told himself, for almost fifty miles, that he was in fact just driving, working something out of his system. It wasn't until he'd passed Manhattan that he admitted, sheepishly, that he was probably going to drive all the way to Susan's place in Connecticut.
He got there after midnight. The sight of Susan's house, a substantial colonial standing among mature trees on a solid piece of property, brought tears to his eyes. She had made it. She was happy, safe; she had the life he'd wanted for his children and himself. He got out of his car and walked quiedy across the lawn, listening. He could hear nothing except the crickets and the faint sigh and rustle of the night itself. No sound of the baby crying. But, hey, the lights were on upstairs. He stepped up onto the porch and stopped there. What would he tell Susan when she came to the door? The truth would have to do. Today he and her mother were officially divorced and he couldn't stand the thought of being with anyone but Susan. Still, he didn't knock on the door or ring the bell. Something moved in him, some furious remorse, and he didn't want Susan to see it. He didn't want the liquor and sympathy of her husband, a Milquetoast, a nice boy who'd made it because his parents were rich and because he wasn't torn by the passions that sometimes ruled other men. Constantine didn't want to be old in this house, or alone, or defeated in any way. And yet he didn't want to be anywhere else. He loved the house, the sturdy prosperous lines of it, the dormers and dovecote, the eight-over-eights. This was the real thing, here. These were the details he and Nick Kazanzakis reproduced, in particle board and aluminum, on the houses they built down in Jersey and Long Island. It had a few of the same details—Dutch-style door, bay window—as the little haunted number on Meadowview Drive. Constantine wasn't ready to drive away, but he couldn't ring the bell. He couldn't present himself as a sad case, a creature in need of shelter. He stood on the porch for a while until he heard the baby's soft fretful crying, drifting down from an upstairs window, and then, as if he'd been summoned, he went back to his car. He stayed there until all the lights were out. He watched the progress of darkness, the play of shadows over clapboard, as mother and husband and baby slept within. An hour passed, and another. He watched the stealthy, restless business of the night being conducted until the night itself forgot he was there, until his waking presence had been subsumed and he had joined the silence that rose up from the earth and met another silence, a deeper, icier one, that fell from the stars. He saw a raccoon waddle with unhurried propriety across his daughter's lawn. He saw an owl lift silently out of an elm tree like the spirit of the tree itself. He heard callings, little chirps of pleasure or alarm or simple assertions of being. He heard one long birdcall, a terrified sound that was unmistakably a question. Quickly, in shrill bursts: Can it be? Can it be? Can it be? He lit another cigarette, opened another beer. It had only been kisses and hugs. He'd never messed with her. He loved her, for Christ's sake. He was her, in a way, and she was him. If that made any sense. Kisses were harmless. Kisses were okay. He watched the night pass. At one moment he felt as if he were guarding the house from the living darkness that swarmed around it. At another he felt that he was homeless, destitute, come to confess his shortcomings and seek whatever protection he could find at the gate of a nocturnal city.
1982/ Smallness was over for him. He'd lost all interest in being lithe and clever, a monkey boy. At twenty-nine, Will wanted size. He wanted to move with the ease and authority of geography. No more nervous little thin-boy dance. He was tired of making jokes. He was ready to look a little dangerous, to need no apology.
He started at a gym on the outskirts. He went faithfully, in a cold tumult of shame. He was ashamed of his aging boy's body and he was ashamed of his desire to improve it. It was easier to be cynically, defiantly skinny. It was easier to sit