Written In Stone: Passions East and West

By Julius Rowan Raper

During a split in his affair with Rashida, an attractive psychotherapist who has earlier moved with him from north LA to eastern Virginia, script-writer Lance Garnett, meets Lisa Birdsong, an academic with a husband 20 years her elder. When Rashida, whose distinguished family live in DC exile, desires to make up with him, it becomes difficult fo

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Oct 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643678757

Julius Rowan Raper

JULIUS ROWAN RAPER is the author or editor of seven published books including DEEPEST FRANCE and MYSTERIOUS DAYS (paired novels), WITHOUT SHELTER (the early life and fiction of Ellen Glasgow), and NARCISSUS FROM RUBBLE (reflections on contemporary British and American Fiction). Raper has degrees from three American universities and has traveled often throughout Europe and on occasion in North Africa, Thailand, Singapore. For four years he lived and worked in Greece, the setting for the political and intimate events in ESTIA RISING. He has two grown children and one grandchild.

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Written in Stone

Copyright © 2019 by Julius Rowan Raper. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, descriptions, entities, and incidents included in the story are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, and entities is entirely coincidental.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of URLink Publishing.

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Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64367-876-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64367-875-7 (Digital)

25.09.19

CONTENTS

Description

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Some people claim

there’s a woman to blame—

but I know …

Buffett, Margaritaville

DESCRIPTION

Written in Stone is an ironic but serious comedy about three people who attempt to write their lives the way they wish but discover themselves behaving as though written by someone else.

Rashida, who wants to become as American as anyone, is governed instead by the cultural rigidity and traumas of her childhood.

Lisa has lived her life as a self-determining woman but now discovers herself pulled to patterns of mountain domesticity.

Lance, the professional script-writer, seeks a better story, yet fears he will find himself in the same impossible relationships.

This is a novel of echoes..

Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or woman lost?

Yeats, The Tower

Remember that you have paid a price; that of a world

rich in mystery and delicate emotion It is not only species

of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling.

Fowles, The Magus

I

Lance liked to think that he had created adequate options for the near future now that he was able to choose between tanned beautiful Rashida and lovely flaming Lisa.

His initial encounter with Lisa six months before had been an exception to this confidence, probably because she had gone in and out of focus much the way Rashida had a habit of doing. Their variability, he decided, could be a quality he desired.

Encountered, not met, he repeated—to the quiet at his own desk whenever he revisited the occasion—since he had heard Lisa before he saw her and seen her before he met her. She seemed an apparition coming into view, a photo developing quickly but in stages.

First there was the voice, quarrelsome, still musical, coming from somewhere in a noisy banquet room, clear as a bell: My god, Joseph, we have to get out of here. I don’t feel like yakking with all these people!

It seemed to originate from someone standing just to the rear of his left shoulder. When he turned no one was there, only the long mahogany table decked out with brie, broccoli, and chardonnay—and a hundred bodies who had remained after his talk to enjoy the freebies.

If you want to stay, Joseph, stay! But I’m walking.

Lance lifted his gaze just in time to catch lips moving apparently in rhythm with the words. They were at the far end of the thirty-foot board and near the bottom of a long serious face framed by long hair of a slightly dark gold above the simple black dinner dress. His eyes moved up to hers, which were far from simple—chiefly sad, with a sadness that drew his own eyes and drowned them. Instantly drowned them. He felt he knew a few things about drowning because he was still researching his script about a boy who drowned in France—and these were drowning eyes. He ought to hire out as life-guard, his therapist Mason had said at the time, and only half-joking apparently. But he headed in her direction anyway, wishing he had slipped into something better for the talk than this old blazer and charcoal worsted trousers.

Through the grazers and nibblers, it was slow going, plenty of time to puzzle through the mystery. She was forty, fifty feet away, and whispering, but he heard her clear as crystal. An odd thing, he felt, as though he was standing next to her and at the same time sitting in the studio, watching an actress lip-synch dialogue. Must be something about this room, he told himself, and looked up. Probably some Jefferson thing, like the oval dome up there, he guessed, as he took in the carved dark wood overhead. Opposite points must communicate with one another. It’s a good thing she can’t hear what I’m thinking—she’d bolt before I got there. He didn’t know then that, in one sense, there was little danger she would ever get away.

He excused himself, rudely he knew, from the tall young fellow who was sharing his response to Lance’s short talk on Leigh Harkness’s novels—sharing at length, he added in self-defense. In case she was looking where their eyes had drowned together, he stopped to pour another glass of the nutty good chardonnay everyone drank that late summer, then made his way down the second half of the table.

Later, he tried to persuade himself that, as he reached all that bright hair, he had not tapped her on the shoulder. But he knew what he had done.

She turned and demanded an explanation—Yes, what is it?—before he saw it register that he was the speaker of the afternoon.

You look very familiar, he said. After a year with Rashida he had given up the need to move subtly in such situations. I want to introduce myself. I am Lance Garnett.

She offered a gracious social smile. Of course, Mr. Garnett. So nice to meet you. And good to have you back in Williamston. I am Lisa Birdsong. I enjoyed your talk so much.

You are fond of southern fiction?

Vivien Leigh Harkness is one of my favorite writers. I always felt her novels would make excellent movies. Her eyes came alive for a second, the first spark he’d seen there.

