Jacob Appel

While teaching at Brown University last fall, I made the mistake of introducing my class to Tennyson's poetic masterpiece, "Enoch Arden." Or, at least, I think it is a masterpiece: Most of my students couldn't make it through to the end. So I set about writing a contemporary version of the "missing-spouse tale"—this time a prose account set on the Florida Gulf Coast of my childhood. Somehow, through literary magic, the original Tennyson poem became entangled in the story. - Jacob Appel

The Pelican City Young Widows & Widowers Bereavement Circle met every Tuesday evening in the art/music/dance room of the Pelican Harbor Jewish Day School. The room itself was cluttered with the odd chaff of children's festivity: stacks of miniature xylophones, a pink tutu abandoned on an old gymnastics mat, finger paintings suspended along a line like laundry. Alex—who had arrived nearly an hour early—did not wish to be the first to cross the threshold. Instead he waited outside in the under-lit corridor. Here the walls had been painted a cloying institutional yellow. Glass cases ran along both sides of the passageway, one documenting the history of the Holocaust through photography and the other relating local efforts to rehabilitate injured manatees, the parallel displays reflecting the heaped carcasses of Mauthausen and Ravensbrück onto newspaper images of beached aquatic fauna. Alex paced the length of the manatee exhibit, skimming the articles from the Harbor Gazette with nervous indifference, before suddenly latching onto the dangers of aiding sea mammals: That's how Karen had died, he decided. It was as promising a lie as any.

Although he'd had twenty-six months to decide precisely what had killed Karen, Alex had only given it meaningful thought in the five weeks since Big Mitch suggested a support group. “It's not just about what it's about, boss,” the one-armed sous-chef had prodded him. “When I was in NA, nobody went to get clean. Half the women there were there for cock,” he added. “And the other half were there for pussy.” Maybe, thought Alex. But you couldn't show up for grief counseling if your spouse was still alive, he knew, so he imagined ways to kill her off: My wife was devoured by alligators. My wife was kidnapped by pirates. My wife was vaporized by pioneers from the Andromeda Galaxy. He strove to keep the scenarios as implausible as possible—to avoid all thought of serial rapists and ocean undertows—and in the end he was back at square zero. So why not death by sea cow? He'd say that Karen had detoured from her afternoon jog to comfort a stranded manatee, and the creature had dragged her off to Davey Jones' locker. He'd say....

Alex's eyes grew moist; he dared not wipe them. People passed behind him in the corridor—beneath the Israeli flag and into the room with the undersized chairs attached to undersized desks. Alex did not look up. His entire body rebelled against these first awkward moments of knowing nobody, enflaming his forehead, flushing the tips of his ears, so he did what he often did at weddings and parties: He focused all of his earthly attention on the first inanimate object to cross his gaze, which in this case happened to be the final glass panel in the manatee display. Staring back at him—all of her earthly attention focused on the Holocaust photographs to his rear—shone the petrified dark eyes of a young female reflection.

*

Causes of death, it turned out, played little role in group bereavement. The widows and widowers did not gather in a conclave and introduce themselves like alcoholics: My name is John, I'm thirty-five, my wife toppled off a Ferris wheel; I'm Mary, forty-two, my husband skimped on second-rate fugu. While the facilitator, Charlotte Ann, spoke at some length about the three drunk teenagers who'd shattered her husband's canoe with their speedboat, the other survivors—Will, Natalie, T.J., Tina, G-Man, Sammy B. and Joanna—steered clear of the morbid. They told stories of ski trips and tailgate parties; they complained about delinquent babysitters and the awkward prospect of introducing a new girlfriend to old in-laws. Alex grew anxious for each speaker. He wanted them to go over well—for their sakes. When it came time for the delicate, dark-eyed girl named Joanna to unburden herself, he thought of her reflection and how he had looked away too suddenly, and now he positively trembled. It was her first meeting too. She told of how her husband had once been clawed by a cat at his office on the afternoon before a charity dinner-dance, and how that evening when she accompanied him into the unisex restroom at the Cormorant Arms hotel to change the dressings on his wounds, the door jammed shut behind them. “So I manage to tear my gown practically in half, working on the lock,” said Joanna. “And I'm shouting. And I'm crying. Help me! Let me out! The whole nine yards. When the security guy finally gets the door open, there I am with the front of my dress ripped open and Owen sitting on the toilet seat with his shirt off and scratch marks all over his chest and neck.” The girl spoke very quickly, in desperate bursts. She couldn't have been more than twenty-five. When she finished her story, Alex realized that he was smiling directly at her.

