Why not smile? Everything she was saying sounded absolutely great, especially once you cleared the confines of Michael Noonan’s dirty mind.

It sounded like we might have the expected fairy-tale ending, if we could keep our courage and hold our course. And if I could restrain myself from making a pass at a girl young enough to be my daughter… outside of my dreams, that was. If I couldn’t, I probably deserved whatever I got. But Kyra wouldn’t. She was the hood ornament in all this, doomed to go wherever the car took her. If I got any of the wrong ideas, I’d do well to remember that. “If the judge sends Devore home empty-handed, I’ll take you out to Renoir Nights in Portland and buy you nine courses of French chow,” I said. “Storrow, too. I’ll even spring for the legal beagle I’m dating on Friday. So who’s better than me, huh?”

“No one I know,” she said, sounding serious. “I’ll pay you back for this, Mike. I’m down now, but I won’t always be down. If it takes me the rest of my life, I’ll pay you back.”

“Mattie, you don’t have to—”

“I do,” she said with quiet vehemence. “I do. And I have to do something else today, too.”

“What’s that?” I loved hearing her sound the way she did this morn-ing—so happy and free, like a prisoner who has just been pardoned and let out of jail—but already I was looking longingly at the door to my office. I couldn’t do much more today, I’d end up baked like an apple if I tried, but I wanted another page or two, at least. Do what you want, both women had said in my dreams. Do what you want. “I have to buy Kyra the big teddybear they have at the Castle Rock Wal-Mart,” she said. “I’ll tell her it’s for being a good girl because I can’t tell her it’s for walking in the middle of the road when you were coming the other way.”

“Just not a black one,” I said. The words were out of my mouth before I knew they were even in my head. “Huh?” Sounding startled and doubtful. “I said bring me back one,” I said, the words once again out and down the wire before I even knew they were there. “Maybe I will,” she said, sounding amused. Then her tone grew serious again. “And if I said anything last night that made you unhappy, even for a minute, I’m sorry. I never for the world—”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not unhappy. A little confused, that’s all. In fact I’d pretty much forgotten about Jo’s mystery date.” A lie, but in what seemed to me to be a good cause. “That’s probably for the best. I won’t keep you—go on back to work. It’s what you want to do, isn’t it?” I was startled. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know, I just. .” She stopped. And I suddenly knew two things: What she had been about to say, and that she wouldn’t say it. I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed about us together. were going to make love and one of us said “Do what you want.”

Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe we both said it. Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive—minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.

“Mattie? Still there?”

“Sure, you bet. Do you want me to stay in touch?

Or will you hear all you need from John Storrow?"

“If you don’t stay in touch, I’ll be pissed at you. Royally.” She laughed. “I will, then. But not when you’re working. Goodbye, Mike. And thanks again. So much.” I told her goodbye, then stood there for a moment looking at the old fashioned Bakelite phone handset after she had hung up. She’d call and keep me updated, but not when I was working. How would she know when that was? She just would. As I’d known last night that she was lying when she said Jo and the man with the elbow patches on the sleeves of his sportcoat had walked off toward the parking lot. Mattie had been wearing a pair of white shorts and a halter top when she called me, no dress or skirt required today because it was Wednesday and the library was closed on Wednesday. You don’t know any of that. IOU ’re just making it up. But I wasn’t. If I’d been making it up, I probably would have put her in something a little more suggestive—a Merry Widow from Victoria’s Secret, perhaps. That thought called up another. Do what you want, they had said. Both of them. Do what you want. And that was a line I knew.

While on Key Largo I’d read an Atlantic Monthly essay on pornography by some feminist. I wasn’t sure which one, only that it hadn’t been Naomi Wolf or Camille Paglia. This woman had been of the conservative stripe, and she had used that phrase. Sally Tisdale, maybe? Or was my mind just hearing echo-distortions of Sara Tidwell? Whoever it had been, she’d claimed that “do what I want” was the basis of erotica which appealed to women and “do what you want” was the basis of pornography which appealed to men. Women imagine speaking the former line in sexual situations; men imagine having the latter line spoken to them. And, the writer went on, when real-world sex goes bad—sometimes turning violent, sometimes shaming, sometimes just unsuccessful from the female partner’s point of view—porn is often the unindicted co-conspirator. The man is apt to round on the woman angrily and cry, “You wanted me to! Quit lying and admit it! You wanted me to!” The writer claimed it was what every man hoped to hear in the bedroom: Do what you want. Bite me, sodomize me, lick between my toes, drink wine out of my navel, give me a hairbrush and raise your ass for me to paddle, it doesn’t matter. Do what you want. The door is closed and we are here, but really onlyyou are here, I am just a willing extension of your fantasies and onlyyou are here. I have no wants of my own, no needs of my own, no taboos. Do what you want to this shadow, this fantasy, this ghost.

I’d thought the essayist at least fifty per cent full of shit; the assumption that a man can find real sexual pleasure only by turning a woman into a kind of jackoff accessory says more about the observer than the participants. This lady had had a lot of jargon and a fair amount of wit, but underneath she was only saying what Somerset Maugham, Jo’s old favorite, had had Sadie Thompson say in “Rain,” a story written eighty years before: men are pigs, filthy, dirty pigs, all of them. But we are not pigs, as a rule, not beasts, or at least not unless we are pushed to the final extremity. And if we are pushed to it, the issue is rarely sex; it’s usually territory. I’ve heard feminists argue that to men sex and territory are interchangeable, and that is very far from the truth.

I padded back to the office, opened the door, and behind me the telephone rang again. And here was another familiar sensation, back for a return visit after four years: that anger at the telephone, the urge to simply rip it out of the wall and fire it across the room. Why did the whole world have to call while I was writing? Why couldn’t they just… well… let me do what I wanted? I gave a doubtful laugh and returned to the phone, seeing the wet handprint on it from my last call.

“Hello?”

“I said to stay visible while you were with her.”

“Good morning to you, too, Lawyer Storrow.”

“You must be in another time-zone up there, chum. I’ve got one-fifteen down here in New York.”

“I had dinner with her,” I said. “Outside. It’s true that I read the little kid a story and helped put her to bed, but—”

“I imagine half the town thinks you’re bopping each other’s brains out by now, and the other half will think it if I have to show up for her in court.” But he didn’t sound really angry; I thought he sounded as though he was having a happy-face day. “Can they make you tell who’s paying for your services?” I asked.

“At the custody hearing, I mean?”

“Nope.”

“At my deposition on Friday?”

“Christ, no. Durgin would lose all credibility as guardian adlitem if he went in that direction. Also, they have reasons to steer clear of the sex angle. Their focus is on Mattie as neglectful and perhaps abusive.