Yes, they certainly would. He looked for a second flash in these eyes. Lisa Birdsong, you say? He wrote that on the screen in his mind. Leigh’s life as much as her fiction interests me. But no more than your musical name. It fits. She accepted the hand he offered.

The pleasant-looking, grey-haired man she was with moved to another group of banterers. Lance took him for one of the professors.

She squeezed his hand. I look familiar and my name fits? How can that be? Still no second light in her eyes.

He squeezed more warmly in return than he knew he should. In The Will of the Wind, the Helen character has hair like yours. He formed a smile he saved for amusing coincidences. She rides her palomino over the hills and her ‘hair flies in the wind like the banner of Virginia,’ to quote our compatriot.

Will of the Wind? It’s one of your films?

No, no, no. Not yet. It’s Leigh’s second novel. I described its erotic structure in my little talk.

Yes, it seemed odd. I thought I had read all her books. I love them. They are unusually realistic.

Yes, they are. He didn’t want to admit that he admired Leigh’s fictions a tad less than Leigh’s own fantastical climb out of the West Virginia coal-mining region to her eminence as novelist. His film, he believed, would add to that eminence when it came out.

Her women, Lisa added, are so much like—like—women I know.

Are they? He wondered what she had been on the verge of saying, but opted for a harmless reply. Are you from West Virginia?

Not at all. I grew up on a farm outside Roanoke—a real, ordinary Virginian.

You’re kidding me? So did my father. That’s why your voice, your accent, sounds so familiar.

Oh, come on. For the first time she laughed—an easy, child-like laugh that he felt must be warming her as surely as it did him. He spotted that second spark he had looked for in her eyes—for a moment.

It’s true. He mirrored her modesty with a boyish laugh. So Southside Virginia and West Virginia are not galaxies apart despite all the ink, and blood, spilt to the contrary?

I don’t know about all that. Her full lips, wide enough to remind him of the glorious Sophia, were pulled tight: she was serious again. Only that Leigh has a knack for capturing what it feels like to be a girl and a woman in our world now—in the South anyway.

That’s so?

Well, I know how it’s been for me.

He was about to ask how that might be when the chair of the department sponsoring his talk, a dapper little fellow with a silver moustache and lime polyester blazer, seized his elbow. He announced to Lisa that he must borrow Mr. Garnett and steered him off to chat up an alumnus who had grown rich dumping dioxin into lovely mountain rivers but nonetheless admired one or two of the comedies Lance threw together before he tried resuscitating the little boy drowned in France in a script based on a novel by his poet-friend, Milt Walters.

* * *

Lance saw her again a week or two later at another reception, this one in Richmond after the opening of a small-gallery exhibit that featured nineteenth century black painters. She was standing by the dining table testing her way through the cheese and pate’ in the home of the woman who managed the gallery. She was the first person he’d recognized as he moseyed from the long entrance hall into the rear rooms where the crowd had collected. For the first time he observed more of her than her undertow eyes and brilliant hair. She was tall, his height, approaching six feet, with very long limbs and a high, high waist. The crisscrossing folds of the dark grey dress, business-like but already behind the fashion even he could tell, seemed to suppress the fullness of her chest while it emphasized the smallness of her shoulders. A high brow, narrow cheeks and prominent chin, he thought as he moved directly toward her, heightened the sadness of her mouth and eyes. He would, he decided, add these to his description of the French boy’s lovely mother.

Lisa Birdsong. Good to see you.

Mr. Garnett. How nice to find a familiar face.

What brings you to Richmond?

Joseph—Joey and I drove up for the opening.

Are you a collector?

Collector! Her laugh this time was an eager squeal as though the idea produced a current of pleasure. No, no. I thought it might help with a chapter.

A chapter? You’re writing a book? For Lance it was generally a treat to run into another writer. A genuine writer—not some script-processing simpleton.

They want me to make it a book. Her laughs didn’t last long, it seemed. I’d be happy just to make it my dissertation, it’s been so long coming.

About art? Dissertations, he felt, didn’t rank much higher than scripts. Except they weren’t put together by a committee. Neither were all scripts, when he could help it. And this, he reminded himself, was one of the reasons he’d decided to leave the Other Coast and return to his roots.

No, literature. Contemporary women authors. Alice Walker, Daphne Athas, Lee Smith. Leigh Harkness, I hope. I’ll focus on their representations of young women as they grow up. Today I thought I might find the spark to get started again on Walker.

Did you?

Maybe. One or two portraits of slave families touched something— She paused. By the way, have you met my husband, Joseph?

Lance felt his throat grow tight as she welcomed an elderly man coming toward them from the sun porch of the remodeled old mansion—the same pleasant-looking gentleman she was talking with the first time he heard her.

Lance Garnett, Joseph Gertz, she said, no expression on her face.

Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Garnett. Gertz took his hand, rather gently, he thought. Lisa reports you gave an excellent lecture on her favorite novelist. Sorry I could only make the reception. He spoke, Lance felt, with absolute sincerity.

It was only a talk. She was kind to call it a lecture. It was better, he thought, not to push his luck around professor types and people writing dissertations.

