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She dropped the stone into the old man’s proffered palm. “It’s beautiful.” No more than that.

His fingers curled round it. Dark veins squirmed across white flesh. She looked away (the lowest clouds were now the color flesh should be), but not before she had imagined Arcadius dead, and swarming. No, the historical Alexa would have dreamt up nothing so patently medieval. Ashes? At most.

He flung the stone out into the steaming field.

Merriam rose to her feet, one arm extended in a gesture of protest. Who was this strange girl, this wisp of a wife? Was she, as Alexa might have wished, just a new mirror image of herself? Or did she represent something more abstract? Their eyes met. In Merriam’s, reproach; in Alexa’s, an answering guilt contested against her everyday skepticism. It came down to this, that Arcadius, and Merriam too in a subtler way, wanted her to accept this scrap of rock as proof that lunatics in Syria have died and then risen from their graves.

An impossible situation.

“It’s growing chilly,” she announced, though this was as patent a fiction as any Arcadius had brought back from the Nile.

The path back home dipped down almost to touch the unfinished pool. A small brown toad squatted on the rib cage of the handsome wrestler that Gargilius had shipped up from the south. He had waited two years so, in mud and dust, for the pool to be done and his pedestal to be raised. Now the marble was discolored.

Merriam said, “Oh look!” The toad got off. (Have I ever seen a toad alive, or only pictures of toads in Nature World? Had there been toads that summer in Augusta? or in Bermuda? in Spain?) Out of the long grass, a deep burp. And again the burp.

The timer on the oven?

No, there was still—she checked her watch—a quarter-hour before Willa’s pies came out and her own daube went in.

Merriam faded to a gape. Worn strips of maple replaced the damp, elaborate grass, and the toad—

It was the garbage bell. Had she remembered? She rose and rounded the bend of corridor into the kitchen just as the platform inside the shaft dropped. Bags from 7 and 8 came down the chute, rattling, and far below, muffled, it all smashed together into the smasher. But her own garbage was still waiting in the pail, unsorted and unwrapped.

Let it, she thought. She tried to return to the villa, closing her eyes and clutching for the talismanic image that would place her there: a wedge of sunlight, a window, sky, and the slight sway of the pine.

Alexa was reclining on the double bed. Timarchus knelt before her, head bowed (he was a new boy, Sarmatian, and rather shy), offering his mistress, on a scalloped tray, a small cake covered with pineae. (She was hungry.) “But I won’t touch it,” she told herself.

To Timarchus she said: “This afternoon when the bailiff can spare you, my boy, go down by the pool with a rag and rub the statue where it’s stained. Ever so gently, you know, just as though the stone were skin. It will take days, but—” She sensed that there was something wrong with the boy.

A smile. “Timarchus?”

He raised his head in answer: the olive skin formed two small, smooth hollows where eyes would have been.

It wouldn’t do. She ought to have known better by now than to try to bull her way through once she’d lost contact. The result was inevitably nightmares and silliness.

She set to work. It was, anyhow, nearly three o’clock. She spread a page of the Times across the counter and emptied the pail over it. A story in the second column caught her attention: a plane had been stolen from the Military Fair at Highland Falls. Apparently it had been flown away. But why? To have found out she would have had to brush aside a skum of eggshell, peelings, paper, sweepings, and a week’s worth of shit and husks from Emily’s cage.

Actually, she was not that curious. She made a tiny bundle, over and under, around and under once more, the only skill surviving from her flirtation with origami twenty years before. Her Japanese instructor, with whom she had also conducted a flirtation, had had to agree to a vasectomy as a condition of entering the U.S. It left the tiniest scar. His name was Sebastian… Sebastian… His last name escaped her.

She put the bundle on the platform.

She stopped in the doorway to untie, strand by strand the knot of muscle from her forehead down to her shoulders. Then four deep breaths. Noises seeped into this brief stillness: the icebox, the higher pitched purr of the filter, and, intermittently, a grinding whine that she had never understood. It seemed to come from the apartment overhead but she never remembered to ask what it might be.

Was there somewhere she was supposed to have gone?

