_Iif you were Clem Mestre you would look over your yard fence and see the new woman on the block, Andra, with her two-month-old black Shar-Pei dog on a red leash. You’d see Andra in a long brown medieval print dress and lizard sandals looking from their hill toward the precincts of the town, Ruggle Hampton, where the men were away and the women were left in the shops, which were wilted, going fast with no grace. She wouldn’t know, Andra, that these plain women were keepers of the flame in failing shops; pockets of ardor and kindness, Clem felt, while the men, the owners, were away, embarrassed. The mall stores were killing them. The men did not want to be seen standing behind forlorn counters looking at the weather. Clem could see, he thought, the used gloom dripping from the windows—an unhappy dew, behind which kind and plain women moved quietly. Andra, probably a graduate student at the town college, was plain too. This moved Clem. He was a doctor, reading books and looking hard at forty. He felt very gentle toward plain Andra with her rare little dog, both of them looking at a new town.

Something had just happened lately to another plain woman he knew, Esther.

She had been raped, by several men. It had made television news. He could think of nothing else but Esther and the book he was reading. He had marked two lines from it just now: “Deep down, I’m in a panic all the time” and “He’s a thief, a drinker...He rapes a bit.” Esther had loved him. He’d ignored her. He had been short and unkind to plain women throughout his life. Now, deep down, he was in a panic, and very sorry for it. Who had he thought he was? Many of them had asked for nothing but simple communication. He was not up to it. He could not deliver himself to their moment. He thought he was a big cheese, with too much to offer; hence, they got nothing.

Clem had had an arrogance about his unusual impression on plain women. He had been unable to disregard their plainness, and wrote them off. But now he was wishing that he had caressed and cheered them all. He had missed good fevers and much easy conversation. Esther Haste was one he should have embraced. He recalled that when she declared her love, he was spending his time, almost all of it, with a self-mocking beauty named Eileen who went through a list of her flaws as if it were the only possible subject on earth. Soon it became clear that this self-assault was merely a social veneer that, when studied with the slightest effort, revealed a bottomless worship of herself, such a solo chamber as he’d never viewed before, where her attacks on her graces were the other side of a monologue through which her charms could shine all the more for being doubted. Even now he was going on in his head about Eileen more than the damaged Esther, simply because of Eileen’s beauty, a thing to which he regretted so much was owed.

Esther had been used badly by several men on a houseboat. One of the men was her co-worker in the Game and Parks Service—Victor Kepps—whose indicted slumping shoulders and petulant face Clem had seen on the local television news. The woman’s name was not given out over the air. Appalled beyond his usual irony, Dale Shivers had whispered it to Mestre. The truth worked on Clem, creating a vision of Esther that surprised him. She became, well, yes, divine. Esther was all at once divine, a treasure that he must hurry to and shower with respect. He must honor her. This was urgent. Terrifying honor was due her because, with his chance, he had slighted her badly.

She’d said she admired and loved him, this on their third meeting. Mestre was busy with Eileen at the time and had told Esther certainly she didn’t. She didn’t know him well enough. But this was all to get rid of her and make the path smooth and clear to Eileen. What a vicious American blunder, everything for romance, one romance. Even the most horrific bands on the radio sang, all the time, one, oh oh oh one, you the only one. One woman, one life, all that. What a stupid lack of option, he felt now. Thick, goonish Mestre, looking through Esther to Eileen, with her sex spread redly, her spoiled, infinitely photographed face wide-eyed with climax. He grew conscious that with a peculiar case like Eileen, he too could adore himself out of existence. Too appreciated, the object disappeared. But with the avid, kind Esther—doomed to plainness, by his standards—so much of her remained undiscovered, and he could see that pleasant sea of her smiling through her bangs. In injury and insult, she seemed a goddess to him now, a woman out of one of those dreams that hurl an ignored female face at you, someone ignored in your day life now calling. You answered with late passion, she held you, and you flowed into her, stunned for days afterward.

But nobody even knew where Esther was staying. Was she even in town? In other days she had divided her life between the stone house in the state park around the reservoir and her apartment on Virginia, the third story of a whitewashed chalet weathered and splotched by the boughs of an enormous maple, below which you could see her yellow Hyundai with a sap-drenched darker roof. Mestre had been up there only once, and had been too shifty to appreciate the small romance of her green and violet rooms. Years ago a writer for the town paper had destroyed himself there in an experiment with “designer” drugs, on which he was doing a series, so the place had the musk of near-authenticated artistic suicide. Esther had been proud of her cheap rent, and Mestre had nodded, not really caring, not really that delighted for her. What did it matter that a plain woman in forestry and wildlife management had colorful quarters on a shaded back street? He hated his smug, awful decisions on good plain women now. There must have been a dozen of them who had wanted to get closer to him, and he had denied their friendship; truly, even their whole unglittering lives. Esther seemed all of them in one. Why couldn’t he find her forestry and wildlife interesting, and why couldn’t he commiserate with her about her ridiculous salary? Why couldn’t he have bought something happy and simple, like a chicken, roasted it on her grill, and had a bottle of middling wine with her? They could have talked on her balcony about the poor departed journalist, whom she’d known. The journalist was the sort of pal—a low achieving hopeful with large ideas—that girls like Esther always had. Mestre had the sort of foxy, prosperous vanity ripe for humiliations by Eileens. He saw through others constantly to the withered ghosts they really were. Now he was himself as among the withered ghosts, seeking membership, hoping much was forgiven.

He continued to watch a minor version of her in Andra over the fence with her little Chinese dog, both well groomed and expectant. The rest of the town would not see it, not a bit. Esther would be the used and outraged woman, hidden away for years, maybe creeping back into view somewhere else, in a place that would not know her shame. Even her name changed, maybe. This would be the common guess, the common want. You saw her going back to her meek people, where she remained in bed suffering for months, none of them knowing how to help her, watching gingerly for signs of lunacy. They’d get her to venture out, say to a pharmacy, and the kindly rube who filled her script would nod with thin warmth, then talk her case up with the senile drone at the cash register when she left. Much nodding again, sincere awe going around the shop like a monkey in a bow tie. Clem could not bear this. Feebleminded men at the bait and tackle hole would nod earnestly as her family car passed by, lamenting her “case.” You could see them wagging and getting moony in the eyes, hundreds of them out there in the dense air of gossip, the mulling progeny—Mestre recalled the phrase from a wag—of Mortimer Snerd.

