dead." And Stern imagined such a scene, his son with cleaved skull and Stern unable to cry convincingly. Once, a childhood friend named Ruggie had gone to climb a fire escape and given Stern his dog's leash to hold. Stern purposely let go the leash, and the dachshund ran a mile before it went beneath a speeding car. Ruggie then came back carrying the dog in a dumb march, the dachshund's body staining his sleeves, to put him some place, while Stern watched, frozen to the ground. Now Stern imagined himself with his son's smashed body in his arms, going dumbly outside to put him someplace, too. He imagined a scene in which he was putting all the dead boy's toys in a box but continually finding new ones as years rolled by.

[Pg 38]

Stern's wife, too, became sullen, mostly about having no friends. For a while, a distant cousin of Stern's named Barbie visited and served as a companion to her. But she centered everything, the food in the middle of plates, flower vases in the center of tables. She even put Stern's son in the exact center of the couch as he watched television. Stern's wife finally wearied of her because of having to listen to her constant teen-age questions. Though she was far out of her twenties, she would ask Stern's wife, "Do you think it's sinful to allow petting on a first date?" and "Will I lose Phil if I don't let him go as far as he wants?" When she left, Stern's wife had no one, and when he asked her about this, she said, "I don't need anyone," and this infuriated Stern. "You've got to have friends," he screamed at her, and then he had a picture of all three of them, his wife, his son, himself, sitting on the lawn, sucking blankets, shaking and trying to rock themselves to sleep.

[Pg 39]

[Pg 39]

He had met his wife at college after being rejected by a young girl with musical voice and tangles of blond hair who acted in Arthur Wing Pinero plays, doing deep, curtsying walk-ons that made Stern weak in his middle. He had scrupulously avoided taking the blond girl to bed, preferring to think of her as "not the kind of girl you do that with" until, disgustedly, she refused to see him, telling him, "Someday you'll understand." A week later, he met his wife, a girl with great eyes and shining black hair and no music in her voice, and, after an anecdote or two to establish his charm, he went with her to a blackened golf course and, with clenched teeth and sourness, drove his fat hand through her summer-smelling petticoats and, as she moaned "God no," kissed her and tried not to think of curtsies. Later that 

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