“Of course.” We walked to my car. I turned to her when we got there. For a moment I thought she was going to put her arms around me and hug me, a thank-you gesture that might have led anywhere in our current mood—one so heightened it was almost melodramatic. But it was a melodramatic situation, a fairy tale where there’s good and bad and a lot of repressed sex running under both. Then headlights appeared over the brow of the hill where the market stood and swept past the All-Purpose Garage. They moved toward us, brightening. Mattie stood back and actually put her hands behind her, like a child who has been scolded.

The car passed, leaving us in the dark again… but the moment had passed, too. If there had been a moment. “Thanks for dinner,” I said.

“It was wonderful.”

“Thanks for the lawyer, I’m sure he’ll be wonderful, too,” she said, and we both laughed. The electricity went out of the air. “He spoke of you once, you know. Devore.”

I looked at her in surprise. “I’m amazed he even knew who I was. Before this, I mean.”

“He knows, all right. He spoke of you with what I think was genuine affection.”

“You’re kidding. You must be.”

“I’m not. He said that your great-grandfather and his great-grandfather worked the same camps and were neighbors when they weren’t in the woods—I think he said not far from where Boyd’s Marina is now. “They shit in the same pit,’ is the way he put it. Charming, huh? He said he guessed that if a couple of loggers from the TR could produce millionaires, the system was working the way it was supposed to. “Even if it took three generations to do it,’ he said. At the time I took it as a veiled criticism of Lance.”

“It’s ridiculous, however he meant it,” I said. “My family is from the coast. Prout’s Neck. Other side of the state. My dad was a fisherman and so was his father before him. My great-grandfather, too. They trapped lobsters and threw nets, they didn’t cut trees.” All that was true, and yet my mind tried to fix on something. Some memory connected to what she was saying. Perhaps if I slept on it, it would come back to me.

“Could he have been talking about someone in your wife’s family?”

“Nope.

There are Arlens in Maine—they’re a big family—but most are still in Massachusetts. They do all sorts of things now, but if you go back to the eighteen-eighties, the majority would have been quarrymen and stonecutters in the Malden-Lynn area. Devore was pulling your leg, Mattie.” But even then I suppose I knew he wasn’t. He might have gotten some part of the story wrong—even the sharpest guys begin to lose the edge of their recollection by the time they turn eighty-five—but Max Devore wasn’t much of a leg-puller. I had an image of unseen cables stretching beneath the surface of the earth here on the TR—stretching in all directions, unseen but very powerful.

My hand was resting on top of my car door, and now she touched it briefly. “Can I ask you one other question before you go? It’s stupid, I warn you.”

“Go ahead. Stupid questions are a specialty of mine.”

“Do you have any idea at all what that “Bartleby’ story is about?”

I wanted to laugh, but there was enough moonlight for me to see she was serious, and that I’d hurt her feelings if I did. She was a member of Lindy Briggs’s readers’ circle (where I had once spoken in the late eighties), probably the youngest by at least twenty years, and she was afraid of appearing stupid.

“I have to speak first next time,” she said, “and I’d like to give more than just a summary of the story so they know I’ve read it. I’ve thought about it until my head aches, and I just don’t see. I doubt if it’s one of those stories where everything comes magically clear in the last few pages, either. And I feel like I should see—that it’s right there in front of me.”

That made me think of the cables again—cables running in every direction, a subcutaneous webwork connecting people and places. You couldn’t see them, but you could feel them. Especially if you tried to get away.

Meanwhile Mattie was waiting, looking at me with hope and anxiety.

“Okay, listen up, school’s in session,” I said. “I am. Believe me.”

“Most critics think Huckleberry Finn is the first modern American novel, and that’s fair enough, but if’bartleby’ were a hundred pages longer, I think I’d put my money there. Do you know what a scrivener was?”

“A secretary?”

“That’s too grand. A copyist. Sort of like Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol Only Dickens gives Bob a past and a family life. Melville gives Bartleby neither. He’s the first existential character in American fiction, a guy with no ties… no ties to, you know…”

A couple of loggers who couldproduce millionaires. They shit in the samepit. “Mike?”

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“Sure.” I focused my mind as best I could. “Bartleby is tied to life only by work. In that way he’s a twentieth-century American type, not much different from Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or—in the dark version—Michael Corleone in The Godfather. But then Bartleby begins to question even work, the god of middle-class American males.”

She looked excited now, and I thought it was a shame she’d missed her last year of high school. For her and also for her teachers. “That’s why he starts saying “I prefer not to’?”

“Yes. Think of Bartleby as a… a hot-air balloon. Only one rope still tethers him to the earth, and that rope is his scrivening. We can measure the rot in that last rope by the steadily increasing number of things Bartleby prefers not to do. Finally the rope breaks and Bartleby floats away. It’s a goddam disturbing story, isn’t it?”

“One night I dreamed about him,” she said. “I opened the trailer door and there he was, sitting on the steps in his old black suit. Thin. Not much hair. I said, “Will you move, please? I have to go out and hang the clothes now.” And he said, “I prefer not to.” Yes, I guess you could call it disturbing.”

“Then it still works,” I said, and got into my car. “Call me. Tell me how it goes with Je, hn Storrow.”

“I will. And anything I can do to repay, just ask.” Just ask. How young did you have to be, how beautifully ignorant, to issue that kind of blank check? My window was open. I reached through it and squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back, and hard. “You miss your wife a lot, don’t you?” she said. “It shows?”

“Sometimes.” She was no longer squeezing, but she was still holding my hand. “When you were reading to Ki, you looked both happy and sad at the same time. I only saw her once, your wife, but I thought she was very beautiful.” I had been thinking about the touch of our hands, concentrating on that. Now I forgot about it entirely. “When did you see her? And where? Do you remember?” She smiled as if those were very silly questions. “I remember. It was at the ballfield, on the night I met my husband.” Very slowly I withdrew my hand from hers. So far as I knew, neither Jo nor I had been near TR-90 all that summer of ’94. . but what I knew was apparently wrong. Jo had been down on a Tuesday in early July. She had even gone to the softball game. “Are you sure it was Jo?” I asked. Mattie was looking off toward the road. It wasn’t my wife she was thinking about; I would have bet the house and lot on it—either house, either lot. It was Lance. Maybe that was good.

If she was thinking about him, she probably wouldn’t look too closely at me, and I didn’t think I had much control of my expression just then.

She might have seen more on my face than I wanted to show. “Yes,” she said. “I was standing with Jenna McCoy and Helen Geary—this was after Lance helped me with a keg of beer I got stuck in the mud and then asked if I was going for pizza with the rest of them after the game—and Jenna said, “Look, it’s Mrs. Noonan,’ and Helen said, “She’s the writer’s wife, Mattie, isn’t that a cool blouse?’ The blouse was all covered with blue roses.” I remembered it very well. Jo liked it because it was a joke—there are no blue roses, not in nature and not in cultivation.