Poor, poor Esther. Radiant Esther. Clem wanted to clasp her in an endless hug and be her champion, running out for errands she barely required, in defiance of the ghastly hicks.

Clem Mestre knew one of her assailants on the houseboat. He’d met the ranger right at the lodge in Tishomingo Park where he took Eileen a year ago. Clem wanted to have her in a cabin overlooking the rock bluffs and creek near the Tennessee line. It was a nippy, fireplace January. The best part of the trip was keeping Eileen away from her society, a constant squad of swains and their envious lovelies who woke the needs of Eileen with hymns of respect and surprises for her day. Eileen was a speech pathologist who did not practice much. She’d never mention her clients, most likely because it entailed, oh, well, afflicted people of another dreary sphere. She was much wanted as a co-anchor on a show in Nashville, but with great flirting she kept turning them down, listing her flaws, which anybody prescient could see were actually virtues. These self-criticisms set a further glow around her, this great beauty so human and unconfident. Now Mestre could see that this obvious method had worked handsomely for her everywhere; it had baffled him—the most promising suave Mestre—perfectly. A childish bid for even more attention, an algebra of pity raising her to withering popular status. Eileen was simply after everything. The cabin bored her instantly. In the city of love she was a kind of Mestre-humoring mechanic, with condescending huffs of pleasure. After two days in the cabin, though, it murdered him. He saw he was not having her at all. He was not even an equal in the room. Even her diligence hurt his feelings. He began using his mouth on her, like a slave. “Oh, why don’t you come back up here with the big people, Clem?” she said after a while.

He thought she didn’t care for the outdoors because it challenged her total concentration on herself. The stony hills and the creek might as well have been rivals in prom gowns. Yet, finally, she admitted, “I’m not all that much, I’m shallow and I’ll never ever do anything extraordinary.” By God, this won him all over again, the chilly minx, smart and humble about her future like this. He wanted to eat her alive, forgiving all, nearly desperate for every part of her. All of this should have been done for Esther, he saw today. If only Esther had been there in the cabin, receiving all his study and adulation, reflecting his love, charmed by everything about him. It could still be done. What brightness in that. He saw them: “Clem, I simply adore you.” And he: “Esther, you can’t know, I’ll begin with reverence for each of your little parts.” Though he wouldn’t say quite that thespianly thing. All his gestures would be put to the good, absorbed in her light, all of her, queen of disgrace and insult. She would not have been available to the horror on the houseboat had he seen her sooner, she’d not have had to suffer it at all. He was almost devout in his groin as he thought of her out there on the water.

But what had happened was, he’d gone to the lodge, where he met the ranger Victor Kepps, a lean freckled man stooping over a long cigarette at a domino table. The man was having his break, with coffee and smoke, and Mestre recalled he was one of those men—how do they do it?—who make the act of smoking a nasty, wet, al- most threatening thing. The ranger had a way with his lips of grimly sucking the filter. You saw he was a fellow of low, mean hungers, too pleased with his tan ranger uniform. The man sold him two gnarled walking sticks, hooped at the end, very rugged and folksy. Clem thought this would cheer Eileen up and give them a memento of their nature walk through the woods of storied Tishomingo. He was, however, unnerved by the ranger, who acted miffed to be waiting on him, making mere change, while the large woman at the register was away in the back somewhere, averse to tobacco smoke. The man said not a word and seemed to despise Mestre on sight. Then he spoke: “Thet your girlie or your wife up to the cabin with you?”

“I don’t see any reason to answer that,” said Mestre instantly. The man was angered, and with his lips worse and redder than ever, he went mushy in the mouth.

“Don’t let me stop you doing your duty by her. A thing like that don’t give it away free.”

The words, out of order, were delivered with that solemn country bemusement Mestre detested, and the bitterer thing about them was that they were absolutely true, though Mestre, a snob who had spent his time since mid-adolescence trying to obliterate his Appalachian brogue, resented the ranger’s eyes and imagination near his realm. Mestre was a physician, an M.D., for starters. True, only a sports doctor, but this was by choice. He was a sporting, damned well-kept and attractive man, and expert at what he did. This leering student of Smokey the Bear couldn’t even keep up the elemental courtesies of his lot, and Mestre couldn’t quite believe the uniform belonged to him. Some browbeaten uncle must have got him the job. Later, with Esther’s awful houseboat experience in his mind, he saw this freckled nephew led off sulking in manacles on the local news. Mestre sank as a too detailed vision of sexual assault—on poor Esther!—blew up his head. He saw the ranger’s member, uncircumcised and freckled, seeking Esther, who lay bruised and cut, in shock, watching her supposed buddy throw himself on her, just another of the wild pack—maybe the leader.

Mestre had seen Esther once or twice after his weekend with Eileen in the park, and commented on the lowbred ranger who’d sold him the canes. She told him, well, that she had no trouble with Victor. He thought he was God’s gift to babes, but nobody before her had bothered to joke him out of this notion. She could handle him though, with one finger. Mestre re- buked himself for his lewd imaginings. His mind would run and stun him, despite his cool treatment of both men and women athletes. Medical school had never beaten down the prurience in him, and he wondered if there were many physicians like him. He worried that one day, somehow, somebody would shine a light through his head and expose the lascivious theater on a screen for the world to see.

When Clem was a youth in Kentucky there was a woman in the neighborhood who warned her daughters, Mestre’s playmates, about “evil-minded doctors.” This woman, a second grade teacher, was a very bent puritan. Even Mestre’s father chuckled about her obsession in this pious town where, Mestre later heard, there were several men who had fathered six and eight children without once seeing their mate naked. The schoolteacher ignored the McCarthy Communist paranoia of the fifties, bent already by her larger obsession. So little Clem chuckled too, but he had grown up the very monster of her admonitions. Or was he simply modern and average? In the case of Esther, his imagination was unwanted. He was scum, she was a saint, with her honest spoken love of him. A graduate student with a year of eligibility left at college, Esther played volleyball for the girls’ team. Nobody much cared, hardly anybody came to the games, but she’d twisted her ankle badly one afternoon. Mestre happened to be there, and his first touch of her flesh must have been the beginning of her love. My, it was rapid. And he’d blown it off. Jackass.

