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Him saying: “You can have the house.”

“It's not paid for.”

“I'll go back east, take that better job.”

“I realize I shouldn't count on you for any financial support.”

“Sure you can, whenever I can.”

“Promise?”

“Not legally.”

“You hate me, don't you?”

“Be happy, Judith, for Christ's sake. It's your choice, be happy.”

“What about Melanie?”

“I would think the last thing you and Marion would want is a lot of responsibility.…”

They were at the table in the nook having breakfast as though it were only another day. Fred in size C polyester pajamas that couldn't be wrinkled, his teeth crunching unbuttered toast according to his diet.

Him saying: “You can have custody.”

“You mean it?”

“I'll have someone draw up the papers so I can sign them before I leave.”

“You're very kind, Fred. Always were.”

“Any court in the country would award her to me in a minute. You know that, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“But for your sake and hers … well, she'll be better off with you. She's closer to you; she's more you than me.”

“Yes.”

“I'll send a couple of hundred dollars a month. More when I'm making more. Fair enough?”

“Yes.”

“I want to be fair.”

“Thank you, Fred.”

“Besides, a while back I read that they're beginning to believe being like you and Marion is a genetic thing, not something you develop but something that gets passed on, you know, like a tendency toward high blood pressure or heart disease.…”

Marion Mercer pictured an all-year house.

An ideal composite of those of her New England childhood. Set on enough of its own land for the confidence of privacy. Walled all around by piled rocks, not a high wall, but such hard, heavy evidence of strength it intimidated any trespassers.

Along the drive lilac bushes bowed sweet welcomes, softly brushed their blossoms across windshields. Enormous old amiable maples on the front slope — three, perhaps four maples. The house with a raised porch, a porch swing, pillows on the front steps. Two half-finished glasses of a fresh lime drink left for a moment on the porch rail.

Perhaps the house in need of paint. Yes, patiently asking for paint.

A late spring day.

Putting on their most expendable clothes. Buckets of white, rollers, brushes, everything necessary. Up on tall ladders and doing normally what a man would do, except not destroying a huge head-shaped yellow jackets' nest discovered under a high eave. Respecting that gray, papery stronghold and its inhabitants that swooped and circled around them, threatening, but as though in repayment for mercy shown, not striking.

The overlapping boards of the house soaking up the paint, while their overlapping loves, hers for Judith and Judith's for her, soaked up one another with their eyes. Brush on the white — innocent as their hands that loved to glide and glided to love all parts of each other, pure as that. Then the house, theirs, completely painted, proud of itself.

Contentment.

Any evening.

Dinner on a table on the porch. And afterward, side to side on the steps, hand-holding, sharing the sense of greater intimacy that came when darkness combined with their isolation. Together. Listening to the sounds of night creatures, venturing, calling out to mates. Perhaps a dog, a collie or retriever, at their feet. Its ears and head suddenly up, aroused by a far-off fragment of a bark. The dog leaving them for adventures, disappearing into the darkness. Returning with its lower legs and the fur of its underbody wet from the dampness of tall grass.

Home rule: they could kiss whenever they wanted. Nobody hurt.

Peter Javakian foresaw a delivery room.

Hospital white, intensely lighted, an odor reassuringly antiseptic. How many nurses? Three — to attend to his Amy who was on the table.

Amy's hair entirely contained, out of sight, in a white headpiece, a white gown from her chin down, and a white sheet propped tentlike over her lower half, prevented her from realizing how awkwardly she was exposed.

Amy's face seemed so tiny amidst all the white. Her eyes on the two doctors at the foot of the table. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them was looking straight up at him.

He was allowed there. As much as possible — really impossible — to share the experience. He felt he was more responsible than a part of it, responsible for the pain that alternately ashened and reddened her face. He wished his love for her could serve as an anesthetic. In the moments between the pains she seemed amazed at herself, the incredible, natural thing she was doing. One nurse wiped the perspiration from her forehead and from above her lip, but more beads immediately appeared.

