I promise I won’t do anything, Daddy. I’ll behave.” She looked down at the small handbag that rested on her lap, in which she kept her lipstick. “I always do.”

On an exceptionally warm day on which Elizabeth wore a white summer dress, a pair of open-toed white pumps and a large summer straw hat, horses surged up and down the polo field like heavy, muscled yachts.

As they went from one end to the other, the ground beneath the shade tent from which Elizabeth and the others watched would begin to tremble, then would shake in earnest, and finally would calm itself until the horses came back in the other direction. The Americans wore white polo shirts, the Mexicans black, and every one of the players seemed to be part of the horse on which he rode, an extension of the horse’s hurtling grace and strength.

At one point, Francisco had progressed the ball all the way up the field from before the Mexican goal toward the American one, his horse sometimes sprinting straight, with wildly nattering eyes, other times meandering with nonetheless great speed through the opposing team’s mounts, avoiding all of them. Elizabeth could see the skill with which Francisco guided his mare past the other animals, and defended her from them. The ball floated and bounced, seemingly flying along a path, the mallet a flying delicacy pursuing it. Elizabeth’s handkerchief fluttered in the melee. When the mare and the man passed before the tent, the earth pounding as though it had a heart of its own, Francisco was able to flash a quick smile at Elizabeth. Her heart, she worried, would soon fail.

The Mexicans won, one to nil. The goal, of course, had been scored by Francisco on that very play.

They sat on a covered porch swing outside the club ballroom. They had to be still so as not to alert the dancers inside or, Elizabeth worried, her parents.

“I would like you to have this ring.” Francisco opened his hands. “As un recuerdo.” Elizabeth’s handkerchief rested, roughly folded, within them. “A memento.” It was soiled with sweat-mottled dust, and she took in a breath as she realized it had gotten so on the field of play, during the mayhem. “I don’t know if we’ll see each other again.”

“We will.” Elizabeth reached for the handkerchief with her right hand.

“I hope so. I wouldn’t want—”

She undid it, her fingers pushing aside each fold.

“I wouldn’t want to come all this way to New York from my poor Mexico, and not come back to sit with you here again.”

Elizabeth took in a quick breath. The ring gleamed from the stains of sweat.

She allowed Francisco to caress her arm. A riveting shock went through her. Love, she thought. She felt a movement of sighs making its way through her legs and tummy, and everything in between. Would she succumb to a kiss? She hoped so. She wished for it. Francisco leaned toward her, and she waited for it. His fingers played with hers.

He kissed her arm. “Mi Isabelita.” His lips were so golden and dark. Not like her boyfriend Edwin, who was white beyond belief, in his lips and his ideas. A sweet, smart man with received ambitions, Wall Street awaited him, while here, now, Isabelita awaited a kiss from Francisco Herrera.

He did kiss her. They kissed many times, and, as Isabelita ran her hands across both sides of his face, grasping for more kisses, she felt her blood rushing through her, swelling her. After several moments, Francisco stood, took her hand, and led her out toward the grove of Italian cypresses, in the darkness at the far end of the clubhouse lawns. She placed her head on the side of his left arm as they walked, both her hands wrapped around his left hand. The music behind them, which had seemed so cacophonous and rattling to her when they had been dancing, now receded into the background, honey-like strings punctuated with youthful laughter. She felt that she could barely walk, she was so excited. The Atlantic Ocean, a ruffling sigh in the distance before them, seemed, in its immensity, to intend itself for just these two people.

They lay in the warmth of the evening on Francisco’s smoking jacket, kissing, hidden beyond the trees. When, kneeling over her, he kissed her knee and then the inside of her left thigh, Elizabeth thought that now, finally, she would find what so many of her girlfriends talked about with her and wished for. What she would be able to tell them. How it was that real love made you feel so electrified.

“Do you see them, Elizabeth, across there?” Glorieta said.