The last humiliation in the cabin with Eileen had to do with the walking sticks.

“What’s this you have? A Good Shepherd’s kit? Am I supposed to be Bo Peep? Really, Clem,” she said when he raised the canes up with a smile at the door.

“These are for us to hike the trails.” He grew downcast, trodden before he’d begun.

“Well, maybe for you. I’ll watch you hike. Go ahead. I’ll wait.”

“You won’t go?”

“You take the hike. I want to see you with this crook thing, making your way.”

There were several other couples staying in Tishomingo, young and middle-aged and obviously in love. Mestre had seen them around the park. He had imagined that this simple pleasure, walking, had created the love, made it a deep, priceless thing. He looked slyly at Eileen, whom he had banged away at with the result of perfect indifference. It was a dreadful fact to read in her eyes. And she was so svelte, so gorgeous with her blond hair pulled back, chilly, in her black shirt! Murder.

Now Esther again. Esther had that devout plainness seen in the face of madonnas, a beauty (yes, beauty) irrelevant to college contests, pretty meat on the hoof in swimwear and formals. More abiding, with a strength that touched him liquidly.

He had set out with his staff, the third wheel at his own party of two. Nature was glum, fierce, mocking, fingers lying on him with smothering irony. Was there ever a gloomier journey? Chief Tishomingo, tall, betrayed, noble, could never have known the petty whining in this white man. He could fall down a ravine, thought Clem. He could see her incredulous, though, moved to high irritation, her arms folded while the paramedics from the ambulance scrambled around. A woman like that got out of sex without even a crease in her brow. In Esther’s case, he knew he’d have her, truly and finally.

He asked around the college and called the park office, but nobody was sure where she’d been taken. The meek Hyundai, yellow under its brown sap-stained roof, was painful in its absence. The vacant oil-splotched drive under the great maples moved him almost too much. Each time Mestre passed, he felt more greatly the sinner. He was aware that he was becoming almost vain in his sin, all the friendly plain girls of his past around his head like a nimbus of medieval angels. Some worker in drug rehab once explained to Mestre something called grandiose guilt. The addict, in his grandiosity, assumes that the derelictions and horrors of his past are too special ever to be forgiven. He continues his substance abuse in this vain fatalism and individuality, captain of iniquity, untouchable. Mestre began asking total strangers about Esther on the sidewalks downtown. Couldn’t they, wouldn’t they, know something?

The houseboat came back to him. There was a shot of it on television, looking discarded, torn into silence by rape, a floating crypt of gang hunger, bottles and cans here and there. The places of crime were even grimmer looking than their pilgrims, Mestre noticed. Grimmer than even the culprits. The place put a hard stare on you, and seemed even lewder than warranted, when you knew the outrage that had transpired there. Same with her vacant apartment window next to the grillwork balcony, ivy clutching the bricks down from it, black-green like sorrow.

He came on a cop, a young skull-shaved, bullet-headed man, hat off for a break from the heat in late May. The fellow was leaning on his cruiser, probably for passersby to review his build. You could tell he spent much time on the weights, and had that prowling-gorilla bow in his arms Mestre had seen athletes of a certain class work for; a subclass of cave-era goons thrilled to be hunched meat. In fact, across the country, these sorts of boys were likely to gang up and take some woman serially and invoke scandal, wandering back to the coach, eyes on the floor, saying “We thought it was a date, sir, everything was all go.” Mestre asked the cop if he knew Esther’s where- abouts, or could tell him. The cop recognized the team doctor, and did know where Esther was. He whispered the place to Mestre.

“Doc, I’ve wondered. Who gets to, say, would it be you?—you know, examine them after something like that, uh, assault?

“Who gets to?”

“Yeah. And paid for it. Paid to look into things. Now there’s a life.”

“I’d imagine a female doc at the hospital. You’re a sick man, a fool.” Mestre surprised himself. The man was a brute but had kind and sad eyes. Mestre was sorry. He half wished the man would attack him.

“No offense, I always imagined you were a man all set up with no great cares.”

“No, no, I’ve got cares. I need to see her,” said Mestre.

“She ought to be where I heard.” The man seemed relieved Mestre had settled down. He was alarmed by emotional discharge and had probably never been called a fool. Briefly, he’d been reduced to a confused infant, but now he was angry.

All of Mestre’s gloomy sin popped in his brain—something red and racing. For this dolt in blue he almost spat out a rapsheet of what?—perfidy, malaise, malingering, concupiscence, general time-murdering sorriness, inner pornography. He was a hangaround, a layabout. He was not a good doctor at all. Yet he maintained the false gaudy innocence that cops always elicited in him.

After medical school, which he had done merely to prove that a boy from the east Kentucky hills could do it, he was exhausted. There was hardly a bit of medical want in him. His parents were glad, but when he did the internship and residence, he might as well have been a zombie. He did not impress his mentors. There was a wrong heaviness to his mind, not in profundity but mere mass, thick unsalient slabs, shuffling back and forth in twilight. Many days he suspected he was not very bright.

It came to him, the very picture: he was an unshucked oyster, hurtling on the winds, all air, gonad and gut. Chances seemed in a loud hurry around him, but he could do nothing—nothing—about them. Mestre yearned to be driven by some grand circumstance. Everything in his existence was too slack.

On the road thirty miles from Esther yet in his little Mazda Miata convertible—a brighter yellow than Esther’s Hyundai—he thought of women again. Back to that misty weird little club that Mrs. Freeman, the schoolteacher who warned girls of “evil-minded doctors,” led. She’d had a hold on small boys too. It began as a vague thing. Clem and others in her second grade class were wont to feign nausea and gag whenever kissing a girl was mentioned. There was a strange youngster in their room who grabbed and kissed girls all the time. Mestre and his mates just could not abide this and would shout and hold their stomachs. Hideously, most of the little girls were pleased when Leonard slobbered on their lips out on the playground, a thing of rough coke soil above mountain caverns. Mrs. Freeman watched the boys with narrowed eyes and much trembling glee. She favored the ones who made such faces and fuss over kissing. Mestre and his friends were in her club. She watched them with fascination and gave them special, private favors. She hated kissing too, Clem now understood. In the little movie house on the hill on Saturday mornings, she was likely to be sitting near the back row, alone. When the characters onscreen kissed, the little boys began raving in outrage. Mrs. Freeman would egg them on. They’d turn around and catch her waving to them, in league, urging the catcalls. “We don’t like that stuff, do we, boys?” She’d cheer them outside in the hurting light afterward, and walk partway with them. Even then, the boys felt odd about Mrs. Freeman. They weren’t that glad to hoot the onscreen kissing, and they did not want to be in a club headed by Mrs. Freeman, with her crinkled eyes and risen waves of white and black hair. Mestre thought he saw Mrs. Freeman in his yard once, looking in at him, but he never told his parents and didn’t know whether to believe what he had seen. Another night he saw a lone hand rise at the back window of his house, and felt he could never discuss that either. It remained one of those many childhood incidents, awful and untellable, that haunt existence.