Lance’s attempt at modesty failed to register in Joseph’s fair, ageless face. You ought to ask Mr. Garnett, Lisa, about beach properties. He must know a few things. He picked up a large fiber wafer, spread a sweet pate’ over it, and excused himself.

He seems a fine man, Lance said as soon as Joseph was out of hearing. He hoped she didn’t suspect he was angling for her response.

Joseph is. A fine man, she said, her voice lacking the confidence of her earlier laughter.

What— Lance fumbled for a harmless question, what does he do?

He’s a philosopher.

A philosopher? Like Plato?

No, no. He teaches philosophy, the way I teach literature. We both work at a college in Louisville.

You don’t live here? Lance hoped his disappointment didn’t show, too much.

We’re visiting.

Like me.

Sort of. Joseph is a visiting professor at the Williamston campus. I’m supposed to be writing my—book.

Supposed to be? Lance reached for his first cracker, one of the cheesy-looking kind.

Writing comes very hard. I have—distractions. I’m still doing my research, I tell myself. And looking at beach houses, and—

Beach property is tricky.

I love Virginia beaches. I have a little surplus to invest—two salaries, you know. And no children.

Williamston may be a safer investment. He was thinking of the last thing she said, and that she must be at least thirty-five.

You do know something?

I had a little beach place out in California. It wasn’t that little. But I sold it. Had to sell it—before his divorce settlement, and to find money for the drowned boy script.

Did you do okay?

Okay. Barely. I have a condo in Williamston now. It’s a good rental.

I—don’t care to rent. I want a beach house. I have a townhouse now I’ll try to sell. One of the Jefferson Springs condos. I lived there as a student.

You’re kidding again—exactly where mine is. What d’you know. The coincidence tied them together, he felt, the way Roanoke, Leigh Harkness, her drowned eyes did. To him she was someone special. If he had any knack at all for relationships, it lay, he believed, in his ability to discover what made the women he loved exceptional. This went with his work as script writer. For good or ill, he seemed able to find a remarkable quality in every woman willing to take the risk of revealing herself to him.

Joseph calls it the Third World Condominium, she said.

How’s that?

So many students and visiting scholars have moved in since I lived there. They come, it seems, from China, India, Korea, France, Africa, Pakistan—any place except Virginia.

I like that. ‘Condominium’—all living together. It’s a rich mix, he said. Must be some symphony to hear so many tongues weaving back and forth. And to smell the spices, not just steak and hamburgers, blowing in the evening breeze.

The Tower of Babel, Joseph says.

When I was in school, Williamston was still a provincial village.

I don’t think the way Joseph does—my first husband was Iranian. But all the rentals have driven our values down, I’m afraid.

Down? This was the way Lance learned that his former wife and her lawyers had screwed him over worse in their settlement than he knew.

For ten minutes or so, Lisa and he talked real estate and their shared stake in the Jefferson Springs. Too soon, Joseph came to remind her they had other obligations, and they were gone.

A couple of weeks after the second meeting with Lisa, he was in a knock-down, run-over phone conversation with Rashida, one of many bitter debriefings, or return engagements as he thought of them, even seven months after their relationship imploded, when the call-waiting click began scratching at his conscience.

Answer the damn thing! Rashida screamed on the other end. I can’t talk with that insane racket It didn’t take much to persuade him to take a break from her venom.

As he said Hello to the other line, his voice stuck from want of use.

Lance—Lance Garnett— Is that you? The voice sounded familiar but he had never heard it on the phone.

Yes.

Are you okay? This is Lisa Birdsong.

Yes, Lisa, I am fine, he said to keep it simple. Talking on the another line, but more or less fine.

I’m sorry to interrupt—but I need the name of a tax accountant. I asked William Grass—the language chairman at Williamston—he’s on vacation. Do you know a good one?

There’s a fellow I use. He gave her the name.

He had an inspiration. I’ve got a book on tax tricks. I’ll be in Williamston Wednesday to talk with Leigh. Give me your townhouse address—I’ll drop it off, about two, if it’s okay.

The way she agreed to the suggestion bathed his senses in a cool current before he went back to the acid rain of Rashida.

Rashida had called from Ashbury Downs, the small college town where she lived with her five year old son Fuad. Lance had known her for better than a year and a half. They’d first met at a religious conference in L.A. when he was developing the subtext for his story about the French child. As he envisioned his script, the boy would fall victim to the intrigues of a French cult driven by certain sinister Messianic impulses. He planned to go more deeply into this dimension of the tragedy than Milt Walters had in his novel. Lance’s research into sects and cults had led him in turn to a faith at the fringes of Islam, one regarded by the mainstream as heretical. It was called Allah-Mahaday after the Agon-Gamostami imam who midway through the nineteenth century proclaimed himself the Messiah returned to earth for the next century.

A flaky L.A. friend named Lynn had invited Lance to the conference. Lynn had a finger in almost every esoteric religious pie baking on the Coast, especially those between San Diego and San Francisco. That such movements seemed to spring up following each West Coast tremor like mushrooms after rain generated part of Lance’s energy for the French story. After the culminating talk of the conference Lynn asked him to join some of his dream-driven cohorts heading out to a small bar not far from Lance’s house in Northridge.