The two little Russian girls had raced up The Mall, while their arguing parents had kept arguing. At the moment, the father was standing away from the bench, his hands in the pockets of his black slacks. His white shirt was wrinkled and sweaty, and hung out behind. Their incomprehensible Russian was filled with aspirated S’s and Z’s. The black tie resembled a slim rag. He was very angry with his wife, and glowered at the walkway in silence as she berated him.

“It doesn’t look good for them, does it?” Elizabeth turned back toward Glorieta. To her astonishment, Glorieta’s lips were quivering.

Elizabeth took in a breath. “What’s wrong, dear?”

Glorieta gathered her hands together on her lap. “Fathers….” She could not continue.

“What about them?”

“Fathers so often don’t know what they’re doing.”

Elizabeth kept quiet, awaiting more. But Glorieta did not continue.

“But I’m sure yours did, didn’t he? A pretty girl like….”

Glorieta inclined her head so closely toward Elizabeth that Elizabeth reached out to caress her hair. The curls felt like fine, dark silk.

“Please tell me what’s wrong, dear.”

Glorieta looked up at the couple across the way. “He doesn’t realize the mistake he’s making.”

The argument continued, and the couple’s daughters quieted as, their gayety and play turning to silence, they approached their parents once more. Uncertain. Looking to each other.

“He’s thinking…look at him…he’s thinking, right now, of how happy he’d be if he just left.”

“I suppose so.” Elizabeth glanced toward the couple. “But, with those two girls? Look what he’d lose.”

“I know. That’s the worst.” Glorieta took in a breath, and then lowered her head once more. “The worst.”

Elizabeth was pregnant. She had written to Francisco, to the address he had given her in Mexico City. She knew he would write back right away. The act of sending her letter to him, the very placing of the envelope in the mailbox slot, lessened the shocking fear that had seized her earlier that morning, before she had written it.

Now, she imagined his reading the letter, probably at first chagrined by the news. But Elizabeth concentrated more on picturing his consideration and integrity. His voice soothed her, the softness of the syllables “Mi Isabelita” bringing to Elizabeth a calming of her breathing, the certainty that Francisco’s sincerity would immediately surface. He would take up pen and paper to write back to her, to describe for her how much he worshipped her.

For the moment, though, without that return letter, Elizabeth was too terrified to tell her mother. Getting pregnant was not part of the plan, and she knew that she would be tossed out of Vassar too, if they found out. But once Francisco came back…once he arrived in New York and came with her to her parents’ living room, when he asked for her hand, when he married her…. She knew that, then, she could withstand any sort of shame.

She sensed just now that she could feel her baby moving around, which he was probably doing, even though she knew it was way too early for that to be noticeable. When Francisco came back, there would be no anguish. She placed a few fingers on her lower tummy. Only happiness.

Is he there? My new little sweetheart? No letter of reply ever came. My blood, my life?

Edwin sat before her, in his parents’ apartment on East Eighty-sixth. He wore a suit, in town for a cousin’s wedding. His parents were at church, and would be picking up Edwin and Elizabeth in half an hour, to go to the wedding ceremony. As usual, Edwin’s mother had embraced her, displaying the happiness with which she always greeted the girl. “Is there anyone who doesn’t love you?” she had asked. Elizabeth cared a great deal for Alice Schuyler, and this morning, when she had arrived at the apartment and Alice had asked her that question, she had looked away, embarrassed.

“Is something wrong, Elizabeth?”

“Oh, no. I….” Elizabeth had brushed her hair back with her right hand. “Just tired.”

“And happy to see Edwin.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.”

His parents had gone off to church, and at first, Edwin had barely responded when Elizabeth had told him she was worried. He was tall and—always—quiet, a nice man whom Elizabeth felt that she could, someday, love.

“Because I have some news,” she had said

Edwin, putting on an overcoat, had turned toward her. Serious and considerate, twenty-one, he always smiled in a way that pleased Elizabeth. She knew he cared for her, and just now she hoped that the sensitivity that that smile had represented to her ever since she had met him would see him through what she was about to say. She also worried, though, that Edwin might recoil from her, caught, angered by all this. Her reputation would be ruined. But his…Eddy’s!...could be destroyed. Locked into a marriage he did not want.

