After hotdogs, grilled to blackened perfection in the fireplace, he dumped the dishes in the sink to soak, running eight inches of lukewarm water over them. Through the kitchen doorway the firelight mottled the walls and floor as if the room were filled with dancers. As he admired the shifting shadows, it struck him how he had so easily left behind the loneliness of home.

The cabin and the buried forest created a cocoon where his own ideas again had merit, safe from the trajectory of her disapproval. When had she stopped liking his sense of humor, and why had he let her impose her pessimism on his days?

On the way back to the rocking chair, he noticed the jar of maple syrup. The bottle's label displayed a cheerful woodsy scene with snow on fence posts and inspired him to go back out into the cold.

As a child, snow ice cream had been a favorite treat because of the rare occasions when it snowed enough to scoop snow by the bowl full. His mother let the five kids drizzle it with syrup or chocolate sauce or frozen strawberries as if it were the fanciest mousse in the world. Anne had read that snow was filled with particles of bacteria and dirt so he hadn't tasted snow ice cream in a long time. Now, remembering the kitchen of his youth, his mouth watered as he zipped the parka, donned the rain hat and boots again.

Outside, the clarity of the air made him blink. Crystalline and clean, in between snowfalls, the night air flowed on invisible streams between the ruffled trunks of pines. He moved in a Seurat painting, upright and cloaked, hardly altering the angle of his limbs as the forest stirred gently around him, shifting ever so slightly, so that nothing looked different, but everything changed positions. Down the slope where the trees stopped and the lake began, he saw the black points of the dock and boathouse; a lean-to really, tacked onto the shore as if made of left-over lumber on the summer's last weekend, a weak attempt at protection for the dinghy and canoe but perhaps an honest reflection of their value.

The best snow for snow ice cream would be closer to the lake. One after the other, his boots slid through the snow, leaving wing marks on either side. Slightly raised manmade drifts of snow pushed to the right and left by the motion of one foot following the next. Wintertime transformed the lake into a vast expanse of desert, black in spite of the snow. He imagined how on a moonlit night the icy lake might glisten, reflecting a universe of stars banished by tonight's dilatory storm clouds. The void could be dangerous to someone who hadn't visited in the daytime, who wasn't familiar with the reedy shoals and the dark vermilion center where you could only see a fish just before it surfaced, quick and twisting in its momentary concession to the world before its return to the hidden secrets of the watery depths. Where the forest disappeared and the sky opened above him, he filled the bowl with snow and started back.

Halfway back, he heard the phone in the cabin ring and ring and ring. Insistent and repetitive, it jarred the forest's peace, before finally stopping abruptly. If it were Anne, he was relieved that he'd been too far away to answer. Now that he'd adjusted to the solitude, he didn't know what he would have said. She'd tell him snow ice cream was silly, and hot dogs were disgusting. The dream, well, he wouldn't have mentioned the dream to Anne, who said she didn't believe in fairy tales, but who expected everyone to act as if they lived in one.

Filled with the sticky maple sweetness, buried under three quilts, with the hot water bottle at his feet, he slept heavily. It was the first good night he'd had since Anne had moved to the sofa. In the morning, the glare of sun shooting off the snow blinded him so that he couldn't look out the windows without shielding his eyes. After stoking the fire, he made coffee and chose a book off the shelf beside the fireplace. He recognized the story as one he'd read in college.

It was about a retarded boy who becomes smart in an experiment, only to find that the change is temporary, and he must return to his earlier unaware state.

When Penn finished the book, it was late afternoon. The fire had all but gone out, and the snow dripped continuously from the roof and branches surrounding the cabin. Briefly he cried, which he couldn't remember having done since high school, when his best friend's brother died in a car crash. At first, still troubled at the connection in the story between the boy's success and failure, desire and reluctance, he thought the book's sad triangle inspired the tears. But the longer he considered the tragedy of the lost vision, the more convinced he became that his sadness signaled a crucial admission about Anne, about their falling apart. Shivering in the cabin, he scrubbed the dishes, put clean sheets on the bed, and packed more quickly even than he had on Friday, when he had been so anxious to prove his spontaneity to Anne.

As he slogged through the yard to the car, he debated whether to telephone her that he was returning early. But then he realized the melted snow had started to freeze. The ride ahead loomed treacherous enough without further delay, so he didn't call. All the way home he concentrated on his driving, aware that one patch of black ice could send him into the ditch or over the edge, where the mountain road descended to civilization. Sunday he'd go to the office and see what he'd missed on Friday, hoping to avert any crisis his unexpected absence had caused.

Anne could mock him all she wanted. His job made life more comfortable and brought him a great degree of satisfaction, though ephemeral success was hard to translate into vocabulary that Anne understood. It wasn't glamorous or exciting or lucrative.

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