In Big Trouble

'Did she?' Chris fiddled with the placement of the bird nests, lining them up, although they looked perfectly aligned to Tess, then moving them around as if they were cups in an ornithological version of three-card monte.

'Were you famous?' she asked on a hunch, a vague memory stirring. 'Or notorious?'

Chris smiled. His resemblance to Crow was still disorienting for Tess. In many ways, he was what she had thought she wanted when she was unhappy with Crow-a grown-up version of same.

'Now see, that's why Felicia and I want to hire you. You're intuitive.'

'Don't flatter me, please. Just answer.'

Chris looked like a child forced to recite for company. 'It's hard to imagine now, but twenty-five years ago Felicia and I were the scandal du jour, at least in our hometown of Boston. I hasten to add that the threshold for notoriety was much lower back then.'

'What did you do?'

'We had an affair.' He smiled at Tess's is-that-all-there-is expression. 'Shocking, isn't it? Shocking to think it was once shocking. Felicia's husband was my thesis adviser at Harvard. I was his star student, I was going to bring home all the big prizes one day. I had theories that were going to change the world. Instead, I turned my own world upside down. I fell in love.'

He rearranged the bird nests yet again, but his voice now had a warm, dreamy quality. He liked this part of the story.

'I fell in love and Felicia became pregnant. Wait-that construction makes it sound as if it were something she did. When it was really something I wanted. I got her pregnant, because I was desperate for her. I didn't think she'd leave her husband just for me, but I knew she would leave for a child. It's not that she didn't love me, but Felicia was a careful, deliberate woman. She didn't have much experience in doing what she wanted, as opposed to doing what was expected.'

'But you changed that.'

'Eventually. Crow arrived before her divorce was final, and we never did get around to marrying officially. Yet it was the age difference that really scandalized people. Our ages, and the things I supposedly ‘gave up' for her. I was twenty-two she was thirty-three. Silly, isn't it, how age trips people up?'

Tess, who had agonized at times over the six-year difference between her and his son, did not answer Chris's question. 'Does Crow know all this?'

'Oh yes.' Chris frowned. 'Actually, he may not know we never married. Little boys don't care much about such things, do they? They don't ask to see wedding pictures. If he had asked, we would have told him, but I don't remember it coming up. We celebrate our anniversary every year, only it's the anniversary of the night we met. May 30. A Memorial Day weekend party. Felicia was wearing pale green.'

Tess ransacked her memory, trying to find some little piece of the story. Crow must have told her at least part of it. Yet nothing was there.

'I didn't know any of this,' she said, intending to sound plaintive, but achieving only a low-grade whininess. 'Yet Crow knew how my parents met, what they did for a living. He knew which bars fell into my father's territory as a Baltimore city liquor inspector. He even knew what my mother does at the National Security Agency and that's technically classified.'

'She's a supervisor, right? A tall woman, like you, given to matching her shoes to her outfits as exactly as possible.'

Tess stalked over to Crow's bureau, where his childhood collection of Star Wars figures had been laid out on a rough woven cloth. 'See? You even know how my mom dresses. That's more than I knew about Felicia. How can you say I knew Crow at all?'

'Crow is one of the world's listeners.'

'He chatters all the time,' Tess objected.

'Yes, he does. But he never really gives out any information about himself, does he? He talks about the latest thing he's read, the song he's working on, something strange and wonderful he saw on the street. But he doesn't talk about himself. He's unusual that way. He fools a lot of people into thinking they're close to him, but few really are. All the words, all that chatter, is a way of keeping people at a distance.'

'So I'm right-I never really knew him. I'm even less suited to finding him than I thought.'

Chris stood up. 'I need to show you something. Down in Felicia's studio. Do you mind?'

The night was cold and crisp, one of the first true autumn nights this season. Their breath was visible as they walked through the garden, to the cottage from which Felicia had materialized that afternoon. Chris Ransome unlocked the door and flicked on a light.

'Crow had his own studio here.' Chris grinned with a rueful self-awareness. 'We've always been a little indulgent, I suppose.'

'Would I understand your theories?' Tess asked suddenly, stalling for time. She felt uneasy, almost frightened of seeing whatever Chris Ransome found so urgent. 'Your ones about economics, I mean. Could you make them so simple that a bonehead like myself could get it?'

'If I can't, then it's my failure, not yours. The basic premise is plenitude.'

'Plenitude?'

'Simply, there really is enough.'

Tess's mind balked at this. 'Everything I see says we live in a time of scarcity, that there are too many people and not enough resources.'

'Well, the theory of plenitude begins with changing one's definition of what ‘enough' is. Look, I brought you here to show you Crow's studio. To convince you that you did know him, and he knew you.'

He opened a door on the far end of the large room where Felicia worked. Moonlight poured through the windows, and before Chris flicked on the light, Tess had a sense of hundreds of canvases, from large to small, surrounding her. When the light did come on, she saw there were no more than a dozen, and they were all quite small.

But every face looking back at her was hers.

There she was, in pastels, in pen and ink, in oil, in crayon. She was clothed, she was nude, her hair was braided, her hair was undone. Even Esskay, who had arrived so close to the end of what would be her time with Crow, had managed to creep into a few of the pictures. There was one of the two of them sleeping, their bodies mirroring each other. It made Tess blush to look at it, to think of Crow standing over her and the dog, studying them, remembering all the details, including the dirty white socks she wore to bed. The only thing she wore to bed.

'We didn't know they were here until a week ago. We've always respected his privacy, but after he stopped calling and writing…well, we thought he might have left some sort of clue behind.'

'You know I did try to make amends,' Tess said, feeling a little defensive. The etiquette of the situation overwhelmed her. She was standing in a room with an ex-boyfriend's father, looking at naked pictures of herself. She had never read Emily Post, but she was pretty sure this situation had not been covered. 'He didn't want to try again. He said it was too late for us, and he was probably right.'

'These things happen. Felicia and I are the last people to be judgmental about the ways of the human heart. What did Faulkner say in his Nobel speech? ‘The heart wants what the heart wants.''

'Actually, I think that was Woody Allen, at the press conference about Soon-Yi. Faulkner said the conflicts of the human heart are the only thing worth writing about.' Every now and then, it helped, being an English major. Not often, but sometimes.

'I know they're the only thing worth living for.' Chris Ransome picked up one of the smaller studies, a nude that had been exceptionally kind to Tess's rounded figure, narrowing the waist just a shade, deepening the almost-dimple in her chin, removing any dimples farther south. But the leg muscles were hers, Tess thought, and that little dent by her tricep. She had worked hard to get her arms cut like that.

Ransome studied the picture, then looked at Tess thoughtfully. In another man, the look might have been salacious, offensive. But Chris Ransome looked at Tess as if she were merely another in the series of beloved objects his son had toted home over the years. The arrowheads, the rock collection, the Star Wars figures, the Nature Store telescope. A swallow's nest.

'Felicia and I know we could hire someone else, Tess. We probably should. But there is something unfinished