he has; he does. Confusingly, he loves his wife no less because of it; he dares to think, knowing it to be a kind of arrogance—something terribly, destructively male—that he loves her even more. To think of Miriam is to think of himself, the span of his life and his children’s lives, and to know what is meant by a common destiny. He is human, and therefore weak, but his weakness is for Miriam. He cannot look at her and not feel love, or the fear that comes with love: that someday one of them will be alone.
But Dora Auclaire: he has known her—how long? Ten years? Fifteen? Did they know one another when their children were small? Arthur allows himself the pleasure of thinking of her, and what she might be doing now, at ten-thirty in the morning on a Friday in fall at the busy clinic where she sees her patients: the young girls in trouble, the old men wheezing from years of smoking, the tiny babies who have cried, mysteriously, through the night. He sees her, moving from room to room—neither gliding nor marching, her stride merely purposeful—wearing her clean white coat with jeans and a sweater beneath (not much jewelry; earrings, perhaps, to complement her heart-shaped face, and a single silver chain), touching, advising, jotting notes on a chart in her fine, square print, before excusing herself to telephone the hospital in Cooperstown to reserve a bed for the teenage boy in the examining room whose two-day stomachache is almost certainly not caused by drugs, as his mother claims, but acute appendicitis. Arthur, at his desk four blocks away, sees it all. (And before he knows it, there is Miriam too: plunking a due-date card into the stamper at the checkout desk, refiling spools of shiny microfilm, pushing a cart of books, heavy with facticity, through the quiet, dusty aisles.) She is a lonely, spirited woman in her mid-forties, a physician and a widow with two young sons—a woman who could chop a cord of wood one minute and swab a toddler’s throat the next—and Arthur loves her. He loves her strong, thin hands, and her gleaming stethoscope, and her sadness, which she does not wear around her like a shawl—some garment of mourning—but inside, in a deep place he cannot see but feels: the same grief that he would carry if Miriam were gone. Her husband, Sam, was a carpenter who restored old houses, and it was an old house that killed him; six years ago, on a bright morning in May (Arthur remembers reading of it in the papers), he stepped from the window of a fourth-story cupola of a falling-down Queen Anne on Devereaux Street, placed his weight on a ledge that turned out to be rotten with moisture, and down he went in a rattling rain of tools and equipment, forty feet to the packed-dirt yard.
The town of Glenn’s Mills, New York—small, nondescript, economically marginal except for the retired cardiologists and downstate corporate attorneys who buy up and rehab the old houses—rests at the bend of a river once so polluted with tannery acids it was given the name Vinegar Creek. This is the town where Arthur has made his whole life. His law firm, a one-man outfit on the town’s ten-block main street—trusts, wills, real estate, the occasional divorce—was his father’s before it was his, and though in school Arthur had thought first that he’d like to be an engineer, and then an architect, and finally a big-city lawyer, he has no regrets about living a life that was, in the end, simply handed to him: The spring of Arthur’s last year at NYU law his father, a two-pack-a-day Lucky Strike smoker, entered his office, removed his hat and coat and scarf, lit his first cigarette of the morning at his desk, rubbed his rheumatic hip once in the ice-cold room, and suffered a stroke of such lethal power that it succeeded in rearranging all the details of his son’s world in one painless instant. By the end of the week twenty-six-year-old Arthur was meeting with his father’s clients and scraping the mud from their boots off the carpet and finding that he liked it, all of it; the thousand choices of his life suddenly included the choice not to choose, and within a month he had canceled his plans to clerk for a federal circuit judge in Manhattan and was studying like mad for the bar. He telephoned the girl