I got out a glass and held it up to the light; Saxony had a fetish about eating off either dirty plates or silverware. The glass passed the Abbey inspection and I went to the refrig for the can of tomato juice – her all-time favorite drink.

Clump-clump-clump from the other room, and then she was in the doorway, leaning heavily on her crutches.

"Thomas?"

"Yes, my buddy?" I speared the can with an opener and turned it so that I could punch a hole on the other side.

"I hated being in that hospital. I'm sorry if I'm stupid and wrought-up now, but I'm just so glad to be back here with you and Nails and everything that it's all coming out of me the wrong way. I'm being a bitch and I'm sorry."

I put the opener down and looked at her. The doorway made a big white frame around her in her pine-green dress. Her face looked both tired and guarded at the same time. A flash of Anna, naked and under Richard Lee, crackled across my mind.

"Sax, do you want to make love? I mean, would it make you feel better if we did? More relaxed? Maybe that's the best way to break the ice. Just not say anything more and go right to bed. Get it all out of us."

"Could you do it with this thing on me? Wouldn't it be too hard? That's another thing I was worrying about when I was in there." She looked at the floor and shook her head. "You have so much damned time to think about stupid things, and then you create all kinds of new worries. I was afraid that we wouldn't be able to do our funny business for months with this thing on my leg."

I picked up a spoon and held it in my hand like a cigar. I wriggled my eyebrows like Groucho Marx. "My little dandelion, the only thing hard will be keeping me away from you once this tango has begun!" I wriggled my eyebrows again and tapped the ash off my cigar. I had no desire to make love. "Say the secret word and the bird comes down and pays you fifty dollars!"

I went over, and bending at the knees, hefted her up and over my shoulder. She felt warm and heavy and soft, and she smelled like clean laundry. I did a Tarzan hoot and, stumbling a bit, wobbled off to our bedroom.

And then how was it? Okay. Good. Fine. No, the exact truth of the matter was that it was all right. Very all right. It had nothing to do with the cast, either.

3

Suddenly everyone in Galen was nice to me. I didn't know whether it was because they knew that Anna had liked my first chapter or because they knew that we were lovers (or rather that I was one of her lovers). In any event, I was sure that Mrs. Fletcher knew what was happening, because she often made it easy for me to get out of the house and over to Anna's after Saxony had returned from the hospital.

The two women spent a lot of time together. I often saw them touch or laugh with the familiarity of a mother and daughter. Saxony was giving her wood-carving lessons, and Goosey was teaching her how to cook "country things." I was torn between a kind of jealousy and relief by the relationship. I had never really felt close to any older person, not even to my mother, who was sweet but too neurotic and possessive to put up with for any length of time. But Sax and Goosey giggled and baked and whittled together, and much of the time were like two little girls over in the corner of a room playing those crazy secret games that girls do. I knew about those games because I used to spy on my sister and her friends when they were up to something. They were always so happy and content that I would stomp away from her keyhole or the crack in the door, screaming at the top of my lungs that I'd seen everything and was going to tell on them. Not that they were ever doing anything.

In the meantime, over on the other side of town, Anna gave me the run of France's files, and I often spent whole afternoons up there, working at his desk, poring over his early papers, notes, sketches, etc.

Gradually, out of a fog of words I began to get a real picture of the man. The facts that we had originally turned up on him became hollow and unimportant. Where he was born, what he did in 1927, where his family went on their vacations… I duly noted it all, but I began to think of these details as his clothes, and what I wanted to do was reach inside and touch the skin beneath. I wanted to know him so well that I could know what kind of thoughts he would have had when he was twelve or twenty-five or forty. Did I want to be him? Sometimes. I wondered if that wasn't true about all biographers. How could you want to immerse yourself in a person's life and not have at least a secret hankering to be that person?

What was so attractive to me about Marshall France? His vision. His ability to create one world after another that silently enchanted you, frightened you, made you wide-eyed or suspicious, made you hide your eyes or clap your hands in glee. And he did it continually. I told all of this to Anna one day, and she asked me what was the difference between her father's books and a good movie, which basically does the same thing to you. In a way she was right, but the difference for me was that I had never seen a movie that came as close to my sensibilities as any of the France books did. He could have been my analyst or greatest friend or confessor. He knew what made me laugh, what scared me, how to end a story just the right way. He was a cook and knew exactly what spices I liked in my meals. When you realize that hundreds of thousands of other people out there felt the same way about the works of Marshall France, you could only marvel at what the man had accomplished.

Sometimes in the afternoon when I came home Saxony wouldn't be there. I never asked her where she went, but I assumed that she was with Mrs. Fletcher. The house would be cold and dark, with only the saddest kind of October-gray light lying tiredly on the floor and on the furniture near the windows. The whole air of the place made me feel wintry and sad. To combat the emptiness that went along with it, I would move madly around, turning on all the lights. I resented her not being there, but I would catch myself for being such a hypocrite. Especially when I had just gotten back from working half the afternoon and making love to Anna the other half.

There was a lot of sex then. I didn't know if I was trying to punish Anna for Richard Lee or trying to show her that I was better. But then I started to see him as only a kind of shadow, his hands appearing out of a darkness. It was what I knew she was doing in return, returning in real life the caresses of this shadow, moaning and moving to him, wanting him. That was what drove the white spike through my imagination every time I thought about her.

It was on one of those absently sad afternoons that I found out about Nails. Anna and I had really gone through the floor with our fucking. It was intense and the orgasm was crazy, but I hadn't done any good work that day, and afterward I felt tired and depressed. I was looking forward to spending the evening with Saxony. We were going to watch a Ronald Colman classic on television that we had been anticipating all week. As a surprise treat, I had stopped at the market on the way home and bought all the fixings for hot-fudge sundaes.

Walking up the steps, I saw that the lights were off in our part of the house. I grimaced and hiked the bag of groceries higher on my chest. Driving home, I had worked out a whole nice, silly scene: flinging the door open, I would race to wherever Sax was. I would tell her to drop everything because "The Great Thomas" had arrived. "Treasures from the Mysterious East, lady." Out would come the chopped walnuts. "Frankincense and myrrh from the Caves of Zanzibar," the maraschino cherries next. Then some other dumb line – the creme de la creme or something – and the fudge sauce would jump onto the counter. I had even gone to two places to find the kind she liked most.