The instant he met Rashida he felt an urge to sit beside her, she so matched the dark woman who kept showing up in his dreams during the eight years since he’d left Greece and a woman named Dimitra. At first this nighttime apparition had been Greek or Italian, then Turkish, Syrian, Egyptian, Indian. Next she metamorphosed into a pair of young Japanese women who bathed him and prepared a bed where he knew he must rest. Now the dream figure, he felt certain, was about to become this lovely golden woman from Agon-Gamostan, a land he knew only as one of the younger hybrid nations the sands of the Middle East and central Asia kept breeding.

He spent that evening in Northridge getting to know Rashida who at first glance seemed to blend the best of the two eastern political women he regarded so highly. There was lots of two-way, three-way, even four-way chatter, but a year later, the only conversation he could recall from their first evening started when the problem of control, left over from the completed conference, came up and Rashida with all the confidence in the world loudly announced to the eight folks at the table that control was one issue that she had no problem with. Coming off a recent four-year return match with his former wife, the final battle of a long marriage of attrition, Lance found Rashida’s statement as comforting as the Annunciation itself. Besides, he was already bewitched by the strange glow of her skin, the blazing dark of her eyes, and the elegance of her fingers when she laid them on his sleeve or knee to emphasize whatever she was saying. He put his hand on her sleeve too when he asked that she write out her name so he could remember it.

Rashida el-Fuad, he read aloud, to get the music right.

Very good. You have studied Arabic?

No, no, no, he laughed. I tried tapes, for a week. It’s an impossible language.

It is, isn’t it, she said, taking the card from his hands. Here, let me give you my number. My father knows everything there is to know about the Allah-Mahaday. He’ll answer your questions, since you are so curious.

Excellent.

Three days later he phoned Rashida, not to meet her father but to ask her out to dinner with friends. After that he began to slip into her world of Islam and unexpected desires that oddly mirrored his own.

For one thing, with Rashida there was never any waiting, and too much waiting, both at the same time.

As their year together evolved, Lance would waste hours in her apartment waiting for her to get her clothes and hair together, or he’d fiddle them away sitting with her son while she did therapy with clients. From this point, since he was waiting anyway, she slipped quickly into the habit of asking him to take out garbage, or clean up dishes, then her kitchen, then the downstairs. He’d grown up in Virginia, he knew what it meant to act the part of a gentleman, to honor requests from women and children. At that time in his life, he also assumed that, when you are in a relationship—and Rashida and he were moving deep into some species of relationship—if you love, you don’t ask the cost and if you ask the cost, you’re not loving. At least, that was his Virginia way. And the woman, if she had good sense, was not supposed to exploit such civilities.

When he had strong feelings for a woman, he realized, he could get pretty dense. It took him months to recognize that Rashida didn’t make requests, that hers were demands about which he had no say. She simply expected him to do chores. It took another couple of months to understand that she felt so entitled because she had grown up in Agon-Gamostan with a house full of servants answering her wishes and that the world owed her a great deal to make up for unpleasant things that happened when she was a child.

Over the months of their arrangement, it was the waiting he grew to resent. But it was the absence of waiting that bound him to her from the start. Their first evening was the little party after the lecture on the Allah-Mahadays. For their second he took her, his flaky buddy Lynn, and Lynn’s woman friend out to a pretentious but tasty North African restaurant hidden in Canoga Park. As soon as the four of them settled in the crimson brocade seats circling the polished bronze tray that was their table, Rashida and Lance interlaced fingers, their arms intertwined, and they spent the dinner with their hands floating about her knees or his. Staring in the dark lovely eyes set in that narrow aristocratic face, he spilled out the short-feature version of his life down to the relationship most recently concluded—unhappily ended for him, though he didn’t tell her this. And she made it clear that although she had survived a number of encounters since her marriage exploded, half a year had passed since she felt anything serious about a man.

From the restaurant, the four of them—Lynn and his friend Camille had not vanished, it only seemed that way—moved on to a funky bar that provided antiques and blues. While Lynn and Camille searched through shelved objets d’art, Rashida and Lance leaned bodily over the bar that separated the antiques from the cafe and the band. She wore a closely tailored black dress that wrapped her small waist, notable hips, and long legs the way an apple’s skin seals its polished body. He stood behind her and pushed his feral Vandyke through her dark hair to follow the band, four enthusiastic amateurs who knew more about the work ethic than the aesthetics of jazz. Rashida and he were the professionals in the room, the way he guided their bodies until the front of his pressed tight against the back of hers where it curved and they were swaying slowly to the deep dominating beat of the bass.

When he reached through her hair to kiss the warm column that flowed from back of her ear to her wide thin shoulders, without hesitation she turned, breaking the lovely connection of their bodies, replacing it with the pressure of full lips on his own.

As soon as his tongue passed through the lips to touch hers, hers was deep in his mouth filling it completely, and the vacuum of her breath drew him toward her until their mouths melded in an uncontrolled union of senses. Her small breasts and hungry hips pressed against him. He leaned back and rotated his body from knees to forehead against her persistence. He had opened a vault, he felt, on a passion long gathering interest. He didn’t imagine that a treasury like this might turn into a modern Pandora’s box.