Her chest hurt.

Elizabeth had known just one other girl who had become pregnant when she wasn’t yet married: Electra Severance. Blonde with a kind of cliché-ridden jollity all the time, she had disappeared from school that day and had come back a year later, just as frivolous although slightly more guarded. She had been in Europe, Electra had explained. “I just loved Venice!” she had said.

Looking up at Edwin, Elizabeth had gathered the words. “I’m…I’m going to….” She couldn’t say it.

Edwin remained standing before her, “Have I done something wrong?”

“Oh, no. It’s just….” Elizabeth leaned to the left, lowering her head so that her hair partially hid her face.

“Are you mad at me?”

Elizabeth had kept her head down. She felt that mortification had stopped her heart. The right kind of girl doesn’t get pregnant. The Church…God…. They’ll send me to Hell. Harry and Peg Ryan’s daughter wouldn’t get pregnant. What’ll Daddy do?

“Eddy, I’m going to have a baby.” Elizabeth could not look up at him. She groaned. “Your baby.”

When she did look up, Edwin’s face appeared to her like weathered marble. Elizabeth knew that he was going to tell her to get out. He sat down on the couch next to her and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. His hands were splayed apart, and he turned them palms up and down, studying them.

“Damn it, Elizabeth.”

“Eddy, please.”

“Christ!”

“Please.”

“Well, we’ve got to get married.” He rested his chin on the palm of his right hand. Elizabeth searched his face for the anger that she knew he must be feeling. The entrapment and the shame. But just now a smile appeared. Elizabeth sat in anguish on the couch next to him. But Edwin, sensitive to her worry, took up her hand and faced her. “I should say that a little differently. I mean…Elizabeth, will you marry me?”

The Russian couple did not make up. But they gathered their two girls together and made a semblance of agreement with each other. As the family proceeded up The Mall toward Seventy-second Street, Elizabeth and Glorieta watched, Glorieta still beset with the distraction with which she had first observed the family and, especially, the father. She held a handkerchief.

Elizabeth leaned back against the Cadillac’s headrest. “Tell me about your father.”

Glorieta leaned her head to the side as she examined her lap. “My real father?”

“Yes, I…I suppose so.”

“I met him just once.”

“Once.”

“Yes. He had made my mother pregnant.” Glorieta looked up, a grin appearing on her lips despite the liquid sheen of her eyes. “That’s how I should say it in English, no?”

“It’ll do, sweetheart.”

“He made her pregnant.”

“With—”

“With me.” Glorieta’s fingers hurried about one another.

“And then, he—”

“Yes. Then he left.”

Elizabeth’s heart tightened. “But you did know him.”

“I met him.”

“What was that like?”

Glorieta exhaled. She lifted a hand to her hair. “I was twenty or so.”

“Where?”

“In Mexico City.”

“What was he like?”

Glorieta groaned. “He was maybe sixty years old.”

“What did he look like?”

“Defeat.”

“How were you able to contact him?”

“Ruined. Gray.” Glorieta swept her hair back, a fatigued gesture. “His overcoat was stained. His hair needed cutting. It was dirty.” Glorieta’s mouth turned down in an expression of revulsion. “He was wearing a suit and tie. But the suit was too big for him. He barely filled it.” She wrung her hands once, finally looking up at Elizabeth and smiling for her, a clear wish to soften the revelation for Elizabeth, to relieve Elizabeth’s own possible discomfort. “He was handsome, I guess…or at least he looked like he once had been very handsome.”

“How did you find him?”

“He contacted me.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I was a student at the Ciudad Universitaria…in poetry.” Glorieta exhaled. “I guess I wanted to be a poet.”

“And he sought you out.”

“Yes.”