Something else happened one summer at his relatives’ house in Virginia Beach, where his childless uncle and aunt had invited Clem’s family. His uncle was in the navy. His wife was a real looker, and Clem was old enough to know this. She looked like all the brunette beauties from World War II. Through an opportune accident of door crack and a mirror somewhere, Mestre saw his uncle on his knees before a bed, his wife’s raised legs around his head. Never, ever, could he confess this to anyone, but it made him wild and dizzy in the head. The sight of his uncle and aunt drove him thereafter from the room. He could still remember, and still lived, that riot of nerve ends and fast blood, childhood shut forever out or, rather, amplified in hot blood and quick heart. Somehow he connected the face of Mrs. Freeman with the sight. She was there looking too, reprimanding. Much later, Mestre heard that the song “When You Walk Through a Storm Keep Your Head Up High!”—whatever its name—was played at Mrs. Freeman’s funeral. From then on, even the song was darkly sexual and forbidden—and wonderful. Mrs. Freeman nodded in music over his aunt and uncle, delirious animals. Mestre felt strange and ill thinking of this.

Esther, now that he brought these memories forward, lived in the condition of a stained glass window, purple and green, looming over the devout. His gentleness was so extended it became holy. He had never felt anything like it before. But his blood was hot and his heart very quick. He was in a trance almost liquid, the ecstasy of lust and piety upon him at once.

He had tried, weakly, to adopt the priestliness of habit in his medical ventures. This was the mode of his esteemed mentors and others in the profession he admired. But he was far, far from it. With his sporting build and smooth face, framed by cherubic black hair, he was conscious of himself as too handsome for the trade, and often found women staring at him while he examined their knees and elbows. Custom protected this subromance, but Mestre, in his weak priestliness, was always afraid he would blather out something over the line and embarrass his profession. The two snakes coiled on the staff—the caduceus—were likely to rear back and strike Mestre in the ears, routing him and the oath, at some horrible moment. Truth was Mestre often thought of being, as more native to his destiny, an alcoholic painter, with only a bicycle and two changes of clothes, wild but clean. But he could not even draw, he could not drink much, and just thinking about a bicycle led him to imagine the right kind of all-sport Reeboks to buy with it. A pair, in short, that swankier girls would passion. Women like Esther would dream of helping him, saving him. That was the huge trouble with Mestre’s life now. He needed saving from nothing. He’d achieved a smug carapace, reaching out weakly to diagnose with hairy little feelers. An M.D. not wholly a doctor was likely to be a monster of some sort, he knew, not just another citizen. He felt natural at nothing. His function could have been filled by any normally bright person with a year in nursing school. Mestre painted at three fixed canvases, wanting passion to come along—perhaps even talent—but his conceptions and executions were vile. They depressed him. He kept them in a secret room. He did not want to be known as a doctor who dabbles. He reminded himself that when he did practice medicine, he was pretty good.

The little village where Esther had retreated (to a widowed aunt with roses and a garden, and trellises behind the house) was marked by a despondent neglect. You saw the hollow lack of use in the few buildings, almost a cry—you heard—from the remaining crust of heart in them. Such was the ruin Mestre had wanted to forever avoid when he fled east Kentucky, where the air was bit with such lack of promise you presumed headless bodies trucked back and forth inside, grazing for water or bread. The aunt’s wide cottage seemed at least brave in its difference.

Clem had made money too late to change the life of his parents. They were beyond wanting anything else by then, and they were frightened by “those new mods” like microwave ovens. His convertible had terrified his mother. A home on the seashore would have served merely as a booth for pale, wrinkled relics. Even the idea of the sea seemed to trouble old Mr. Mestre. Clem was quite sure that his father thought great creatures got out of it and walked around the neighborhoods. His parents would have settled into that peculiar ghastliness of old Floridians who never leave the house. Dr. Mestre’s childhood friends were so far gone from his hometown, there was nobody to come back to and impress. The aunt’s house, minus the garden and roses, reminded him of places back home, anchored well-deep to the grim and habitual. He circled the wide cottage-asylum of the raped, roses flocking it—and looked for signs of Esther. What would he say?

It was likely that she hated men at large now, and that Mestre might make her skin crawl. It occurred to him that he had never known a woman confessing to a rape in her past. He had seen a group of them on television once. But they claimed to have been raped by their husbands. Mestre was uncomfortable with their going public about this matter.

He caught sight of Esther, who seemed tiny and retreating, on the back screened porch.

He felt too handsome and smooth in his yellow Miata, like a birthday cake candle, irrelevant to the moment.

Mestre had had, of course, a wife at one time. She was a lazy nurse who’d now and then have bursts of manic zeal for very eclectic things. Things of sudden irksome importance: some new friend, the Bible; a glass frog collection; the Catholic church, with bedroom Madonna statuary. None of the enthusiasms lasted. Her equally lazy and snobbish brother would visit. They liked nobody, really. The world was in for general hell when they were together. The two of them would retire unto themselves for an afternoon of contempt and giggles. Mestre was cut off from their spite reunion. Once he announced he had seen a large dog, a shepherd, dragged killed from the road by two weeping children. Mestre had been deeply moved by that and needed to share it. The two of them found a clever way to giggle even about that. He never forgave them, and began thinking of them as the evil twins. It was a delight to see her brother, shed by his wife after multiple mean infidelities, become a bawling penitent in Mestre’s house. Brother and sister liked to cook up a batch of chicken gizzards and devastate them, an act Mestre saw as an ugly communion from their past. The stench drove him to the front of the house, where he found out he really despised his wife by hating so much this filth that she ate. What he had taken for an easy philosophic high style was merely torpor. Yet he continued living with her, and this was the thing: he began raping her. She did not know it, but he was raping her, his body in a frenzy like a shark’s. His act was one of total control and disgust. In fact, it was good, and he did not intend to improve his attitude, and it lasted the last year of their marriage.