This time it was the timer. Willa’s pies had a fine glaze. Alexa had used one of her own (real) eggs to brush the crust, a courtesy that would probably be invisible to Willa, who was capable of only the broadest gastronomic distinctions, as between beef and ice cream. The casserole squeezed in beside the rice pudding she was doing for Larry and Tom, who, lacking an oven of their own, paid for their time in Alexa’s with tickets to the opera from their subscription series, an informal, inflexible contract of many years’ standing. She closed the door, reset the timer, rewound and unplugged the instruction cassette.

And that, except for the mail, was that.

The key was in the penny dish, and the elevator, god bless it, was alive and well and only one floor off. Plotting how in coming up she would escape them by reading her mail, she read the graffiti going down: obscenities, the names of politicians, and everywhere (even the ceiling) “love,” which some patient cynic edited, each time it was scratched into the paint, to “Glove.” the super’s endearing theory was that this was all the work of lumpen-prole delivery men, the residents themselves being too well-bred and status-conscious to muck up their own walls. Alexa had her doubts about this, since she’d added her own tiny “shit” coming home drunk last year from her section’s Xmas party. There it was, just below the cloudy plastic cover of the Inspection Certificate, as humorless now, as ineloquent as all the rest. the doors opened, stuck, strained, and opened all the way.

The mailman was just beginning to stuff the boxes, so she said “Hello, Mr. Phillips,” and asked the polite question or two from her standard casework repertoire of family, weather, teevee. Then she went out to the street and tested the air. It was palatable, but beyond that something suddenly seemed wonderfully right.

A sky of curdled cloud, a bit of breeze that flapped the fringe of the canopy. As it moves from a smaller to a larger space, an answering expansion of the spirit. The concrete swept clean. And?

She only realized what the wonder had been when it was taken from her: out of the third brownstone in the row across the street a woman wheeled a baby buggy. She had been alone.

The buggy descended to the pavement at a controlled jounce and was steered inexorably toward Alexa.

The woman (whose hat was exactly the same dismaying brown as the inside of the elevator) said, “Hello, Mrs. Miller.”

Alexa smiled.

They talked about babies. Mr. Phillips, who had finished up inside, told them about the preciosities of the two younger Phillipses: “I asked them what the dickens it was, a leaky sieve or what—”

It came to her, where she was supposed to be. Loretta had phoned last night when she was half asleep and she hadn’t written it down. (Loretta’s middle name was Dickens, and she claimed, in some complicated way, to be a descendant.) The appointment was for one o’clock and the Lowen School was on the other side of town. Panic whelmed up. It couldn’t be done, she told herself: and the panic subsided.

“Do you know what it turned out to be?” Mr. Phillips insisted.

“No, what?”

“A planetarium.”

She tried to think what this could possibly mean. “That’s astonishing,” she said and the woman who had known her name agreed.

“That’s what I told my wife later—astonishing.”

“A planetarium,” Alexa said, as she retreated toward the mailboxes. “Well, well.”

There was the winter number, one season overdue, of Classics Journal; a letter with a Burley, Idaho, postmark (from her sister Ruth); two letters for G., one from the Conservation Corporation that was probably an appeal for funds (as, with equal probability, Ruth’s letter would be); and the crucial letter from Stuyvesant High School.

Tank had been accepted. He didn’t have a scholarship but that, considering G.’s income, was only to be expected.

Her first reaction was sodden disappointment. She had wanted to be relieved of the decision and now it was squarely before her again. Then, when she realized she’d been hoping Stuyvesant would refuse him, she felt as sodden guilt.

She could hear the phone ringing from the elevator. She knew it would be Loretta Couplard wanting to know why she’d missed their appointment.

She used the wrong key for the top lock. “My house is on fire,” she thought, “and my children are burning.” (And, as a kind of appendix to this thought: Have I ever seen a ladybug alive? Or only pictures of them on nursery-rhyme cassettes?)

It was a wrong number.

She settled down with the Classics Journal, which had gone, as everything did these days, from paper to flimsy. An article on the Sibyl in the Satyricon; a compendium of the references in Aristotle’s Poetics; a new method of dating the letters of Cicero. Nothing she could use for therapy.