Elizabeth’s stomach quivered as though, to her chagrin, she herself were being sought out. “What did you think?”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“What did he want?”

Glorieta’s lips crumpled upon one another. “Money.”

“Did your mother know?”

“Oh, no. This was just on an afternoon in Mexico City. My mother…my mother….” Glorieta took the handkerchief into the fingers of both hands. “This man…he had betrayed my mother when she was just a girl. He left her…with me.” She twisted the handkerchief around the fingers of her right hand, studying the way the fingers became incarcerated. “You know.” Glorieta, pointed at her tummy. “Inside. And of course….” The handkerchief came unraveled.

“He had left you.” Elizabeth laid a hand on her own tummy. “With her.”

“That’s right.”

Elizabeth knew how painful this recollection was to Glorieta. She wished to take Glorieta into her arms and comfort her. She wanted to alleviate the distress, suddenly loving Glorieta for being able to share such a story with her employer, who was an elderly cripple in a wheelchair. Elizabeth’s own heart fell into a kind of grateful remorse. Her sympathy for Glorieta warmed it, even though Glorieta herself, in this moment, was too involved in the memory of her father to realize what might be happening in Elizabeth’s comprehension of her. It’s so difficult for her, Elizabeth thought. And look at how long her father kept her waiting, how long it took for him just to show up. And look what she’s giving to me.

Elizabeth also worried, from the commiserative look that Glorieta now gave her, that the younger woman’s story would come out even worse than the one that Elizabeth could tell her. Although she knew that she would not tell Glorieta the story, which had become a closely held personal grievance that nonetheless found its thread in the unrequited and absurd love she still felt for Francisco. That story would never come out, especially now, so long ago, so much examined and re-examined by Elizabeth for so many years.

“A playboy,” Glorieta muttered.

“But not wealthy.”

“No.”

“A businessman, dear?”

“No. A scoundrel.”

“What did he do?”

“Played polo, my mother told me. She said that that was what made her fall in love with him at first. A fine Mexican man beautiful on a beautiful horse, the grace and strength—”

“The charm.”

“Yes. My mother used that word too. “’¡Él me encantaba, mi’ja!’ she said to me so often. ‘Because he was so charming!’” Glorieta’s mouth turned down. “She loved him…even though…even though he had abandoned—”

“What was his name?”

“Francisco.” Glorieta lowered her eyes, now stricken, and compelled herself to stare at the crumpled handkerchief in her fingers. “Francisco Herrera.”

“His name?” Elizabeth brought the fingers of her right hand to her cheek. “What?”

Glorieta, surprised, offered her a smile, not expecting the intensity in Elizabeth’s voice. “Francisco. You know, it’s nothing special. A common Spanish name.”

“Yes, but….”

Elizabeth’s thoughts careened against one another. Finally, she looked to the side, at the statue of foolish Fitz-Greene Halleck, the moony poet awaiting a word or two from the muse. After a moment, Elizabeth turned once more to Glorieta, whose unhappiness remained in the way she looked again toward the now far away, retreating little Russian girls.

Elizabeth floated into a revery. She had so wondered about him, whether he had ever become the great Mexican statesman of which she had dreamed. She had looked for his name now and then, in the diplomatic news or the international gossip columns or the world polo news. But Francisco Herrera had disappeared, except in Elizabeth’s dreams, in which Francisco kissed her time and again, took her hand in his and kissed it, caressed her hair with his lips. “His lips,” she whispered to herself. His fingers…. Francisco Herrera, who had driven Elizabeth crazy when she was nineteen and who even now came to her from time to time, to help her to fall asleep, whispering “Mi Isabelita.”

Franco’s father.

Glorieta remained quiet. She lifted her eyes to Elizabeth’s. There were no tears, although there was clear longing and regret. The clear wish for her father’s love, such as it could be.

She so reminded Elizabeth now of… Oh, Glorieta. Of my beautiful Francisco.

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From my 2017 collection titled New York.

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