Now in his dreams and day reveries he achieved a delicious chill when he thought of several men taking women sexually, the woman a thing of only slightly resisting orifices, until the animal ecstasy struck her. This was precisely the point, knew Mestre, staring at Esther, who had come out to the lawn.

Writhing orifices, the whimpering, protesting mouth—Esther, my Esther—the amazed eyes, the unbidden hunger. That is my Esther. He had to stop this quick. He had heard of a priest who resigned because the confessions of his parishioners were so dull. Bored petrified, did he dream off into his own better ones? Mestre could sympathize, too much. Remarkably, he’d achieved with time a defined contempt for the ill and high regard for the healthy and the dead, so eloquently quiet. But he resisted the arrogance of his profession. But maybe he was not that good, simply. He was a layabout, merely heavy in the mind, with no weight. He could barely look at Esther now and he seemed, out of his loud toylike car, a rolling fool and an impertinence. She was not a glow. She was a woman only five foot four, with square shoulders, ordinary as the tomatoes behind her, this mystified pinch to her face. It was a country look, little-eyed, mouth forming zero. Could this thing be real? All the rubes were asking, nationwide. Then she smiled as if she had found, say, Venus in the telescope. He was almost on her before she called his name tiredly. “Clem Mestre?”

I need, I need badly something ongoing in my life, thought Mestre. It has to be her. I can love her. I can surround her with care. Wasn’t he seeing love and care in her eyes? He went up and clasped her in a great hug.

Esther had, he noticed, rather insinuating haunches, and moved with a lot of tease about her, maybe deliberately set on being girlish despite the recent horror. Trying to have her self back. She was made-up with some flush on her cheekbones, and she couldn’t have been preparing for him.

“I didn’t even know if we were friends. I thought I’d run you off,” she said.

“I’ve never forgotten you.” A field of gray set in Mestre’s mind, narrowing to the image of a kind of bowling lane with pools of despondency here and there. But he pressed on, trying to bring some honor to his route.

“You know I’m all right, physically, don’t you? The doctoring is over.”

“Bruises on your neck.”

“Do you want to ask me things, Clem? Or should we act like nothing much has happened?”

“Tell me about your aunt. What’s she like?”

Esther resembled somewhat the older Princess Margaret, and like hers, Esther’s hair was swept back from the ears. He was waiting for Esther to leap into his own beatific vision of her, tresses streaming down. He stared at her rudely, as he himself had been stared at by the injured women he’d touched.

“My aunt. Well, she was fun once. Now she’s religious. Golly, like the D.A. Everybody around me seems to be turning religious. What are you looking at? Don’t!”

“I’m sorry.”

“At my neck like a swan’s, but purple and yellow?”

“Not that. Just you. Seeing you.”

“Like I’m about to burst into a gas.”

“You feel that, Esther?”

“The same as my aunt and the D.A. I was going on with the story and looked over at him. You knew he was waiting for me to burst into flame. The Hindenburg."

“Mal Little seems to be a good man. If you believe in good men anymore.”

“Oh come on, please, Clem. Sure. It’s me, still me. The one that had a crush on you.” She placed one foot forward in its black pump, arms out, as in a statue of mercy. In truth he had expected more the mad maid twirling between the hedges in a long white gown like, say, Ophelia in Hamlet, the only play of the bard’s he’d read. “You think you’re looking at, gosh, I’ll bet, Saintness Somebody.”

She was clever. He didn’t remember that. Mestre had once heard a comic say that beautiful women had to listen one hour per day to people calling them beautiful, whereas ugly women had the whole extra hour free to get smart. Esther wasn’t ugly, but...One of the men on the houseboat, his hands around her long neck, thrusting, tongue out, eyes shut, flashed and shamed Clem.

Second one on her, enormous with waiting, chooses sodomy; another one yokes her. Please. Mestre was embarrassed and disgusted by those hip naked orgies in the seventies. But his mind would not quit flashing.

“You can’t be having this much fun,” he said.

“Oh Clem, there really isn’t a way to be now, is there? It’s a kind of yanked-around nonexistence I feel.” Clem could see the aunt looming in the doorway to the screened porch. He wondered what the old woman thought she needed to hear. His youth was beset by harkening interlopers— spies, really—women in windows, telephone in hand like a virus. The men had no stories. It was the women who had a point of view and a theme: evil is breaking out. What I saw this morning. Who Jenny was with. Another man with Esther. “She doesn’t matter.” Esther knew who was behind her back on the porch. “She’s got three friends in the church, even more religious than the minister.”

“What about your spiritual state, Esther?”

“This is a surprise from you.”

“Why?”

“I assumed most doctors were atheists. Just did, since I was a little girl.”

They sat on the wire drugstore chairs under a spreading pecan. Mestre was shy of his question, a little, but his eyes pressed on at her without his consent.

“It’s a way of asking about you.” He blinked. “Just how are you fixed in your soul?”

“Is it a preacher?” Came a quack behind him. It was the aunt and he jumped. How could she have heard. He wasn’t loud. What long, long ears. Esther shook her head at the aunt. He heard a movement of retreat at the porch door. 

“Who changed you?" Esther asked.

“That kind of language made me uncomfortable for many years, I admit. Not now.”

“Uncomfortable sounds very modern. Like without remote control. You mean now with the Great Victim in front of you, it’s all right.”

“Well, I guess. Exactly.”

“You’re attracted to pain? Or is it even something nastier than that?”

My word, she was Princess Margaret, but beautified in the face, thought Mestre. It collected light now, he was sure. Beautiful, not pretty, like the madonnas. It hurt your groin and made you chilly, then warm. But he could not reply immediately.

“I never had a chance with you until I became the Mother of Victims.”

“You’ve also gotten very smart, Esther. I don’t remember you this...acute.”

It was three in the afternoon, a time Clem had never been fond of, but Esther drew all nature to herself, green, yellow and blue light, and threw back a calming beam at him from the beige of her face. He was sure.

“I doubt you remember anything of me,” she said. “I’ve never been so looked-past in my life.”