Charlotte Ann thanked Joanna. Others murmured assent. “Anyone else?” asked the facilitator.

Everyone except for Alex had spoken. He looked down at the top of his miniature desk. A choppy hand had scrawled on the wood: Why couldn't Helen Keller drive? Because she was a woman. Why couldn't Helen Keller read? Because she was from Alabama. She'll adjourn the meeting, Alex thought, and I'll never come back. Nearby, the equine woman named Natalie reached for the jacket on the back of her chair.

“That man,” chirped Joanna. “He hasn't had a chance.”

Alex suddenly found himself at stage center.

Charlotte Ann grinned. “Would that man like a chance?” she asked.

“Sure,” lied Alex. “Why not?” And then he told the story of the night he'd proposed to Karen—when they were both only eighteen and living up north in Trenton, New Jersey. Her stepfather had owned a downtown bowling alley. Alex worked there as the manager on weekend evenings. During the pre-dawn darkness, the deserted Capital Lanes were an ideal setting for a lovers' tryst. Every Saturday night for nearly a year, Alex drove his future father-in-law home—and as soon as the old man entered the house, his daughter snuck out of the shrubbery for the return trip to the sofa in the bowlarama office. Until the March of their senior year. On the final day of that month, a Sunday, a mini-blizzard swept through Trenton after midnight. It's heavy, wet snow clung to the burgeoning leaves like webbing. When Alex and Karen arrived at the bowling alley for their rendezvous, a robust white oak had already plummeted through both the roof and the ceiling. Drifts rose waist-high on the lanes around the tree; frost seeped its way along the metal gutters like blood. The automatic pin setters had also gone haywire, toppling and replacing in a berserk game of chicken and egg. Alex was about to phone his employer when Karen's first snowball hit him smack between the eyes, and soon the two of them were on the slick floor of lane seven, groping and giggling, planning a wedding and a honeymoon in Florida. “I miss her,” said Alex. “You know.”

“Of course, honey,” said Charlotte Ann. “We know.”

Alex looked over at Joanna to see how his story had gone over, but she was diligently scribbling in a notebook. He tried to delay his own exit. He sat back down again and wrote on his desk: Why couldn't Helen Keller find a husband? Alex didn't know exactly why he was waiting, what he was waiting for. Soon he and the delicate girl were the only two people left in the room. When she shut her notebook, she appeared startled to find him still in his seat.

“Oh goodness,” she said. “I'm so sorry. About before.”

Alex thought back to the reflection in the glass.

“You didn't want to say anything, did you? I realized that as soon as I said something. I'm stupid that way—I was just writing about it in my journal.”

“No big deal,” said Alex. He didn't like the expression stupid that way; he suddenly felt disappointed, almost betrayed.

“What you said was so romantic, though. All that snow reminded me of Ethan Frome.”

Alex walked her to the elevator and they rode down the three stories in silence. It was only nine o'clock and the summer dusk greeted them on the boardwalk outside. Silhouettes of wood storks crisscrossed the horizon. Alex searched for words to continue the conversation.

“It's a book,” said Joanna. “You're wondering about Ethan Frome. It's a book, not a movie.”

“Okay.”

“I'm an English teacher,” added Joanna.

“Okay.”