He saw nothing except Rashida’s eyes, sensed nothing except the touch and taste of her kiss and the pressure of their hips forged together. When finally he looked up, Lynn and Camille were staring at them, affectionate but startled smiles on their faces. Half the bar was staring, not all with affection. This is California, the faces seemed to say, but this is not a bedroom—not even a sound stage. Since Rashida, it was clear, had not finished, he blanked the others from his senses.

Lynn and Camille developed a sudden need to get back to their own apartments. Lance asked Rashida to stop by his place for some chilled chardonnay from up north and a little brie. She agreed to follow in her own car.

Over the wine, she told him more about her marriage, the many ways her Gamostami husband had mistreated her, the verbal abuse, the blows that forced her to return to college in San Diego for her professional degree before she could leave him. As Lance felt his heart going out to her—this automatic response, if nothing else, Mason later told him, should have put him on guard.

When she stood to leave his house that first time, he took her in his arms, pulled her to him like a sheet, and the kiss began again. He both wanted her to spend the night and realized it was early, that they hadn’t talked about the private things people needed to get straight in the late eighties, the health details. He wanted her bad. Their kiss revived all the passion of the bar, with now the magnet of his bedroom just up the spiral of steps—and not even the risk of a slip on the carpeted stairs. All of it seemed almost safe and natural.

She pulled away and rubbed the back of her hand across her lovely dark lips as though to rearrange the banished lipstick. I can’t do this, she groaned.

Why? he protested.

I can’t do this tonight.

He heard the promise, but had the instinct to protest again. We’ve got to, Rashida. We both want it. We need it. It feels right.

I know, I know it does.

He hadn’t expected quick assent—actually was prepared to wait.

We must, he said. If you wait too long on these things, it becomes too late. He knew he was quoting one of his scripts—hoped she hadn’t seen the film.

Not tonight. You’ve got to let me go home.

I’m not holding you, he said, and took her bottom in both hands and pulled her hips against him where he was most urgent.

She pressed her perfect mouth against him and tried to swallow him whole. He kissed back with equal force. He wanted her even more and thought it was happening.

She broke free. I’ve really got to leave now.

He kissed her again, and she fed him until he knew he had her and it didn’t have to be tonight.

This time when she pulled away, he turned loose. She came back for a final course, a nightcap really. He let her go out the door. But not before they laid plans for the next evening, after she saw her final client.

After a year of Rashida’s ‘difference,’ Lisa, with all the coincidence she brought, seemed a homecoming.

As soon as she opened her door the first time in the Jefferson Springs, he offered her his tax book as his bona fides. And she invited him in, the way polite Virginians like the two of them did.

This is uncanny, he said as he carefully studied the large living room to keep his eyes from lingering on the white tennis jersey and shorts that set off the burning hair, long arms, magnificent breasts, long flawless legs. Another time, he would tell her she had the brains of a Ph.D. and the form of a Vegas showgirl. I know, I know, she would say. Nothing but trouble in that combination.

What’s uncanny? she said, his initial visit.

It’s the first time I’ve been in another one of these. It’s a mirror of my own.

They’re all the same—lots of space for the money. We’re about to transform this one. Please, have a seat. She motioned toward the couch by the sliding door to the patio.

She came to sit on the sofa too, between Lance and the door, with the early August sun at her back illuminating her hair. A candle, he thought.

This book is going to solve my problems? She laid it on the coffee table at their knees.

I’m afraid I didn’t give you time to tell me what they are, he said, half apologizing.

With that, she laid out her financial concerns—the decisions about selling the townhouse, buying at the beach, investing in C.D.’s vs. mutual funds—as though Lance were her accountant making a house call. While he shared several of his own experiences and relevant details of his divorce, his eyes, as usual following a will of their own, settled on a heavily marked, wallet-shaped calendar bound in red leather that lay beside his door-opening volume.

All this seems very urgent, he said.

It is, I’m afraid. Her gaze followed his.

I can’t help noticing your calendar. Every day seems heavy with obligations.

Especially today, she said and nodded.

Yes? He didn’t want to push.

It’s my birthday.

Congratulations. I was just thinking that, with the light in your hair, you look bright as a candle. I didn’t realize it was a birthday candle.

I don’t feel like celebrating. Her eyes were moistening.

You ought to relax. Twenty-eight can’t be horrible.

I—I’m thirty—thirty-nine. The number came hard, he could tell.

Well that’s not bad either. You look twenty-nine. Look at me. He leaned back to illustrate. I’m not doing so badly, I feel. And I didn’t come into my full powers, I claim, until I passed forty.

You’re not a woman. She stared into her hands as though reading her life there. You have your children, I hear.

I don’t follow you. He was beginning to, and the conversation, he felt, was moving in a forbidden direction. But if she needed to go there, the least he could do, he told himself, was make the passage as comfortable as possible. You want to talk about it? He expected her to say no.

It would help, I think.

Before he left two hours later, he knew more than he could have imagined for any script about the winding down of Lisa’s biological clock, the anxieties of attempting to get pregnant with a man, a good man, the most sympathetic in the world, more than twenty years older than herself. Often in amazed silence, he heard much more than he would be able to remember, even after she explained her heroic efforts many times following that afternoon. He learned all there was to know about the cutting-edge procedures she and Joseph had endured in the last four years of their five-year marriage.