“I think it’s my lousy bedside manner.”

“I think you were simply totally uninterested.”

“No. I just didn’t believe anybody could say those things so quickly. You hardly knew me.”

“There was no reason not to love you, fool. A handsome doctor, wanting to paint, with black hair, like a poet’s, if poets looked like anything anymore.”

“I don’t feel those things are all that good.”

“Doctor False Modesty carries on.”

“You can really burn down a fellow, Esther. But no wonder now.”

He knew she didn’t like what he’d said, though she stayed radiant. He wondered if they were going to sit here on the nice little lawn forever. The house seemed a bugged crypt inside, with that aunt around hovering. They themselves seemed to be hovering, too, no real place to land. He suggested they take a ride in the Miata.

“Eee. I’m thinking the D.A. won’t like this, maybe. He wanted me to be practically a plain-clothed nun here until the trial. ‘Deportment is most urgent,’ says prosecutor Little. And a garish little thing you’ve got.”

“But this is all innocent. It’ll be practically a church picnic. I’ll get the fixings to roast a chicken somewhere around here. There’s a half case of New Mexico wine in the trunk. Grateful patient. I’ve heard it’s very decent stuff. Don’t you need away from this place a while?”

“Very. But you know I won’t be going for any wine or chicken. That’s pleasant, but I’m warning you: I’m in love with you still and I want a friend very, very badly.”

She whisked around and whirled her dress, a bit calfy and athletic in the legs from all that volleyball, he imagined, maybe a bit full at the ankles. But who do I think I am, grading her? Mestre swore at himself, All my life, who did I think I was? Grading women like cuts of rib-eye since I was a little pest with seven hairs near my pod and red acne on my chin. “I’ll tell her something and get a thing or two!” Esther called back over her shoulder.

Clem heard the aunt inside, quacking out in disagreement. Even graver duck sounds came from her as she said something about it being Sunday. But he heard the lighter tone of Esther, resolute, demanding her right to play, and Mestre rolled back into his childhood, circled by stern women monitors. In his car trunk was also a rag football they could toss in some meadow. The games of youth, that was it. Games gave the better thoughts—they made one feel pure, direct, happy. Maybe he had not simply fallen into sports medicine.

He also recalled that he had once seen Esther in a bicycle helmet. She looked exceeding ugly and dumb, like something on the prow of an old ship of a losing nation. Mestre tried to banish this thought. So headlong, dreary.

And at volleyball, though she had made the team, she seemed to be playing in sand. Through the years he had noted certain overachieving athletes, a step behind everybody else naturally, always seeming to perform in sand while the more gifted flew around them on glass.

In the car she told him there was only one thing that bothered her about his face. It didn’t seem to have any history behind it. It was almost too clean. She was measuring him? But that was all right, why shouldn’t she? But Mestre protested—lamely, unnecessarily, he thought—that he did have history, too. Privately, he thought: I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have history. I can’t say this, she’d take it wrong. Esther went on, anyway, pertaining to an awful thing she had to confess.

“Maybe I’m talking more about me. Thing people do most of the time, selfish us. I was horrified I didn’t have any history. Who wants to look at a modern girl without any history? I mean men especially. There’s a part of me that’s proud now. Can you not be repulsed, Clem? I am somebody, somebody they paid attention to that way.”

“Attention? God help.”

“You don’t know at all what being ignored is like, doctor. You walk in an office or even onto a field, and all eyes are on you, respect and love. Look at me. I was just honest, or stupid, enough to blab it out pretty instantly. I don’t care. I’ll just go ahead and tell you (you aren’t a spy for the defense, after all). Yes, I liked it at first, all those men around me when the houseboat left the shore, looking at me, and me in my just slightly agitating swimsuit. I have a decent body, don’t I, as you may recall when I was in my volleyball uniform years ago.” She waited.

“Yes. I noticed,” he lied.

“I didn’t mind being the county Cleopatra on the barge for a while there, day all sunny. (The houseboat was Victor Kepps’, his dream. Now you can guess what his dream included.) Floating down the pretty Tennessee-Tombigbee all the way to Mobile maybe, who knew? Seemed a day not to care and let happen. They were much impressed I had a graduate education. They didn’t seem bad men, and they were witty even, for a good long while. So I enjoyed all the stares like accidents in my direction. You blame me? I’m too old to be your smart-dumb coed unconscious of her impression on others, half-naked I guess, no. I didn’t even mind the accidental nudges after they’d had a few beers, but I was looking at the whiskey—so much of it!—in the cabin with a little concern. I thought three rough county boys might be trouble, but five of them, now that was closer to a salt-of-the-earth family with their girl mascot. Decency would exercise itself, I was sure. And it did, until Kepps started the more serious stuff. I never knew how he hated me, my education, my ways, my—whatever was withheld, I guess. Maybe he thought a plain girl with big teeth like in the British royal family should feel lucky giving it up. But it’s him that most of it’s about, and it’s him that planned to kill me when they were all...done.”

“There’s no reason to tell it all, if it hurts,” said Mestre like a physician, though he wanted to hear more, and was driving his car too seriously toward the bottom of the county for the chicken in the dingy store—priestly sexless monitor. The top was up as a tribute to her guarded role in pre-trial, but the day was very warm. Also, nobody was about in the fields, the houses were few, with only a porcine woman at the end of a drive challenging the afternoon. Esther went back to her plea.