Alex focused on two small green lizards darting along the wooden planks. Across the school parking lot, a pickup truck churned dust in its wake.

“I need to unwind after that,” said Joanna. “Do you know a good place to eat?”

The lizards ducked under the railing. “You're in luck,” said Alex, smiling, relaxing. “I own a restaurant.”

“Is it good?”

Nobody had ever asked that before. It was like asking if he was good in bed.

“Not without Karen,” he answered, mechanically. “Not any more.”

*

Alex revealed his secret over a sizzling platter of Apalachicola oysters and mussels mariniere. They were ensconced at one of the corner booths in the Quarterdeck Room, swaddled by antique barometers and mollusk-draped rigging. The early bird crowd had long since departed, and through the swinging doors to the kitchen resounded the clash and clatter of the Captain's Mast readying for slumber. “A good restaurant needs beauty sleep, coddling,” he said. “When we first bought this place from Karen's aunt and uncle, we tried to run it late into the night. We learned the hard way: The best bistros eat breakfast in bed.” Alex refilled his wine glass, conscious of his tongue growing loose in his mouth. “I'm boring you to tears, aren't I?”

“No,” answered the girl. “Not particularly.”

Alex fumbled with his napkin ring. He regretted his vignette on the history of Oysters Rockefeller—but what else was he supposed to say? Seafood and Karen were the only two things he knew anything about.

A thin smile trailed across Joanna's lips, then faded. “That was supposed to be a joke,” she said too quickly. “The not particularly.”

Alex nodded. “My wife's not dead.”

He braced for anger—Karen's temper would have flared. Joanna merely dabbed her lips with her napkin and waited for more.

“She's missing,” he said. “Vanished off the face of the earth.”

Joanna toyed with her wedding ring; he wondered if this meant something.

“One day she went out jogging” he continued, “and she jogged straight off into oblivion. They had search teams combing the beach for weeks, but nothing. Not so much as a tennis shoe.” When Joanna said nothing—just focused on him with her intense, sooty eyes—he let himself go. He spoke of the days squandered leafleting shopping malls, the exertions whose eventual purpose grew merely to fend off suspicion. And he spoke of the uncertainty, the frustrations, the second-guessing. How could he know whether she'd been carried away, gouging and clawing, or absconded fully of her own volition? How did he know if she'd show up again one day—at fifty? At eighty? He read in the paper about missing schoolgirls escaping from cults, amnesiacs stumbling upon long lost spouses, Japanese kidnapees returning from North Korea. All this hope made his bed feel colder, his plight more desperate and urgent. “Every time I accept that she might be dead, something reminds me that she's still alive....But when I get to thinking she's coming back, death throws me a zinger.” Alex tore the top off a pack of artificial sweetener and poured the grains into his water glass, watching them form a sheet of frost on the surface. “Sometimes I dream of footprints on sand,” he said. “Shallow footprints filling with murky water.”

Joanna reached forward as though to take his hand, but she stopped, tentatively, several inches short. “How awful. Like Enoch Arden.”

Alex nodded. “You mentioned that earlier.”

“Did I?” puzzled the delicate girl. “Oh, no. That was Ethan Frome. This is Enoch Arden. It's a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.”

“Next time around,” said Alex, “I'll go to college.”

“It's about this woman, Annie, whose husband is shipwrecked at sea,” continued Joanna. “And presumed dead. Only he's actually not dead—and he comes back to find her married to a new man—”

“—named Enoch Arden—“

“—named Philip Ray. It's one of those popular misconceptions that the new husband is named Enoch Arden. The old husband was named Enoch Arden. Sort of like how some people think the one-armed man was The Fugitive.”

Alex stirred the saccharine frosting in his water glass. “Okay,” he agreed.

“But here's the important part,” said Joanna—her face suddenly aglow like a schoolgirl with gossip. “Enoch doesn't reveal himself to Annie. He loves her too much to ruin her happiness, so he conceals himself in a boarding house and dies alone.”

