He got up from his reading to take the instrument from her, an almost tall man, long-legged, balding on top, trim in spite of middle age. "This is Dr. Wolfe," he told it, wandering toward the living room’s big windows, the phone to his ear. His wife went back to grading papers or making lesson plans or whatever it was she was doing. She was always fiddling, always doing something.

    The snow had stopped. Just a couple of inches lay pristine on the deck and lawn, brightening the lowering light of a Saturday afternoon in January. Big, wet flakes had fallen, sticking even to the tiniest branches. Around the yard black bark lined in white was silhouetted against the slate-colored sky. Across Bay Drive the gray waters of the Chesapeake Bay stretched off toward an invisible horizon where air and estuary came seamlessly together.
 
    On the phone there was labored breathing. Someone trying not to cry. "It’s Barbara," it said finally. "I need to kill myself."

    She’d never removed the last tiny trace of mountain twang from her voice. He knew her by it—that Barbara! He drew a startled breath.

    "What’s happened?" he asked the telephone.

    Her face came vividly to his eyes. She seemed to be right there, looking at him from just outside the window.
 
    He had imagined her happy and thriving. What had happened? Something about her son? Or the no-name illness? The new husband gone to alcohol or women?

    She was trying to catch her breath, fighting sobs. He glanced at Ann sitting at her little desk against the far wall, immersed in her work. Opposite her a wood fire flickered in the brick fireplace, sending smoke up the chimney and warmth into the room. His own papers and books were scattered around his chair—charts, pilot books, other materials he had gathered to accompany his reading of a volume by a man who had sailed single handed through the Straits of Magellan, the hard way, east to west. In the winter when he could not sail himself these imaginary voyages were his hobby. The lone sailor’s book lay open, face down on the table next to a mug of black coffee. Ann, at her tiny desk, had a little teapot in a cozy, a china cup, and a small silver pitcher of milk. Separately they lived together.
Usually he told this kind of caller to go to the nearest Emergency Room. He wasn't a crisis service and he didn't sympathize with suicide threats. So life sucks--deal with it!

    But this Barbara..!  Hearing her voice flipped his stomach.

    She was silent, not answering his question. The vision of her outside the window faded but his shock grew. The lingering resonance of her voice seemed to warp time. He felt as if whipped back in years, wrinkles smoothed from his face, gray washed from his hair.

    His reflection in the dark window stared at him, its reality pushing him back toward the wrinkled and grizzled present.
 
    "When I try to talk about it," Barbara said finally, "I choke up and I can’t."
 
    "Okay," he said. "Tell me about something else instead."

    He was dry-mouthed, totally intent on her but in certain way bored. It was one of these situations where you could only wait for something to come out in its own time. Wolfe was slow to anger but he hated waiting.

    "Friday I went up to West Virginia…" she started, then broke down again, crying. He pictured her dear face, cheeks wet with tears. He wanted to say the normal things—"Don’t kill yourself!" or, "Whatever it is it can’t be that bad." But that wouldn’t do any good. He thought of saying, "I love you." But Ann was there. Besides, he’d never told Barbara that. She’d been a client, he’d treated her like a client. She couldn’t have any idea how he felt.

    He wished Ann would drop dead! Then he could say what he wanted, and the hell with who had been a client those years ago!

    He walked around, retrieved his cup, went back to the window, sipped coffee, watched the unchanging scene beyond the window, all clutching the receiver to his ear, nervous and helpless, listening to silence. The coffee hurt his stomach. In the darkening stillness outside the window there was no traffic, no wind, no wave. Even the birds and squirrels had stilled. He turned his head right a little and the glass gave him an image of Ann poring over her papers. Looking the other way brought a picture of the flickering fire, the one moving element in a frozen scene.
 
    He tried to slack off his tight grip on the phone, made a deliberate effort to relax his shoulders and to breathe slowly, from his abdomen.

    "I’m here," he said finally. "I’ll be here as long as you like." A delicate intervention, inviting without pushing.

    Under their calm surfaces therapists seethe with second guesses. Making right responses automatic turns spontaneity into studied art.

