The Three Weissmanns of Westport

his age and his competence, he was neither her assistant nor her skipper. That there was no hierarchy involved in their relationship, none at all.

'I'm so lucky,' he said. He looked down at Henry's shining hair, then turned his pale eyes back to Miranda. 'Always have been.' He smiled, a tight, ironic half smile and closed his eyes. 'And so grateful,' he added. 'So fucking grateful.'

There was something touching about his declaration, as though he knew all his happiness, even his memories of happiness, could be snatched away.

'Lucky to be lucky,' she said, for she suddenly felt lucky, too. Her business was falling apart. Her reputation was ruined. The sky was blue. The wind filled the white sail. A child hummed a tuneless song beside her. She was skimming the water. She was still, motionless, swift.

No, no, bad idea, Miranda, she had forced herself to think then, but of course he had kissed her. He'd opened his eyes, looked into hers and somehow the distance between them, an expanse of sea air and sunlight and decades, had disappeared.

Miranda recalled that first kiss with a private smile. She watched Annie in the kitchen, catching a glimpse of an elbow, an arm, a general bustling beyond the doorway. Annie worried too much. It was very stressful, worry was. Took its toll on your health. Not to mention your skin. She had bought Annie some La Mer cream, which really did work miracles, but all Annie did was work herself up over the cost. Annie needed perspective. Life was not just about material things. She thought of little Henry. That's what life was about, the little Henrys. Annie had her boys, it was true, but they were grown. She needed someone to take their place, if not in her heart, then at least in her life.

'I wonder how Frederick is,' she called out to Annie. 'You should call him, Annie. Get him to drive down.'

Annie yanked the silverware drawer open. One of the unwelcome side effects of her sister's new fascination with Kit Maybank and his little sidekick was a newfound and frequently vocalized interest in Frederick Barrow. She reached in the drawer. 'Shit!' she said, pricking her finger on a steak knife someone had put in with the forks.

'Don't be so controlling, dear,' her mother said, having no idea what Annie was complaining about but sure it had to do with her totalitarian views of the kitchen. As if Betty had not had a kitchen for over fifty years.

'I cut myself,' Annie said, going into the bathroom for a Band-Aid.

'Don't bleed on the napkins. Although that OxiClean is supposed to be wonderful. And use Neosporin. Cuts heal three times faster.'

Betty had begun watching daytime TV and found it extraordinarily informative and reassuring. There were so many problems in the world she had never thought of, and so many products to solve them.

In the bathroom, her cut throbbing a little in its bandage, Annie stared at herself in the mirror and wondered, not for the first time, what she really looked like. As other people saw her. It didn't seem to mean anything, the way she saw herself, for it changed with her mood. I'm not bad-looking, she decided, as she so often did. Whatever that meant.

Was that what Frederick had seen? A middle-aged woman, not bad-looking, who took very good care of herself, as she would have taken care of a rare first edition? She plucked her eyebrows and had her lip waxed regularly. She used night cream at night and day cream in the morning and sunscreen even in winter. Her makeup was natural-looking, but she never left the bathroom in the morning without it. She swam almost every morning. Her hair was the same natural-looking brown of every other middle-class middle-aged woman who went once a month to have it colored. She was not exceptional, but she was not exceptionable. She was, she realized with a mixture of pride and self-pity, conscientious.

It had been a month since she'd seen Frederick, or even heard from him. Ever since he'd gone up to Massachusetts after his reading. That night, while waiting for his car at the parking garage, he had sent her a text message thanking her again for arranging the event, saying he would miss her and urging her to visit him in Cape Cod. Then — nothing. She was deeply disappointed, but not really surprised. Frederick Barrow was an important person. She was not. There was a reason he was important, there was a reason she was not, there was an order to the universe that kept the important people in their important sphere and the unimportant people living with their mother and sister in a borrowed shack. Still, sometimes an important man like Frederick was in New York City and sought out an unimportant but quite intelligent and pleasant woman like Annie. It had happened before, it might happen again; in fact, she was sure it would happen again in some desultory fashion. It was not enough, but it would have to be enough — to have a friend like Frederick, a friend she saw when it suited him, when he had time, when he was in town.