The room turned silent. From the kitchen came the sound of Big Mitch hurling profanities at the industrial dishwasher. “So you're saying that Karen's out there somewhere. Hiding.”

The delicate girl wilted. “I don't know what I'm saying,” she said, unmoored. “You should read it.”

“If I should, then I will.” He reached across the table to fill his wine glass one last time. The thought crossed his mind that he had revealed too much and she too little. Good clams enter the pot closed and exit open. His instincts told him that the same rule applied to women and dinner. “And what about you? What's your story?”

“My story?” The delicate girl flicked back her long sable hair. “My story,” she announced with sudden decision, “is that it's nearly eleven thirty and I'm teaching Anna Karenina tomorrow at eight.”

“That's a book,” said Alex, grinning. “Not a person.”

She stood up and walked briskly toward the door.

“Next week,” said Joanna.

Alex agreed—though he wasn't certain what he was agreeing to. “Next week.”

*

That night he missed Karen more than he had in months. Her absence actually afflicted him as physical pain, as a jab somewhere deep within his skull. Ever since losing his wife, Alex had abandoned their queen-size bed. He slept on the moth-gnawed olive sofa in the living room—to hear the door chime, in case she returned in the dark without keys. The couch itself was a stunted little pallet that Karen had once tagged a love-seat with ambitions. It didn't even let him stretch his legs. Yet now, for the first time, this constricted berth struck Alex as far too roomy, and he pitched about on the cushions for hours like a toy boat lost at sea. Shortly after three a.m., he retreated to the lanai. He sat at the end of a dew-soaked chaise longue. He wore only boxer shorts. The breeze off the ocean sent chills down his spine. In the pine barrens that rose beyond the bougainvillea hedge, scarlet ibises roosted like Christmas ornaments. So many of his nights with Karen had been spent in this little nook of paradise—reveling in the shock of their own successes. He could still hear her boasting, her voice slurred with sherry, “The fucking American dream!” That was the bare-knuckles Karen speaking, the hardscrabble New Jersey schoolgirl. She was the cart that drove the horse. Alex could not imagine loving anybody different.

When dawn broke, Alex went to market. Karen's uncle had taught him to inspect each fish individually at the wholesalers—to hand-pick the largest pompano, the tilapia and grouper still flailing in the stalls. The work required sharp eyes, stamina. Sometimes a thick apron. Not surprisingly, his arrival at the two-room municipal library several hours later—his work boots and dungarees still lacquered in snook guts—drew the attention of the puffy, chinless young man behind the counter. The youth folded his stubby arms across his breast. “Need any help?”

“Just looking,” muttered Alex. Libraries and bookstores generally made him feel self-conscious, and this attendant's polite offer stung like an accusation of shop-lifting. The problem was he'd forgotten the poet's name. He had no choice. He walked briskly to the main desk. “Do you have Enoch Arden?”

The librarian looked up from a crossword puzzle. “Is that a book or an author?”

“It's a poem,” retorted Alex. “I don't know who wrote it.”

He waited for the librarian to snicker, but the young man merely smiled in sympathy. “That's hard, if you don't know the poet's name.”

“It's a famous poem,” said Alex.

The librarian scratched the pink flesh around his collar. “You know what I'll do,” he said. “I'll phone my grandmother.” The youth flicked open his cellular phone, adding in a more professional voice: “She reads a lot.”

They finally found Tennyson—Selected Poems in the children's room; it had been propped against one of the windows to keep the air-conditioner from blowing open the drapes.