Hardly had even a kiss in four years. Ignored. Could he know what that felt like? No. Friends at college were blacks and dim freaks from the college radio station. She’d felt for everybody. She felt for the blacks, not taunted but just looked-through, something like a flawed vacancy, slightly worrisome. The boys in the radio station cheered ugly garage music and science fiction like nerds everywhere. The volleyball team won but was yawned past. She felt for the gays and lesbians: I am, I am, she’d thought, in their little clubs. She even had friends on the staff, the wastebasket patrol, who saved cans. The last she would say, because she did not like the trembly awful pity for herself any more than he surely did, was that her aunt’s place remained her last outpost. Her father ignored her too, and only wanted her out of the way. Her sister was a looker, a charmer, his, at another school, private, downstate; the father knew the aunt had gone religious, too. So she was pushed back like a nun everybody forgets forever. The D.A. wanted her to be a nun. They all wanted her pure air to look through, bolstered in some vague way by the religion of the widow. But she was an office-supply junky, did Mestre know that? He looked over, not getting it. All my life I’ve liked pens and paper, even paper clips. All the things around her that went to write on paper. She had a history now, she was somebody, she was finally going to write a book or a long story, she didn’t know which. That last trip to Wal-Mart she had found herself among very lonely women like herself and almost burst into tears, thinking of her future, these older sad women defining themselves among aisles of created need. She could see herself old and lonely out there, lonelier than ever after marrying somebody who was simply male and had paid attention to her. Pardon the sentimental cliches, but there was a story in that too, damn it. This pathetic, poor-mouthing, little ol’ me stuff, but I tell you, Clem, I’m just beyond any irony now, Mal Little told me the trial would be long, graphic, ugly and two-thirds untrue, get ready, and he had found rape trials even got very funny in this state, the more humor the defense could bring in the better for them, because the public would rather agree that there was simply a misunderstanding, at root, ha ha ha. Sorry for this long talk but you are the first I could ever talk it truly through with, Clem. I wasn’t about to give my aunt much at all, as it would set her off. Mal Little needs mainly the threat of murder—they were so drunk they thought I couldn’t hear the whispers out there—and thinks one of them will “flip” for him in my behalf, a state’s witness.

Mestre went in alone and got a nice chicken, some charcoal and fixings, but he forgot the ice. He almost turned back, thinking of the hot wine in the trunk.

“Oh, no matter, I know a brook, a perfect little thing behind the post office in a ghost town. We can do it all, there. Perfect. It’s got those old-style gas pumps and just lizards,” Esther said, putting her hand on his arm. “Chill the wine there.”

Mestre had not remembered that his vision of Esther was likely to talk. A lot. There were no legends of the chattering Madonna. Life was breaking in and he was a bit gloomy. Also an ass, he reminded himself. Why shouldn’t she talk? Nobody had listened to her—in her whole life, maybe. There was much to say, and he should listen. It would all be over, and he would be glad. So they drove back toward the middle of the county where her aunt’s house was, but took another road. Silence reigned. See. See. Over.

“It’s a cold brook too,” she broke it. “That must’ve been lovely, having the water right behind the stores, to dream over. Last time I saw it there were hordes of little purple flowers and a tiny brown pebble beach. It’s gone now, nothing in it, that town where my aunt was once happy and fun, with her funny drinking husband the crop duster, an airport bum. Bad for the local women too, I heard. The man would get drunk and lie down right in the road, they say. You couldn’t budge him without his friend the county sheriff being called. Uncle Ulysses would get a ‘high lonesome’ going, he called it, and just get country drunk. But the next day he was fine, sharp. What we laughed at must’ve worn out my aunt. He was bad to write local women letters, too. They say he wrote a beautiful letter. He’d tell them the time he would fly over their house and dip his wings for love, and gratitude. Aunt Trudy came on with a holy vengeance once he was in the ground. She saw the post office itself as evil, and I know she’s glad it’s gone and dried out. Makes you wonder if women get nuts when they don’t get laid. The first two, really, I didn’t mind that much. We were just talking, friends in the cabin, and movements were made, it seemed no time at all. First Kepps was in me, the other one smiling and holding my hand. I can’t say I loved it, but it was such a new and daffy thing. Then he came for my mouth, it wasn’t friendly anymore. At the end Kepps came again, and I was beat up. I had been saying no forever and finally just shut up. Kepps was so drunk and angry.’’

“You’re telling me too much, don’t you think, Esther?” Mestre interrupted, but a black excitement was on him, despite himself, the bullet-headed cop asking “Who gets to look?” I do, I do, I do.

“I can’t quite figure,” she said with another big breath. “Are you here as a doctor, or friend, or...I’m talking everywhere because I can’t decide. This is my story for my story, not the court, you see. You aren’t a spy for the defense, so you can know that. There’s another story to everything. Some day I’ll write this one, I think—for whom, who knows? I’ve got all my supplies stacked. Those blue lines beckon. They had weapons. I saw knives in the kitchen. They wanted to kill me and dump me in the canal, with weights on my body. This is what matters, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mestre.

She began whimpering and cried soundlessly into her hands.

“Kepps is a monster. He led them all, his cousin and all the rest. He just has to rot some. I don’t care whether the state wants this trial or not. I am a woman worth something!”

“Of course you are.”

All this land around them looked black and rich. Nobody was bothering to farm it. The few homes looked so shut-in, pulled away from the rolling fields. Mestre, from coal-mining and scratch-farm country, deliberately knew nothing about either. Were folks paid to shut up and not farm, get concerned watching “Jeopardy” over Shake ’n Bake dinners on TV trays, served up with Crystal Light? He didn’t know. Some of the yards were very clean. Was that their profession? The homes struck him as lonesome morgues for passion. But then after vacant brambles and low weed-wheat acres, he sensed they were coming on a settlement. Ruins of pickup trucks held out against weeds and kudzu as if they had al- most made it to town. Now, by what he could guess, Mestre figured the real point of rural America: to have pickup trucks and run them into rust hulk, exploring internal combustion. He saw three old wild housecats hunting, then a solo dog in the act of becoming feral. Next, round a bend came the town, and it was very much a ghost. Citizens picked up and left, a dry curse still ringing through the planks. This used to be Uncle Ulysses and Aunt Trudy’s town, he understood, and there was the post office, ruined, hollow. Esther had stopped talking about herself. She was excited about something else. Passionate phrases he barely got the gist of sang from her, yes it was a song of memory about nature, nature and the brook which could not betray; it was about things from her girlhood, things standard, unchanging, and all that dreaming by the brook as she listened to the blacks and whites exchange stories at her back, stories she could barely hear but did, and she knew what the real South was, others didn’t. What she dreamed of when she was a teenager! A man in a white suit, maybe a doctor. She smiled and looked over, giddy. He was happy she was happy, and the form of her, hurt but beaming anyway, came back to please him. You want to paint, paint this, she said. The brook of the soul running through destitution, soul man, she cheered.

