"But Wainwright," she said.

"Not onboard."

"Stand up straight."

"Jumped ship in Vancouver."

"Do they know where he went?"

"Signed on some other ship. Going north somewhere. He's a cold-weather person, this Chuckie."

"You'll find him."

"It doesn't matter."

firewall of chemical waste. The smell that surrounded him was infused with what, with geopolitics, and he waved a towel for five minutes and propped open the window, it kept closing, with a rolled-up copy of Pravda, he was still looking for baseball scores, and then he went and stood in their room and watched Eleanor sleep-she came from a gentle rural place and could easily perish from his reek.

He walked to the edge of the construction debris and realized this was not the source of the smell. The smell was still distinct, completely reminiscent of his Soviet experience, only less farshtinkener than his personal output, a bit toned down, and it was not coming from a sewer main break or a communal toilet of the homeless.

Then he saw the ship. It was docked at a remote pier up ahead, between a number of empty slips and a wide basin, and it appeared to be abandoned, with bridge and deck deserted and rust stains running down the sides and graffiti spray-painted on the smokestacks in languages he did not recognize and in alphabets unknown.

He turned and looked at Eleanor. She had a thing she did to show impatience, where she dipped her body and tilted her head and went half limp, her mouth showing a yawny oh.

The name of the ship was unreadable, covered with rust and graffiti. Such a woebegone thing, an oceangoing vessel that carries a public funk of portable toilets in a field.

Marvin and Avram argued for three days. They ate meals in the little unheated flat where you had to unscrew the tap from the kitchen sink and take it down the hall to the bathroom when you wanted to take a bath because construction of this block of flats ended on a certain date, finished or not. The two men traded many family stories but always with an undercurrent of contention and with intervals of open insult, Us and Them, and it grated on Marvin to hear these things from a man so self-assured who's a total nobody, a little guy who pushed upward when he talked, with two false teeth made of stainless steel, he's the shiniest appliance in sight. The flat came without windows. Avram had to install the windows himself, they came from the plate-glass factory where he worked, glass so thin you had to come away from the window to talk, A word with too many consonants might shatter the glass.

America, a fact he'd managed to miss-the things, the places, the bright buzz of products on the shelves, the sunblast of fortune's favor. Here they were in a strange bed in California, what twists to life, how uncertain go the turns, an English girl in his arms, pink and innocent even if she's not, and Marvin's polymerized hairpiece secure on his head.

She wanted Japanese but that wasn't enough. They had to go to a place where the guidebook said tatami seating.

Marvin thought if he lived all his life for a hundred years before meeting Eleanor, he would have done the same three or four things in the same order every day and as soon as he met Eleanor, at the age of a hundred and one, he would be sitting on the floor to eat seaweed.

They faced each other over the low table, in their stocking feet.

"What's the word for the thing that's not ultimate but next to ultimate?"

"Penultimate."

"Penultimate. See, that's what I've got in Chuckie Wainwright."

"Sit up straight," she told him.

"Greenland. I always had my suspicions about that place."

"What do you mean?"

"That's where he was stationed in the Air Force if he was actually there."

"Why wouldn't he have been there?"

"Do you personally know anybody who's ever been there?"

"No, I don't," Eleanor said.

"Let me advise you. Neither do I. And neither does anyone I've talked to lately."

"I think there's a main city."

"You think there's a main city. Do you know the name of this place?"

"No, I don't."

"Did you ever look at Greenland on a map?"

"I guess I have, once or twice perhaps."

"Did you ever notice that it's never the same size on any two maps?

The size of Greenland changes map to map. It also changes year to year."

"Actually it does. I used to think you were mad. But I understand now. Yes, you're mad but there's a certain reasoning behind it. There's a little childlike spot of logic. A little bedtime thing. You need to finish the story. Dear Marvin. Without the final link to the baseball there's no way to be sure how the story ends. What good's a story without an ending? Although I suppose in this case it's not the ending we need but the beginning."

He liked her in a towel. They'd first met near the end of the war, said hello-goodbye but corresponded, she was an air-raid warden with a torch, they called it, and he was a quartermaster handing out condoms for D-day that the troops fixed to the muzzles of their rifles to keep out sand and water and he still liked her in a towel or slip, married twenty-seven years to this point.

He sat in his shorts at the edge of the bed, taking off his ribbed socks. They would do like tourists in commercials, have marital sex in a nice hotel. Their room had a view of a view. From their window they could look across the courtyard to office towers and reflected clouds in the picture window of the hotel restaurant.

"Marvin, do you plan to wear it?"

She was talking about his toupee.

"I need it for how I see myself."

He also needed it because it took the edge off his large ears and sorrowful Marvin nose. He wanted to look nice for her even if she didn't think it mattered. Tonight he'd wear his best shirt, with cuffs so French he wanted to hum the what-do-you-call.

"You're my man, with or without."

A thing she said with a half-fake quiver of her mouth that made him feel he owned the earth.

She slipped off the towel and placed a knee on the end of the bed. They were honeymooners still, shy but eager, and Marvin in his Brooklyn-bornness, his religion of skeptical response-he was only now beginning to see how hard it was to persist in the sentimental myth, after all these years, of their dissimilarity, a thing he'd fabricated out of her accent and complexion. He was glimpsing his Eleanor truth by truth, that she matched him in appetite, that her ambitions for the business were bigger than his own, that her main ambition was

The waitress brought saki for her, beer for him. She called the drinks beverages and Marvin thought he was on an airliner. All the traveling he'd done, baseball-related, the unsheveled lives, the words and sentences.

Wait-listed passenger Lundy please present yourself at the podium.

1. The mother of twins in what's that town.

2. The man who lived in a community of chemically sensitive peo ple, they wore white cotton shifts and hung their mail on clotheslines.

3. The woman named Bliss, which he was younger then, Marvin was, and maybe could have, with eyes as nice as hers, done a little something, in Indianola, Miss.

4. The shock of lives unlike your own. Happy, healthy, lonely, lost. The one-eighth Indian. Lives that are blunt and unforeseen even when they're ordinary.

5. Who knew a Susan somebody who spoke about a baseball with a famous past. Marvin forgets the tribe.

6. Stomach acting up again.

7. The chemically sensitive man, his whole body vibrated when somebody snapped a photo a mile and a half away.

8. And Chuckie Wainwright gone to sea, leaving a woman and child behind, a hippie Christian cluster, barefoot with beads, and Marvin tracking him ship by ship.

9. And the bone cancer kid in Utah, which his mother blamed the government.