*

The delicate woman didn't show up the following week, or the next. Alex had arrived early both evenings in the hope of discussing Enoch and Philip and Annie Lee. He'd also tackled “In Memoriam” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade”—the idea of knowing something other than shellfish did appeal to him—but it was Arden's turmoil that he burned to explore. She'd said next week, hadn't she? A promise, a contract. What sort of person plays so fast and loose with her words? Alex understood that he had no legitimate gripe against the woman—she'd made an idle remark to a virtual stranger, nothing more—but he didn't care. So what if his anger was irrational? Anger wasn't rational. On the occasion of Joanna's second absence, Alex shared the Enoch Arden tale with the rest of the support group. Philip Ray, the second husband, sent Sammy B. into a dither. His own dead wife, it turned out, had been unfaithful. G-Man called Enoch a “chicken-shit bastard” who deserved what he got. When Tina stood up for the hapless fisherman—“it's just like on The Days of Our Lives,” she insisted—the two went at each other's throats. Eventually, they both turned on Alex. He apologized: “It was stupid to bring up.” For the remainder of the meeting, he kept silent. His attention drifted, and he counted the colored tags that labeled the walls, the windows, the chalkboard in both Hebrew and transliterated English. He read the wisdom on his desktop: Abe Lincoln was Jewish. He was shot in the temple. Also: Lucy eats snotburgers, Chazz & Lindsay 4ever. In response to Why couldn't Helen Keller find a husband? someone had inked Because she was a lesbian. Alex snuck a glance at his watch. At the Captain's Mast, Big Mitch would be rolling out the first of the key lime pie.

I'm not coming back, he decided. Enough is enough.

He did, of course. He arrived early again—planning to ask the facilitator if she knew the delicate woman's last name, seething with two week's pent up frustrations—to discover Joanna standing in the corridor and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. She wore a low-cut cotton dress. The fine ridges of her collarbone danced with every breath. Alex examined her reflection in the glass display case—where a tribute to Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon had replaced the manatee exhibit. Everything about her struck him as so fragile, almost ethereal: her slender shoulders, her perfect teeth aligned like small white tombstones. A contrast to his wife's substance, fullness—to Karen's fleshy thighs and the breasts he could palm like baby pumpkins. In the glass, he traced Joanna's fine features—superimposed upon a profile of the space shuttle at dawn, reflecting also the death chamber atrocities and swastika-emblazoned banners from the opposing glass case—to uncover his own reflection, and her eyes once again locked upon his. He shifted his gaze to the fringes of the Shuttle Columbia portrait and examined them with a sudden and ferocious intensity. She reeled to face him, leaving his eyes no escape.

“You're back,” she said. “I'm so glad.”

His anger—what was left of it—turned upon him. All of his past frustrations now seemed so unreasonable, so utterly overblown. “I read the poem,” he said.

The threads of her eyebrows rose in uncertainty.

“Enoch Arden,” said Alex. “I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed it, but you weren't here....”

“Oh, Tennyson,” answered Joanna. “I'm so glad you liked it. Many people don't, you know.”

Alex tucked his thumbs into the pockets of his slacks. It hadn't crossed his mind that G-Man and Sammy B. were in the majority—that he was the odd man out. “I don't know much about poems,” he said. “All I know is what I like.”

Joanna nodded. “Some people find Arden a bit too...forced, maybe hackneyed. All that Victorian gloom and doom. I like to think Enoch must have had a mistress tucked away somewhere, maybe more than one....” The woman paused, bit her lip. She added disdainfully: “Tennyson would never tell us that, of course.”

“Of course,” echoed Alex.

He followed her into the meeting room. His entire understanding of the poem had suddenly come loose at the hinges—and all the questions he'd had for the delicate woman no longer seemed relevant. After Karen's disappearance, Alex had seriously wondered whether she might have been having an affair. How could he not? Yet if that were the case—and deep down he didn't accept it—then he'd always assumed the transgression and her absence to be linked. Either she'd run off with this unknown man, or he'd done to her the unspeakable. A third possibility now confronted him: Maybe his wife had been unfaithful independent of her disappearance. Everybody had secrets, after all. One look around the circle at his grief-stricken companions—all of whom except Joanna and Charlotte Ann had already confessed to cheating—reminded him how easy it must be to become enmeshed in the tangled gossamer of infidelity.

