Red Leaves

'I don't know,' Keith answered. 'Before ... midnight, okay?'

'Okay,' I said. 'But no later. Your mother would be worried.'

'Okay, Dad,' Keith said.

He hung up and I went back to my chair, though not to The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. I had never had particularly refined taste in literature, although the occasional serious novel might gain a little ground among the nonfiction that was my usual fare. On this particular night, it was a book about an African tribe that had been displaced, moved from a region in which the tribesmen had been farmers to one in which they were reduced to gathering food among the sparse foliage that dotted otherwise rocky, inhospitable soil. As their condition had grown more desperate, their ancient religious and social institutions had collapsed. All that had once seemed so firm crumbled, all their habits and relations—everything. There was no solid human nature, the book said, there were only met and unmet needs, our deepest roots sunk in shifting sand.

I had just finished the book when Meredith returned home.

She seemed surprised that I hadn't gone to bed.

'Keith called,' I told her. 'He's going to be late.'

Meredith dropped her purse on the sofa and began pulling off her shoes. 'The Giordanos are making a late night of it, I guess.'

'No, he's already left there,' I told her. 'He said he might hang out with some people.'

She cocked her head quizzically. 'Well, that's an interesting development. Or it will be, if it's true.'

Her final words struck me as unexpectedly suspicious.

'True?' I asked. 'Why wouldn't it be true?'

She came over and touched my face, her gaze oddly indulgent, as if explaining life to a little boy. 'Because people lie, Eric.'

'But why else would he be out?' I asked.

She shrugged. 'Maybe he's buying drugs,' she said jokingly. 'Or maybe he's a Peeping Tom.'

I laughed, and so did she, since the image of our son lurking in the shadows, peering into windows, seemed comical, one of the many things we could not imagine him doing.

'I told him to be back home by midnight,' I said.

She reached for me. 'Let's go to bed,' she said.

Meredith often tossed restlessly for hours before finally dropping off, but that night was different. She fell asleep right away, like someone exhausted by a long day's labor. For a time, I watched her, pleased with how smart and lovely she was, how contented with the life we shared. By then, many of our friends had divorced, and those who hadn't seemed hardly better off, either snippy with one another or dismissive, the pleasure they'd once taken together now no more than a distant memory.

We'd met during her last year of college, dated for six months, then married. We'd lived in Boston for a time, where she'd taught at a local public school while I'd worked at a pharmaceutical company. We'd both hated our jobs, and so, a few months after Keith came along, we'd taken the plunge, moved to Wesley, managed to secure a loan, and bought the frame and photo shop. Meredith had stayed home with Keith for the first seven years, then taken a part-time teaching job at the junior college. As Keith grew older, she'd added to her teaching load, shedding her former household duties like a dry skin, becoming younger and more vibrant, it seemed to me, so that as she slept that night, it did not surprise me that her lips suddenly lifted in a quiet smile.

I was peering at that smile when I heard a car crunch to a halt at the far end of the drive. I sat up in bed, and glanced out the window. By then the car was backing onto the road, two beams of light sweeping across the undergrowth with a smooth, ghostly grace. Seconds later I saw Keith make his way down the unpaved drive that circled around to our front door, his pace slow and halting, head down as if against a hostile wind.

After a moment, he disappeared from view. Then I heard the metallic click of the front door, the sound of his feet as he made his way up the stairs, past our bedroom, and down the corridor to his own room.

He was just opening the door to that room when I stepped into the hallway.

'Hi,' I said.

He didn't turn toward me, but stood, facing the door, his body curiously stiff.

'Did you have a good time with your friends?' I asked lightly.

He nodded, the long strands of his hair shifting in a tangled curtain as he moved.

'Good,' I said.

As he eased around to face me, I saw that his shirttail was rumpled, as if it had been hurriedly tucked in. 'Okay if I go to bed now?' he asked a little curtly, but with no more than the usual teenage impatience.

'Yes,' I said. 'I just wanted to make sure you were okay.'

He quickly turned and disappeared into his room, leaving me alone in the dimly lit corridor.

I returned to my bed, now fully awake, feeling an inexplicable unease, a sense that something in the nature of things had quietly turned against me, undermining my long certitude, as if, beneath the houses firm foundation, I could feel a subtle trembling in the earth.

THREE

The next morning Meredith was already up and making breakfast by the time I came into the kitchen.

'Well, hello, sleepyhead,' she said lightly.

The air was thick with the salty smell of bacon and brewing coffee, odors that mark a family man as surely as cheap perfume betrays a bounder.

'You're awfully energetic this morning,' I said.

Meredith forked a strip of bacon onto a paper towel to let it drain. 'I woke up starving. Don't you ever wake up starving?'

For some reason, I heard a faint sense of accusation in her question, the sense that my own early-morning lack of appetite was emblematic of deeper deficiencies. Did I lack ambition, too, she seemed to ask. And passion? Did I lack sufficient hungers?

She drew the bacon from the paper towel and took a quick bite. 'Yum.' She snapped at the dangling end of the bacon, tearing the meat away in small bites. Wolfishly. I half expected to hear her growl.

Or did she do any of this, I wonder now. Was it merely something I thought I saw? And even if it were really there, where does a man go with such odd presentiments, a sense, vague and ineffable, that you do not really know the one you know, that all your previous soundings have gone no deeper than the shallows.

I sat down at the table, picked up the paper, and glanced at the headline, something about the proposed town budget. 'Keith got in late.' I idly turned the page, now looking for the ad I'd placed three days before. 'Around midnight, I guess.'

Meredith grabbed the pot from the coffeemaker and poured each of us a steaming cup.

'I heard him come in,' I added. 'But you were out like a light.'

She sat down, took a sip from her cup, then tossed her hair with an earthy flare, like a woman in a roadhouse. 'Beautiful morning,' she said. Then she laughed.

'What's so funny?'

'Oh, just some silly joke Dr. Mays told us at the meeting.'

'Which was?'

She waved her hand. 'You wouldn't think it was funny.'

'Why do you say that?'

'It's silly, Eric. You wouldn't like it.'

'Try me.'

She shrugged. 'Okay,' she said, 'It wasn't really a joke. It was a quotation. From Lenny Bruce.' She chuckled again. 'He said that the difference between a man and a woman is that when a woman is thrown through a plateglass window, she doesn't get up thinking about sex.'

'Dr. Mays said that?' I asked, surprised. 'Dr. Mays of the thick glasses and tweed jacket and white meerschaum pipe?'

Meredith took another sip of coffee. 'The very one.'

I folded the paper and laid it on the table. 'I'm surprised he's even heard of Lenny Bruce.'

Meredith snapped another strip of bacon from the plate and took a small bite. 'People aren't always what