He felt helpless.

Everyone, except Amy, wearing a white mask covering their mouth and nose.

The routine competency of the nurses, skill of the doctors. Very little talk. One of the doctors, the one in charge, winked at him to put him at ease. It didn't.

Amy screamed.

She connected to him only by her hand, not by her pain. He felt so impotent.

“Bear down,” the doctor in charge told her.

Her face went red.

Her mouth opened wide, stretched open, so much it seemed her lips would tear at the corners. From almost directly above Peter could see into her mouth, the pink pillow of her tongue, the slicker, more crimson membranes of the back of her throat, from which came another, longer scream.

The doctor in charge motioned him to the foot of the table, to stand back out of the way but where he could see everything.

There was some blood running from the lower juncture of Amy's vagina, which was distended and parted. It seemed unfamiliar. Impossible that it had ever been a source of pleasure.

Amy's stomach was like a mound of risen dough, that pale. Its skin so tight it was almost transparent. The doctor in charge kneaded her stomach expertly with both hands.

“Here we go,” said the doctor in charge.

“That's a good mother,” said the other.

Amy's vagina expanded its fleshy perimeter, changed shape into an elasticlike ring to accommodate the top of the new human head.

All the head emerged.

Neck and shoulders.

And the rest of it came easier, eagerly it seemed, almost spurted out.

It was a boy, he thought, from what he could see. But the doctor in charge said, “It's a beautiful girl.” He always used that adjective.

It would be sometime later, at least a day or two. The child in Amy's arms. No embrace more possessive. He, Peter, there to watch a feeding. The child given Amy's nipples, that dripped the sweetest kind of milk, love in it.

Amy Javakian thought of a future morning.

In Peter's studio, an extension of where they lived.

A spacious room with the skeleton of its framework left exposed for warmth and a skylight of numerous panes.

Sibelius on the stereo.

Sunlight to guarantee the truth of the colors squeezed from tubes by Peter.

Peter there, her love. Before the challenge of a huge fresh stretch of canvas. That moment a contemplative moment within his need to paint. His eyes, fixed on the white infinity, searched for the endless beginning. His face was pulled toward his mouth and his eyes, tightly, as though in pain, as though he were looking directly into the sun or trying to make out some distant object on a bare, bright horizon.

For the longest while he found nothing. But then he must have hit on something. His concentration reflected off the blank expanse, back to him, causing an opening in the creative part of him. At first a mere pinpoint, a distant single star in the sky of his unconscious, then quickly it dilated and he was able to reach down in, grab hold and bear it out.

She saw, she thought, squeezes of color on a palette. But no. More paint than that needed for such a major canvas. Buckets of it.

Green.

Peter dipped the wide, bristling head of a brush into green and gave it to the canvas. In all creativity, she realized, there had never been two brush strokes exactly alike.

The green went on. He continued with a different color, others, working rapidly, caught up in it. Images crowded out of him, the next pushing the next. A rare sort of labor. A birthing.

Every so often, without stopping work, unable to, really, he used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe perspiration from his forehead and upper lip.

Finally, suddenly, the painting was done.

And they named it together.

Lois Stevens pictured herself transformed into a different kind of creature.

A puma.

From her nose to the end of her tail she was as long as a tall man. With a fawny coat, light grayish brown, luxuriously thick, that only she could rub the wrong way. Ears and tail tipped puce to black, as though she had dipped them into dyes. The fur on her belly white and softest.

She was a roamer, a lethal vagabond.

Born, one of a litter of two, on a ledge beneath an overhang in the Crazy Mountains of Montana. For most of her life she had wandered from range to range, never staying more than a night or two anywhere — from the Flat Tops of Wyoming, the San Raphael Swell of Utah, to Sweetwater Park in the Sierra Nevadas. An independent with no destination.