Joanna told the circle about her trip with Owen to the Galapagos—of how they'd watched the mating dances of the blue-footed boobies and how her husband had tried to replicate them in their cabin. Alex didn't reveal anything. He waited for her at the end of the meeting, but the equine woman named Natalie had visited the ladies' room, and now shared their elevator ride. Natalie also had a connection to the Galapagos, having watched a Discover Channel special. She peppered Joanna with inanities about giant tortoises and tropical penguins. Mercifully, the woman's ride awaited her at the curbside. Without warning, Alex and Joanna stood alone. The insect lamp drove their long shadows toward the cusp of oblivion.

“You weren't here last week,” said Alex.

Joanna held her hands clasped in front of her.

“I had a good time at dinner,” she said. “I wasn't ready for that.”

Alex rustled in his pocket for his keys. “The mussels were tender, weren't they?”

Joanna smiled. “Passable,” she said.

She nodded in the direction of the beach—and they walked down the boardwalk, alongside the cast-iron benches and topiary shrubs. Beyond the grassy dunes, the distant surf murmured through the darkness. “Do you want to know?” she asked.

“I wouldn't have asked.”

“Owen drove off the Cormorant Island causeway,” she said.

“Intentionally?”

Joanna shrugged her frail shoulders. “Who knows? He was a pediatric dentist.... One of the girls said things....said he did things.....”

“Oh Jesus,” said Alex. “Was it....?”

“How the hell should I know?” slashed Joanna. “She was goddam thirteen.”

She paused and drew in her breath; she made no effort to dampen her tears. “I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that.” The young woman stretched her arms, opening her hands as though to cast away anger like feed grain. “Uncertainty,” she said.

“You're telling me,” answered Alex. “Dinner?”

Her nod was faint, fleeting—yet it was a nod. And over dinner they discussed lighter topics: the rare yellow lobster on display at the Tampa aquarium, the ongoing boycott of sea bass and bluefin tuna. Joanna had her own take on shellfish: She related how Cleopatra had dissolved a pearl earring in wine to prove Egypt's wealth to Marc Antony, how Chekhov had written of oysters, and later how the playwright's coffin had been transported from Germany to Moscow on a freight car labeled “For Oysters Only.” She also spoke of her interest in poetry. She'd arrived at literature “late in life”—she'd actually studied marine biology in college, but had killed time reading while waiting for “scientific magic” in the lab—and, at the end of the evening, she even recited Browning's “My Last Duchess” to the delight of the kitchen staff.

“Encore,” demanded the one-armed sous-chef. “Encore”

“Next week,” she promised—to Alex, to Big Mitch, to the twin busgirls Susana and Mariana. “You've worn me out.”

She stopped Alex from walking her to her car: “Next week.”

When he returned to the kitchen—half jubilant, half on-edge—Big Mitch cut the ground out from under him. “She isn't nothing like Karen,” he said. “Not better or worse, you know. Just a different cut of meat.”

*

“How do you break up with someone you're not dating?” Alex asked Big Mitch.

They were standing on either side of the seafood station, shucking oysters. Alex had already jabbed himself twice. A few stray shells lay in a puddle of bloody water on the countertop. Alex admired Big Mitch's dexterity. The sous-chef held each oyster in his one large hand—and carved it with a thick makeshift blade strapped to his thumb.

“Fucking depends,” said Big Mitch. “You breaking up with her to start dating her? Or you breaking up to get rid of her?”

Alex stuck his knife into the wooden cutting board. He dabbed horseradish on a raw oyster and sucked the tiny body into his mouth. “Good flavor in these Olympias,” he said. “Try one.”

“Not in May,” said the sous-chef. The conventional wisdom—long since trumped by commercial farming—warned against oysters in months whose names did not contain the letter “r”. The sous-chef carried his cache of mollusks to the shellfish refrigerator. “Nothing romantic about getting the runs.”