As they talked that afternoon, they sat poised on the edge of her couch, their limbs almost touching or briefly brushing one another (his rough khaki against her pale skin pulled smooth over the small knees) each time one of them leaned to the low table to sip the coffee she finally ground and brewed. Poised like that, he wanted to gather her to himself and give her what comfort he could offer. The strong mix in him of rescue and desire flowed out to her so powerfully that when she rose to refill their cups, he felt the need to retreat to his corner of the couch.

Throughout the confession of failures, Lisa kept claiming that the fault was chiefly hers, the effect of the long years I chain-smoked, the lonely years when I slept wrapped in the magnetic field of my electric blanket, my still undeniable need for strong, strong coffee, even the chain of lovers she had taken during her high school, college, and graduate years. Her serially monogamous years, she called them.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, he interrupted. I have a feel for the coffee damage, the cigarettes, even the electricity. But I don’t about—for crying out loud, what do you mean about the lovers?

I didn’t either. Not about any of the possibilities. But they say a woman with many lovers builds up antibodies against the sperm.

Jeezus, this is the weirdest thing I ever heard. It goes against serial monogamy, doesn’t it. Although he wasn’t yet aware of it, he already wanted her to know he understood her generous values—that, in fact, when it came to eros, he shared them. It even goes against evolution.

I don’t know. Isn’t a woman supposed to conceive, then protect her babies? Only the male is supposed to scatter his genes. She looked at Lance as though she wanted something from him—a confirmation, perhaps something more. When I was young, I was all mixed up. That’s why I find the way Leigh gets it down in her stories so helpful.

But if Joseph is over sixty—wouldn’t he likely be the faulty—the logical party?

You’d think. I was pregnant once—my first marriage. But I wasn’t ready. She told Lance about her graduate school husband, a young med student from Iran. But I can’t—blame Joseph. He tries so hard. And he’s been tested. Slow, sluggish little things—but still kicking.

You’ve been tested too?

Of course. They couldn’t find anything wrong. A little endometriosis, but—

Endo-what? She had been hauling Lance boldly where no man he knew had ever gone—deeper into the alternate universe of women—for at least twenty minutes now, and he thought he needed to test his brakes.

Some excess mucus membrane in my plumbing. Not enough though to hurt.

Don’t give up, I say. My ex and I had trouble the first time. On the pill too long, her docs said. They blew her tubes open, and Bingo— It went like clockwork. This, he felt, was all he needed to say. He wasn’t sure yet why Lisa was confiding so much to him. But if it was for the reason he suspected and wouldn’t yet let himself believe, surely Lisa would pick up the rest of what she wanted from his confession on her own.

This year’s my last chance. After I’m forty, clinics won’t want to waste time with me. I’ll work on it—till I have to get back to Louisville. That’ll be it.

You sound so hopeless. Again he wanted to reach out and hug her.

Time to get on with my life, that’s all. She looked to the other side of the room as though tossing off the bite of a cognac.

The gesture for Lance seemed a door opening on an inviting sea. Before he took her hand to squeeze it goodbye, he knew Lisa Birdsong better, he thought, than he ever knew his wife in the quiet years of their marriage—or even talkative Rashida with all her secrets. Lisa, after all, came from his father’s neck of the woods. They were practically kissing cousins. And they already, he told himself, had an unspoken understanding between them, though he wasn’t quite sure where it was taking them.

The afternoon with Lisa also awoke memories for Lance, faint ones, going back years. Something about a southern girl, a young woman, who grew tired of her sexual rebellion against her mountain community and decided to settle down to have a family. Sitting at his computer attempting to write, he couldn’t figure where these echoes kept coming from.

Two days after their surprising conversation, he was working up backgrounds for his Harkness script, a documentary he planned to do between drafts of his French thriller. He usually kept all Leigh’s books in a box where he worked in Richmond. Now he had taken them out and lined up, along the back of his desk, her bright covers, many with the face of some young woman superimposed Heidi-like on sky and mountains. His method these days was to run mentally through each novel, recollecting the various plots as he went, jotting down the titles he would have to re-read because his memory of them had faded.

In his row of books, he placed his finger on the spine tip of her second novel, The Will of the Wind. He’d always considered it raw and a bit out of control—not one of her best but interesting for its description of a young woman’s erotic and emotional gropings. That view arose when he was thinking as a reader. Now he was looking at Leigh as a writer and as one more interested in her story than the stories in her novels. In his own writing, he knew that when his scripts took off and went out of control, he probably was following life too closely. The Will of the Wind, he decided, was that kind of novel—likely Leigh’s most autobiographic fiction, the sort a young novelist writes first and, having expelled that story from her system, either stops writing and goes into business, or moves on to the mature phase of her career.

To refresh his memory, he pulled the novel from the row. Just as he remembered, the cover showed squat West Virginia mountains gashed by piled coal and monstrous coke-firing plants—a forgotten corner of old America. And superimposed on the pure West Virginia sky, the long black hair and wide forehead of an intelligent young woman floating free above her pent-up land seemed the commercial artist’s attempt to disguise a photo of the young Leigh Harkness with her still wide forehead and all her flowing auburn curls.