Annie was used to being alone. There were people who felt they didn't exist if they were alone, who needed to be talking and listening to others all the time. But Annie felt acutely alive when she was by herself, when she was silent, when she was surrounded by silence. She sometimes looked at the books on the shelves in the library and felt a kinship with them, so full, so still, so potent.

Her sister, of course, had always been just the opposite. She had reveled in talk, whether on the phone or in person, her own or that of the couple at the next table at a restaurant — the more people around her, the happier she was. Though she had never entertained like Cousin Lou, she had always taken her clients and their editors out, filling up almost every meal of almost every day — breakfast, lunch, or dinner, the choice calculated using her own internal and complicated formula, a successful author getting dinner, as well as one who had hit hard times. But she did these things, ate these meals, not in a great flourish of hospitality like Lou, but out of fascination. Miranda loved problems. She loved turning problems into stories and stories into gold.

'I am an alchemist,' she would say. 'And a nightmare.'

Annie knew she herself was neither an alchemist nor a nightmare. Perhaps that was why Frederick had disappeared. Yet she was sure he had liked her. Really liked her. And she was sure she had liked him. She would let her thoughts go no further in that direction. She had liked him. In a way she had not liked anyone in a long, long time. In a way that left her hollow without him. In a way she would push out of her mind.

Back in the living room, she watched her sister thoughtfully perusing a People magazine, which, along with all tabloids, she referred to as her 'files.' These quiet days in a suburban Indian summer must be hard for Miranda, Annie thought. Annie was used to being left alone by the world. Miranda was not. But now the publishers had stopped calling. The editors had stopped calling. Even the press had stopped calling. There were, of course, the remnants of the Awful Authors. It seemed as though they unfortunately would never stop calling. They were like foghorns, mournfully hooting from their lonely rocky promontories. No wonder Miranda was so taken with Kit and his little boy. They were young and fresh and untainted by the false disasters Miranda had wasted her life pursuing.

When Kit arrived, he brought a bottle of Maker's Mark and, on the basis of his many years as an unemployed thespian bartender, made them Manhattans. Miranda sucked on the Maraschino cherry. He had actually brought a bottle of them. The resplendent red, the sweet unreal flavor, reminded her momentarily of Josie, of special nights out and tall glasses of Shirley Temple cocktails.

Henry sat on the floor with a plastic cow and a robot. The cow and the robot danced. Or wrestled. Miranda could not tell which.

Now Kit was talking. But, mirabile dictu, instead of telling her his stories, Kit was asking about her own. He wanted to know what she thought about before she went to sleep when she was a child. Did she have wallpaper in her room? What teachers had she loved and why? What was the first pair of shoes she remembered? She sometimes felt that he was rummaging through her life as if it were an attic full of musty antique treasures, but his curiosity was warm and detailed and domestic and endless, and Miranda, so accustomed to listening and waiting and pouncing on the sordid details of others' lives, found herself almost delirious at the intoxicating novelty of hearing her own voice telling her own small stories.

Annie listened to her sister talking about their childhood. Now and then she would add something, or Betty would jump in with a clearer memory. Annie had to admit she liked having Kit and Henry around. On the floor, Henry muttered seriously to his toys and allowed her to stroke his silky hair. Kit had dropped his jacket on a chair and kicked off his shoes and, though just barely suggesting the sweeping piles of shoes and socks and sweaters and electronic gadgets that her own boys would strew around her apartment when they were home, these small gestures afforded her a momentary tender motherly exasperation.

She heard a phone ring from deep inside her reverie and thought for an instant that it was her phone, her call, her sons. But of course it was not even her ring, it was Miranda's.

'Yes,' Miranda was saying in her patient Awful Author voice, at the same time grimacing to the others in the