“I don't know what I want,” said Alex. “She didn't show up again last week. That's four meetings out of the last seven.”

The sous-chef returned and carried off Alex's store of oysters. “Why the fuck don't you just ask her out? Take her dancing or something?”

“Jesus Christ,” said Alex. “I'm married.”

The sous-chef shrugged his one good shoulder. “Don't stop most people,” he said. “And if you're so married, boss, where's your wife at?”

The ceiling fan buzzed overhead like a helicopter. Big Mitch stepped into the alcove bathroom and left the door open; Alex heard his urine hitting the water. “You're way out of line,” shouted Alex.

The toilet flushed; the faucet ran. “So fucking fire me,” called the sous-chef. He returned with the fronds of his hawaiian shirt poking though his fly.

They glared at each other: Alex's eyes flashed sharp and hot against Big Mitch's unflappable durability. The sous-chef's exposed stump—a birth defect, not a war injury—suggested courage, street smarts. Eventually, Alex looked away. His gaze settled on a shiny silver pot brimming with crushed ice.

“It's me I should fire,” he said. “How about bowling?”

*

The enterprise proved far easier than Alex had anticipated. He offered; she accepted. That evening—after a raucous meeting in which Sammy B. publicly declared his love for an unsuspecting Tina—they braved a torrential Gulf Coast squall, which had flooded shut the interstate, and followed the mangrove-lined back roads to Sawgrass Bowling & Billiards. Joanna drove: a beige Dodge Dart from the late 1970's that resembled a giant cigar on roller skates. The car's interior smelled of spearmint, of lemongrass, of woman's shampoo. Hand-knit hoods covered the seat backs; baby pink Mardi Gras beads dangled from the overhead light. Magazine clippings—cartoons, photographs—were scotch taped to the face of the dashboard. Alex's father, a transmission specialist from Camden, always insisted that cars mirrored souls. That theory made Joanna spiritual, complicated. Alex's own pickup stank pungently of ocean musk—evaporated brine, mackerel viscera—which also struck him as an unfortunate confirmation of his father's hypothesis.

“When was the last time you went bowling?” asked Alex.

“You'll laugh,” answered Joanna. “I've never been.”

“Never?”

Joanna squinted through the sheets of rain. “Owen had a bad knee. He fell off a horse as a kid.” Something inchoate and feral cut across the road; Alex's foot reached for an imaginary brake. “It's amazing, you know, how people define each other. Owen had a bad knee, so I never went bowling.”

“With Karen it was airplanes,” said Alex. “Scared the living shit out of her.”

His own use of the past tense caught him off guard.

“I love flying,” said Joanna. “It's like magic.”

The glowing, low-slung form of the Sawgrass Lanes rose suddenly against the gray horizon. A sign out front flashed “OWL” “OWL” “OWL” in neon—the burned out “B” hunkered down against the storm. If Karen's father was running the place, thought Alex, he'd have me out there changing bulbs in a hurricane. But the old man was dead, of course. Diabetes. Renal failure. Too independent, too stubborn, for dialysis. Yet the interior of the Sawgrass Lanes—that septic junior high school stench, poorly lacquered over with cleanser and verbena—pricked at Alex's memory. A list of 300 game bowlers ran the height of one wall; a case of league trophies traversed the length of another. In the far corner, near a decapitated payphone, teenagers clustered around an arcade game. Somewhere out of view, Alex sensed, hid an manager's office with a sofa.

“What do we do first?” asked Joanna. “You've got to tell me what to do, you know. I don't want to mess up.”

Alex steered them to the shoe-exchange counter. Thunder from outside melded with the crash of falling pins. “There's only one important rule in bowling,” he said. “You want to make sure you keep the ball on your own lane.”

“Like driving,” said Joanna.

“You've got it,” said Alex. “I've never thought of that.”

Joanna examined her bowling shoes suspiciously; they were the smallest size. “You'll teach me step by step?” she asked.