Lance turned to Part One, saw the title there—A New Vein—and the story came rushing back: how thirteen-year-old Helen Burden, her hair red in the text, sinks deeply into herself after her family moves from the coal town where she was born to a slightly smaller, and poorer, community, how her performance at school drops disastrously, how for the first year she remains withdrawn and angry, until she meets Randy Cooper, a miner’s son, and they become secret lovers, how Randy cruelly exploits her dependence on him until she gets the strength to break away by attaching herself to a sports reporter for the newspaper in a town nearby, then goes through too many trustless experimental relationships before marrying a handsome but heartless Pakistani medical student she meets at the state university.

This is why, Lance told himself. This is why Lisa’s story sounded familiar. It’s basically the same as Helen Burden’s. Not in its details, he added, but in what he already knew of its outline. For Lance this seemed a vital discovery: Leigh had based her novel either on a general regional pattern or on what she knew of Lisa’s life—and the second seemed more likely than the first. They had both lived in Williamston. Lisa knew Leigh. Leigh must know Lisa. Lisa had told her her story. Leigh had met some of Lisa’s friends. Leigh simply used memories of her West Virginia girlhood to flesh it out. That’s how it works, he decided, for me and for Leigh. No wonder Lisa felt Leigh had her finger on the contemporary pulse. No surprise she forgot reading Leigh’s book.

Unfortunately all this wasn’t much practical use for his project. He could already imagine how the conversation would go when he met Leigh again in the check-out of the Williamston Lot-a-Eats.

He’d say: I know something, Leigh, about Helen Burden.

Helen Burden, who’s that? Oh, that old story. I didn’t think anybody read that poor thing any more. They ought to let it die and R.I.P.—Revive In Perpetuity, hee-hee-aight, you know. It was that West Virginia laugh, he figured, that endeared her to her fans when they met her. Part of her shtick—and she ought to file for a copyright on it too.

Lisa Birdsong, I expect, would rather it Rest In Peace, he would risk saying.

Lisa? Isn’t she the sweetest thing this side of Su-wonee? Pretty—and smart too. She has been reading that old abortion, has she?

Leigh, you know what I mean. They would both be shoveling pork ribs and diet Pepsi onto the check-out conveyor belt, Leigh ahead of him.

Lance, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.

You modeled Helen on Lisa.

And she would look at him in total amazement. You really think so?

Yep.

Lawd, I might have. Sure as Jesus don’t need a Jet-Ski, I have to use up ev’ry scrap I come across if I want to keep churnin them out, you know what I mean? Begg’rs can’t be choosers. But I don’t think so. Not Lisa. I admire her too much to run her through the old churn. She’s a menschette—which is a female mensch, they tell me up in New York City. Hee-hee-aight.

He knew that was how that conversation would go. Because he would say the same thing. A writer, he told himself, has to protect himself from libel. A writer has to nourish his reputation that he’s some kind of creator working out of pure imagination. Besides, after he wrote it, he didn’t know any longer whether he lived it, heard it, or made it up. It didn’t matter any more. To a writer like her, he went on, it’s all just clabber from the churn.

And that was pretty much the way it went when he saw Leigh two weeks later. Except that it was the All-Mart, not Lot-a-Eats—and that afterwards he had an inkling Leigh wasn’t just covering her rear, fine as it appeared, but admitting something else. If so, he figured it likely was what he also knew about the way imagination blurs into reality.

By the time he grilled Leigh in the check-out, a lot had changed between Lisa and Lance, things that left him grateful Rashida and he had parted company, intimate company at least, nearly eight months ago. After his long talk with Lisa he’d waited three days, days he devoted to his work. The third afternoon he phoned her for the first time.

Just want to check and see how your tax problems are working out.

Thanks so much. Joseph and I made a quick appointment with your accountant. He was a gentleman. He told us exactly what we need to do. The new tax laws aren’t going to help. But he can keep us from making expensive mistakes.

How are your other—problems—progressing?

My problems are thriving, as always.

Are you doing as well as they are?

Not much I can do. Not this month.

You mean—?

I have to wait a month between—before trying again.

I don’t understand.

Didn’t I tell you?

I don’t think so.

We tried last month—in the Richmond program. The day I met you, I had just—found out it hadn’t work.

No wonder you seemed down.

Well, no one has ever accused me of being a cheerleader.

Lisa, you have your own brand of humor.

’Understated,’ I’m told.

It wouldn’t work in Technicolor.

Or black and white.

Probably only in shades of grey.

You’re telling me I’m a melodrama?

All close-ups. And I like them better when I can see you.

That’s odd, she mocked a moan.

Why so?

’Cause I’m starting to like your voice over the phone.

Well, if the voice sounds sexy, let’s keep talking.

Hey, I’m not interested in phone sex, she said.

Even when it’s free?

No true sex is ever free.

Touché’.

Why?

It’s a line from one of my movies.

I thought I made it up.

It’s not very original, I admit.

I thought it was.

I mean, when I made it up. You don’t get paid for patter the way I do.

A good line is its own excuse for being, she said.

Yeah, cut the poetry. You’ll go right over your audience’s head.

I don’t think so. You sound like a damn literate audience to me.

I’m no Ph.D., but we ought to collaborate, he said.

On what?

Oh, we’ll think of something … After an odd silence, he went on, Let’s cut the show-biz. Why do you two have to wait a month before— He didn’t know how to put it— before collaborating?

Joseph and me?