She traveled the greater distances at night, her eyes peripherally set like polished citrines, naturally capable of night sight, and her blonde whiskers, out left and right, equalled exactly the width of her body to measure and warn her when the going got too narrow.

She lay now on a huge domelike boulder, typical of the dry terrain there on the western shoulder of the Sierras. She nearly matched the hue of the boulder, knew that and found security in it. Resting in the sun, blinking, sweeping her tail back and forth to entertain her edgy disposition. Cleaning her fur with long licks.

Finally, she settled into a nap. But was bothered by a blue fly that peskily lighted on her ear, tickling. She twitched it off. The fly, or perhaps another, circled and lighted on her again. She was almost irritated enough to scratch. The fly flew away, probably frightened.

Noises then, from below in the canyon less than seventy yards away.

A hunter.

According to his senses he believed he was being silent.

Lois, the puma, watched the older man picking his way, following her tracks. It amused her. She stood, so she was profile against the sky, asking for attention.

He saw her, brought his rifle up, got it butted snugly into the socket of his shoulder but did not have time to aim before she leaped from sight.

She led him on, purposely padded over soft, sandy places to leave impressions for him. Several times he lost her and she had to snarl for him to reestablish direction. After a while it became boring for her, too easy. She circled around from rock to rock to be at his back. There he was, thirty feet away, confused about which way to hunt.

She crouched, head low, ran her tongue over her teeth, extended and retracted her twenty claws, while deciding whether or not she loved or disliked him enough to spring.

Spider Leaks had his fuck-you money.

Now he thought what he was going to do with it, not
if
, but
when
he got out of the mud.

For sure he wasn't going to start flashing green all over the place right away. He'd stash it, keep scuffling straight as usual, so his parole officer had nothing to get on him for. Wouldn't be easy, having all that bread and not showing it. Maybe every once in a while, like on a Saturday night, he'd treat himself to a hundred to spend. But that would be the limit. No matter how good a deal came along he'd cool it for three, maybe four months.

Then he'd put in to have his parole transferred to New York. No reason why his parole officer shouldn't go along with that. No suspicions. Spider had an aunt and a bunch of cousins welfaring it back east. He'd leave California looking trashy and hit town looking to take care of business.

A white El Dorado with automatic twin antennas, not a mile or a scratch on it, his. Glad rags, like those he'd seen Clyde, Walt Frazier, wearing in a magazine article. He'd ask around and find out who Clyde's tailor was. He'd also get himself a three- or four-room crib in one of those big apartment buildings, thirty stories above the dirt. Chrome and mirrors and lots of upholstery that looked like real fur and stereo speakers everywhere, even in the bathroom, both bathrooms.

Chicks. He'd have two main ones. Two of the foxiest, a tall black and a tall blonde, so he could mix them up. They'd wait on him every minute, do anything he wanted, let him do anything he wanted. Fight over him.

Soon as he had it all together he'd shag ass to radio station KBLS for a job. KBLS, New York, the soul station. He'd look so good they'd have to believe he could do it good. He knew how. All those years in slam he'd practiced disc jockeying in his mind and sometimes aloud. And since he'd been out he'd kept at it at home, using a pair of grapefruit crates up on end for turntables and the empty socket of a gooseneck lamp bent to his mouth for a microphone, while he turned the volume of his radio up or down according to his own verbal cues, as though he were actually on. They'd dig him at KBLS, sign him up right away, long-term unbreakable contract. He'd play Barry White and James Brown punctuated by his own appropriately cool phrases, and before long he'd be as famous as Frankie Crocker. He'd never heard Crocker, but from what he'd heard of him from back-east blacks that man was what Spider wanted to be.

Spider Leaks.

It just didn't sound as good as Frankie Crocker.

Maybe, Spider thought, he ought to change his last name, so no one could make any more of those pissing jokes.

Elliot Janick distracted himself with a moral accounting.

Entering rights and wrongs on a mental ledger.

He only concerned himself with what he'd done professionally. Otherwise, his thoughts became jammed, too much to handle.