“I promise. Just like swimming.”

They were already through nine frames—with Alex leading 186 to 47—when the conversation rapidly veered away from bowling. It was all Alex's doing, though he wasn't sure what prompted him. Maybe the 50's music, maybe the college kids on a double date in the adjacent lane. “Those poets,” he said, apropos of nothing. “Browning. Tennyson. Swinburne. They must have gotten lonely.”

Joanna sat down beside him on the plastic aqua bench. She held her bowling ball between her legs, as though she'd just given birth to a boulder. “Swinburne?”

Alex had discovered Swinburne on his own; he now feared that he'd pronounced the poet's name incorrectly. “What I mean is—it must get lonely doing all that writing.”

“I always think it's worse for the characters,” answered Joanna. “They're stuck forever in the same bad relationships. Poor Hester, poor Anna. But sometimes I think it's all a pack of lies—that Emma Bovary was actually messing around with Homais the chemist.”

“Yes,” agreed Alex. “”Or that Enoch Arden was having one night stands.”

Immediately they both realized that they were no longer talking about what they were talking about. Joanna fumbled with the gold bangles around her wrists; sometime since their first meeting, Alex realized, she'd removed her wedding band. He glanced nervously around the alley. Most of the other lanes stood empty. One of the college couples had departed early, while the other had given up bowling. The girl now sat on the guy's lap—and he clearly had his hand under her skirt. Women inside, Alex remembered, feel like squid.

“There's a scene in Anna Karenina,” said the delicate woman in a wispy voice, “in which this learned intellectual named Sergey Ivanovitch and a poor relation named Varenka go out mushroom picking....”

Alex's lower back had started to cramp—too much bending—but he dared not stretch. From the seat behind them came the desperate sounds of giggling or whimpering; he focused hard on Joanna.

“....They have this moment,” she continued. “Out in the forest. Where either he'll propose—where something will happen between them, or it will all be over forever....”

Joanna looked up; a thin smile traced her trembling lips.

Alex felt his own body fluttering. He knew something was called for—statement, action. A charge of urgency swept through him, priming his senses, magnifying the odor of floor polish and the clatter of pins. But with his heightened emotions came the sudden tug of the past—flashing before him that lost moment of youthful enrapture on lane seven, the groping, the fumbling, Karen's long auburn hair dappled with frost. He could feel her snow-numb nose meeting his—like Eskimos. The memory reached for him like a hand reaching forth from the grave. Alex found his focus entirely derailed and he stared blankly at Joanna. Her eyes remained wide and hopeful. She was waiting for him to speak.

“Anna Karenina,” Alex said finally. “I've never read it.” He struggled for something further and added: “Is it good?”

Joanna opened her mouth to answer, but didn't. Across the alley came a ripple of plangent euphoria—someone had toppled his tenth straight strike. Alex watched the fellow high-fiving his buddies.

“Yes, of course,” said Joanna sharply. “It's good.”

She stood up and walked rapidly to the ladies' room. After that, they bowled out the last frame, speaking only when necessary, and she drove him home.

*

The storm worsened past midnight. The wind picked up something fierce, slashing palm branches against the siding of the bungalow. Alex sat on the edge of the threadbare couch in his boxer shorts. He wanted something to happen—he wanted the doorbell to ring. “Ring the goddam bell,” he thought. “Just ring the goddam bell!” Whether he was speaking to his missing wife, or to the delicate woman, even he no longer knew. Around three a.m.—shortly after the power went dead—he lit a candle and read to himself the opening passages of Enoch Arden. He grew drowsy. The words waltzed aimlessly under the lambent flame. Alex kept waiting, irrationally, for Enoch to reveal himself to his wife. He didn't of course. When the tears came to Alex's eyes, he folded shut the book and retreated to the master bedroom. He slammed shut the door behind him and slept with the thick down comforter pulled snug over his head. It was the deep, stony sleep of a man who'd died twice in one night.