In a trice, as the old stories say, we are here, giggled Esther. Behind the shell of the post office—just a deep booth anyway, with pigeon holes, racked with mud-dauber clods—the brook was certainly there, with its tiny beach, two big chilled frogs waiting for them until they got too close and the frogs shot off in the burbling drink like space machinery. Mestre recalled that after the two frogs surprised and scared him, his existence would never be quite the same again, as they said in the old stories. Nature could be very, very quick and odd. The creatures went out six feet, more like technology than flesh and blood, making Mestre and Esther both gasp. Then they laughed. Everything afterward seemed in rapid motion.

He had forgot any kind of grill to put the chicken on. But right on the floor of the post office a few steps behind them lay a piece of screen and, merrily, a large hubcap with spinners, a relic from the fifties, the decade of Clem’s childhood. Mestre matched them instantly and made a grill on the beach, feeling very adroit, even suave, and he was congratulated wildly out loud by Esther who said it is still the age of miracles. In that vein, he later recalled just a bit of his own talk about a miracle, one of those things unshared with anybody else since his youth. There are miracles, he thought, with Esther sitting by him, pink silk dress on the pebbles, not caring. He told her about a grotto for black Catholic priests in Virginia Beach with a freshwater pool, a most pretty little place. He and a boy had caught a burlap sack full of crabs and were walking back to Clem’s uncle and aunt’s with them, proud. They had, really, too many crabs. Mestre took five or six of them out and put them in the grotto. The other boy said, Why that’s just cruel, they’ll only die. But Clem told him the others were going to die boiling, which was better? The next year Clem was walking by the grotto alone, and went down to look at the pool. Something fantastic hung over the place even before he saw what he saw. Where were the black priests in training, where did they go, who ever heard of black priests anyhow? Not in Kentucky. Also you never saw them anywhere around. Their training was secret, deep and Catholic, scary and too quiet. Then he saw a crab swim up from the fresh water, this ocean crab that shouldn’t be able to live. The crab came to the surface and stared at him. Deeper in the pool Clem thought he could make out scores of them, fading smaller in their army claws to the black depth. Then they all flashed away, having shown themselves enough. They couldn’t be there, but they were, thriving. He never went back because he was afraid he wouldn’t see them, and he never told anybody. There, a miracle.

But his speech faded into other matters. The chicken was cooking, lathered in sweet barbecue, the smoke around them comfortably; they were like a picture on a calendar as the words went around. You are my miracle, my friend, Esther said. He found Esther on his lap, legs out on either side. She had put on sunglasses and stared blackly at him without words for a long fast time. Fairly soon something became noticeable. Under the dress she had on hose and garter belt, but no panties. Her skirt of pink and smooth silk came up and he saw the outraged property itself. Clem had seen his wife’s, of course, but it had been a good while since Clem had looked, direct, at the place itself, framed by the garters. He marveled at the original hurt, and felt very meager. Her scars were so much beyond his. He had no scars; he had gotten through smooth as a baby’s butt. What did he have for pain? Tennis elbow. What a weak slick thing he was. Just enough injury to make him mewl and wimp around, unable to protect her reputation on the streets. He thought she’d gone in the house just to get a few things. A minx, her place of rage, concocted—all these flew to mind, because he was still mostly head and unprepared, here in nature.

Esther spoke: “I’ve always imagined Adam and Eve had the first big sin by a beautiful accident, like most great good things. It was so easy, so helpless. People throw up such a storm about it, but it’s just so easy, just a piece of cloth away.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t you imagine they just fell into each other, my friend? They were friends and then they were something else. It was too easy.”

“It wasn’t even fair. Yes,” whispered Mestre, some of his Appalachian brogue spilling out.

“My friend!”

“Friends.”

“I’m in a dream!” she sighed as he took the natural way. The brook seemed to shake and get loud behind him. He could hear it tearing through the weeds.

But Mestre felt he was more in a saloon, a battle of notes rising from the piano, the gamblers yelling “Har!” as her garters rubbed him, Esther on his lap in sunglasses. He looked past her shoulders into the open post office above. That’s when he saw the old woman watching them.

Hair in those risen waves of black and white, she was the image of Mrs. Freeman from the second grade—her stories of “evil-minded doctors,” her anti-kissing club, still having it when she was dead, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” played at her funeral. The exact title came to Mestre straight out of shock.

The old woman caught his eye and huffed, he thought, before she turned and went back through the shell of the post office. Esther was up by then and saw her go. They heard the car roll away in the dust.

“That’s one of my aunt’s church friends,” Esther said sadly.

“What was she up to?”

“God knows. It couldn’t mean anything, could it? No. She’s just a telephone Christian, is all. Holier than the pope. Thing is, we heard she was one of Uncle Ulysses’ women. Down here...” Esther said in a flat small voice. “Down here for one of his letters? I don’t know.”

The chicken burned up right behind them. They must have stood watching the absent car for awhile.

Clem thought he smelled men all over Esther. Her back was sweated orange against the thin pink dress. It was not a good evening. Later he could not drink enough chilled wine from the brook to make a difference. He flipped pieces of burned meat in the brook as Esther got sillier. He would paint, she would write, she kept saying. No he wouldn’t.

Out of strength or weakness—he couldn’t figure—he stayed loyal to her through the next months. She was depressed, then exhilarated, about the looming trial. Clem would see her face sometimes and feel the plain sorrow in it. When she didn’t talk, she moved him very much. Just the face and the hurt green eyes, maybe looking sadly down her driveway, through the maple leaves, at nothing. She would remind him of Kentucky men on their porch steps, looking down another evening.

The trial was of course nasty. Every reputation was ruined, and the people of the state seemed sorry it was carrying on. Then there was no trial at all. The old woman from the post office took the stand, very voluntarily. Neither Esther’s aunt nor parents were there. It was just all nastiness. No trial left at all. But people were impressed that Dr. Mestre was standing by, every day. They remarked on the fact she must be of some quality to inspire this.

Clem and Esther married at the next Christmas. Clem could not tell whether he was happy or sad, and he was wholly neither. But he was comfortable now that he had a past, and had done something for plain sorrow. He left athletics for family practice after a summer and fall of study.

Esther became friends with Andra, the grad student next door. They played with the Chinese dog, which had gotten very stout in his rolls of skin. She was extremely happy, except sometimes when she looked out the window into something like the pulse of time, it seemed to Clem—the seasons taking on leaves and putting them off, something somehow rushed and slow at the same time, and not looking back at her at all. She couldn’t figure why Clem had married her.

On these few occasions, Clem loved her. He felt part of a big thing.