burst of astonishing easy vigor she bounded over the wall there—low on the driveway side, with an eight-foot drop on the other—and on into the deer-colored woods. I fired, blindly, into the mist of the dusky trees where she had vanished. The noise was enormous— flat, absolute—and the kick against my shoulder rude and unexpected. For what seemed a full minute there was a faint pattering in the woods, like sleet, as the buckshot settled and dry leaves detached by the blast (the oaks and beeches hang on forever) drifted to the cold, hushed earth, the forest floor whose trackable paths and branchings were sinking beneath the rising tide of darkness. My mail glimmered on the driveway like white scat.
Gloria, coming home, was thrilled to hear that I at least had fired Charlie Pienta’s gun. She kissed me with a killer’s ardor. After dinner, thus rewarded and stimulated, I checked the yard just in case, and, sure enough, against the snow I saw the deer’s hungry silhouette nibbling at the round privet bush by the birdbath. I lifted the loaded, cocked gun and fired, high, but not so high that I didn’t think that a few pellets would sting her flank. To my amazement the deer didn’t move. She just kept nuzzling the bush, chewing its outmost leaves, like a wife ignoring your most vehement arguments, having heard them before. It was only when, at last sharing my real wife’s indignation, I moved toward the deer as if to throttle her with my hands or beat her with the gun butt that the creature, with a shadowy surge of her extended head, loped off, as if awoken from a trance.
As my reward for coming over to her side against the deer, my wife offered to make love to me in any position I chose. I like it when she lies on top, doing the thrusting, and also it is bliss to fuck her from behind, with no thought of her own orgasm. But by the time we went to bed, after dinner and the network news and a glance at Channel Two, and did a little reading—Scientific American for me and for her the competition’s Christmas gift catalogues—we were both too sleepy to act upon our new rapport. Outside, in the dark, a wobbly patch of life upon the blue snow, the deer perhaps browsed, her soft blob of a nose rapturously sunk in the chilly winter greenery, her modest brain-stem steeped in some dream of a Cockaigne for herbivores.
“Perhaps”: the word is like the little fork in reality when a quantum measurement is made. Each time that we measure either the position or momentum of an elementary particle, the other specific becomes, by Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, unknowable. The “wave function” of the particle collapses. Our universe is the one containing our observation. But, some cosmic theorists aver, the system— containing the particle, the measuring apparatus, and the observer—continues to exist in its other possible states, in parallel universes that have branched from this moment of measurement. The theory is called that of “many worlds.” It is intellectually repulsive, which does not mean it is not true. Truth can be intellectually repulsive. From the same verifiable quantum formulations arises the possibility that our universe, born from nothing, was instantly boosted, by the gravity-reversing properties of a “false” vacuum, into an expansion so monstrous that the universe’s real limits lie many times beyond the matter of which we can gather evidence with our farthest-seeing telescopes.
My wife’s two sons, Roger and Henry, and her daughter, Carolyn, with Roger’s wife, Marcia, and Carolyn’s husband, Felix, have come for Christmas. It is nice to have the big old house trembling with other footsteps and the murmur of multiple domestic discussions. The rooms, even to the third floor, are permeated by the scent of woodsmoke from the fire the boys keep going in the living-room fireplace, which my wife and I rarely use. We just want, after dinner and the news, to get upstairs to bed. Often we are in our pajamas and nightie by eight o’clock; we have made a joke of it—“Damn it, you won again!”—as if it is a sporting event, the race to bed. But in fact we are in a more serious race, to the death. Which of us will die first? We look each other over every day, appraising the odds. I have given her five years’ handicap, but two of my grandparents lived to ninety—hill folk from up