Who else?

You don’t understand. There’s more to the story.

Why don’t you tell me Wednesday. Over lunch.

I like over the phone.

You admit it, the voice gets to you.

Tender and—deep.

It’s long distance.

Lunch is no cheaper.

Don’t worry. We’ll split the bill. In his experience splitting bills was a turn-on for certain women—the independent ones. Rashida being the exception.

Splendid. See you Wednesday, she said. My place.

I can hardly wait.

Waiting’s good for us.

II

For Rashida the word waiting seemed hardly to exist, and Lance’s second dinner with her had turned out far different than their first with Lynn and Camille and less under control than his initial lunch with Lisa would prove a good year and a half later. From the start, he sensed that Lisa and he knew without mentioning it that they had to pace themselves to make this relationship, beyond all their others, the one that would endure. He’d had no idea what Rashida expected—only that the acceleration during their first encounters was as rapid as he could wish. Perhaps a little faster, since new notches on the bedpost were not his goal. But he had no reason to complain. He intended to go along for the rush no matter how the pace picked up. And he would keep his eyes open.

The evening after the meal with Lynn and Camille, when he dropped by Rashida’s little cottage up in the hills north of L.A.—two bedrooms, kitchen, living-dining combined, a single bath, a bargain she said—she told him that she couldn’t find a sitter and had cooked dinner so they could eat in, if he didn’t mind. He wasn’t hard to please.

He met Fuad, a five-year-old with a face much rounder than his mom’s, plus large intelligent eyes and thick black hair cut off straight above the eyes. While his mother put finishing touches on the main dish, Fuad showed Lance his kindergarten drawings and waited anxiously for his opinion. They were remarkable, Lance told him combining as much enthusiasm and honesty as he could muster, the way he had with his own kids when they were young.

This is me. Fuad pointed to a tiny, roughly human shape with stick arms and legs spread broadly. This is mommy. An almost equally human shape with the same arms and legs, plus a long wild mane of crayon-black hair. This is my daddy. He brought his finger down firmly on a huge creature with a hairless dome and the spread fins of a ship from outer space.

He is a big man. Lance filed a mental note not to act competitive around Fuad.

He is a strong man. Like Fuad when I get big. He pulled the picture away from Lance and continued his assault on the sheet as though welding his entire family into oneness with the wax of the crayons.

Where’s his dad? Lance asked when Rashida came into the living room with a wide platter of strange white fluffy long-grained rice that smelled richly of the earth. What’s this?

This is basmati, from India, and you have never boiled anything that comes near its flavor. With pride she bore the platter to her round glass table. He stayed in Washington—his father did.

God, Washington’s a long way away. When my kids were in Italy, it nearly killed me. He trailed Rashida’s return to the kitchen.

He works for an institute. He has my other son.

Another boy? Lance kept outside the bar dividing the stove and sink from the breakfast area, giving her plenty of room to serve her dishes.

He’s sixteen, old enough to be with his father, the court said.

You never mentioned him. You don’t look—mature enough for children that age.

I try not to think of him. How old do you think I am?

I know you’re in your mid or low thirties. But you look ten years younger. Although he managed to exaggerate politely, he was thinking of other things she was saying. What sort of institute?

Middle East.

Middle East what? Economics? Health? Politics?

All the above, she said with speed, as though to prove she knew the American idiom well. I don’t know what. He doesn’t talk about his work. She turned from the sink to the range.

You hear from him?

He calls. About Fuad. She concentrated on the large pot she was stirring with a long wooden spoon, then drew the spoon to her lips to sample a well-cooked stew. It gave off a rich smell of beef braised in olive oil, salt, and spices Lance didn’t recognize.

And the older boy?

I make myself talk to him.

Make yourself?

Being rejected by your child’s not easy for a mother. It was an ugly custody case.

And he chose his father? Lance began to envy her ex. Mine are back in Virginia, with their mother.

It’s not the same for a man. She took the smaller pot from the stove and spooned what looked like fried dumplings into a white serving dish. Again Lance detected the fragrance of olive oil and unfamiliar seasonings.

Don’t be so sure. I grieved like crazy. What’s that? He pointed at the dumplings.

She looked at him as though he had said something odd. Grieved? I didn’t waste my time. Artichokes. I had to look after my own feelings.

Not grief? Grief, he imagined, was the panacea of therapists.

Anger. Pure anger. She poured the meat with its sauce, thick, red and orange, into a large green bowl—Bring the glasses—and led him to the round table crowded against her front window.

Rage, you mean? Lance put a glass by each of the three plates and stood back of the seat to which she pointed him.

Fuad, you take this one. She pulled back the middle seat. I had enough sense not to act out, if that’s what you are implying.

Of course not. He didn’t know what she meant but didn’t want to attract any of her anger and thought he might figure out her intent if she kept talking.

The boy came to the table but didn’t take his seat. He stood the other side of Rashida, his head down, and tugged fiercely at the corner of the tan, A-shaped sundress that made her arms and neck glow golden. They huddled for a moment before Fuad took the seat the opposite arc of their semi-circle from Lance.

He’s a tiny bit bashful.

I would be too. Total stranger comes into my house, intrudes on my family. My Nick would probably arrange to eat with his best friend.

He would? She looked at