Then, with a mental squaring of her shoulders against her sister’s devious demands, she began the letter:

March 29, 2025 Dear Alexa—

thank you and god-bless for the bundle of good things, they seem practically new so i guess i should thank Tancred too for his gentleness, thanks, Tank! Remus and the other kids certainly can use clothes, esp. now. it has been the worst winter ever for us—and thats going back 23 yrs. before i arrived—but we are well dug in & cozy as mice.

my news? well, since i last wrote you i have been getting into baskets! it certainly solves the problem of those long winter evenings. Harvey who is our big expert on just about everything—he’s 84, would you believe that?—taught me and Budget, tho she has decided to return to dear old Sodom & Gonorreah (pun?) that was right at the low point of the Great Freeze, now with the sap running and birds singing— and its so beautiful, Alexa, i wish you could be here to share it—i get awfully restless sitting in front of my pile of withies, but i seem to be stuck with the job since its our biggest moneymaker now that the presents are sold, (did you get the two jars i sent you at Christmas?) i wish you’d write more often since you are so good at it. i always am so happy to hear from you, Alexa, esp. whats been happening to that Roman alter-ego of yours, sometimes i want to return to the 3rd cent, or whenever and try and talk sense into the other “you.” she/you seems so much more receptive and open, tho i suppose we all are inside our heads & the hard thing is to get those feelings working on the outside!

but don’t let me preach at you. that has always been my worst fault—even here! again you and Tank are invited to come visiting for as long as you like, i’d invite Gene too if i thot there was any chance he’d come, but i know what his opinion is of the Village….

i tried to read the book you sent with the bundle, by that Saint, i thot from the title it would be really trashy & exciting but 10 pages was as far as i could get. i gave it to elder Warren to read & he says to tell you its a great book but he couldn’t disagree more, he would like to meet you & talk about the early Christian communities, i feel so committed now to our way of Life that i don’t think i’ll ever be getting back east, so unless you do visit the Village we may never see each other again, i appreciate your offering the flight fare for me and Remus to come out but the elders wont let me accept money for so light a purpose when we have to do without so many more important things, i love you—you must know that—& i always pray for you and for Tancred & for Gene too.

your sister, Ruth

p.s. please, Alexa—not Stuyvesant! its hard to explain why i feel as strongly about this as i do without giving offense to G. but do I have to explain? give my nephew at least half a chance to live a human life!

Depression came down on her like August smog, thick and smarting. Ruth’s Utopian gush, silly as it could be at times, or sinister, always made Alexa see her own life as strenuous, futile, and unworthy. What had she to show for all her effort? She’d composed that inventory so often it was like filling out her weekly D-97 for the Washington office. She had a husband, a son, a parakeet, a psychotherapist, sixty-four per cent equity in her pension fund, and an exquisite sense of loss.

It wasn’t a fair summation. She loved G. with a sad, complicated, forty-four-year-old love, and Tancred unequivocably. She even loved Emily Dickinson to the brink of sentimentality. It wasn’t just and it wasn’t reasonable that Ruth’s letters should do this to her, but it did her no good to argue against her mood.

Bernie’s advice for coping with these minor disasters was just to go on agonizing at full steam while maintaining oneself in a state of resolute inaction. Finally the boredom became worse than the pain. Going off into the past was escapism at best and could lead to a nasty case of dichronatism. So she sat on the worn-out settee hidden in the setback of the corridor and considered all the ways in which her life was rotten through and through until, at a quarter to four, Willa came for her pies.

Willa’s husband, like Alexa’s, was in thermal salvage, which was still a rare enough specialization to have made a loose kind of friendship inevitable between them, despite their natural New York-bred reluctance to get involved with anyone living in the same building. Thermal salvage, on the miniature scale of oven-sharing, was basically all that united Alexa and Willa too, but it didn’t serve them as well for conversational fodder as it did their husbands. Willa, who claimed to have scored a prodigious 167 on the I.Q. part of her Regents, was a pure specimen of the New French Woman celebrated in the movies of twenty years ago, and indeed in all French movies. She did nothing and cared for nothing and, with a precise feeling for the mathematics involved, deployed the little green pluses and pink minuses from Pfizer’s labs to hold her soul steady at zero. By never for a moment relaxing at the effort, she had made herself as pretty as a Chevrolet and mindless as a cauliflower. Five minutes talking to her and Alexa had regained every shred of her usual self-esteem.