    "I know," Barbara replied, "That does help." She was silent again.
He worked on his breathing. "I’m over this," he told myself. "I don’t still love her. That’s past."

    "I’m sorry," she said suddenly. "This is stupid. I shouldn’t have called."
"It’s not stupid. You’re horribly upset. You need to talk about it."

    "I can’t talk about it."
 
    "That’s why you need to kill yourself, you can’t talk about it?"

    "Yes."

    "Can you meet me at my office?"

    "I’m there now, sort of. I’m in the phone booth at the Shell station."
His office was on the third floor of a six story building in the Parole section of Annapolis, next to a filling station. "Wait for me in the lobby," he told her. "I’ll be there as soon as I can." He had to shave. Five minutes for that. Fifteen minutes to make the ten-minute drive on snowy streets. He gave her the security code to punch into the keypad next to the door so she could get inside and wait in the lobby.

    "I’ve got to go out for a while," he told Ann.
 
    "Umm," she said, not looking up. "Try not to be late."

    After dinner they were supposed to go to a Quaker fundraiser, to help world peace or prisoners in Africa or some other Good Cause. He disliked these events, called them "venues of virtue" and felt they pandered to pious overconcern for the wounds of the life’s losers.

    "Look at the weather," he told his wife. "They’ll have to cancel."

    Ann looked around with an expression of complete, sympathetic understanding that he found intensely annoying. "You hope they will," she said in her modulated British tones, smiled vaguely, turned her nose back to her papers.

    "You shouldn’t be a psychologist," Ann had said to him once. "You don’t really care about people who have problems. They make you angry."

    "I like winners," he told her.

    His father was a tank commander, his grandfather a cavalry officer. His brother, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, had been killed over Vietnam. "I’m bone of their bone," he would say. Ann always looked at him mildly. "They aren’t what they think they are," she would answer.

    Wolfe had accepted Ann’s outspoken pacifism. So, amazingly, had his family, whom she had charmed with her combination of cheery good manners, utter frankness, and lack of rancor in disagreement. When she wept so bitterly at his brother’s death they were entirely won over and ceased worrying with about her opinions or her preachy Bible sayings.
But Ann, for her part, couldn't sit comfortably with marriage to an advocate of self-defense and capital punishment. Determined to bring them into unison, and convinced that as a therapist it was wrong for him to think as he claimed he did, she continued trying to reason with him. Pacifism and nonviolence were not only Godly but logical and efficacious, she insisted. He often laughed at her efforts but she never angered. Daily things annoyed her. She could be an utter bitch about a mess in the kitchen or a misplaced envelope. On big topics, though, her tender heart prevailed over the alarms of her brain. His cold statement about winners had drawn from her that same look of sweet understanding that so annoyed him now.
"Your bark is so much worse than your bite," she had replied when he said that.

    He was never sure if her look of understanding meant she really did know him—perhaps better than he wished—or if it was a pretense she put on to suit her need to appear wise and compassionate. Whichever it was it always left him frustrated.

    "All right," he said vaguely, and went upstairs to shave, leaving her to her papers.

    He loved his car, a white BMW two-door sedan, not new, he hadn’t even bought it new, but it was a fine car and he especially liked to drive it on snow, both for the way handled and for the memories evoked of being sixteen and learning to drive on icy roads in the northern plains.
Wolfe wasn’t a Methodist but he had lived by their precept: he had done well by doing good. Ann had some money of her own and he’d made plenty—enough to support a waterfront house, the BMW, and a 33 foot, ocean-going sailboat, and plenty put away for a rainy day.

    He was vain about his physical person. No glasses, contacts. He worried about whether to use a rinse to hide the creeping graying of his hair. He experimented with ways of combing over the bald spot on top. His potbelly concerned him out of proportion to its size—he couldn’t seem to get rid it no matter how much he worked out.

    He didn’t just like winners, he liked to win. Twice a week he played racquetball at a club near his office. In tournaments he was seeded forth in the over 40 division.

    But people felt comfortable with him. He was soothing, they'd say. He enjoyed feelings. He liked to go barefoot because it lets can feel the land, learn which bushes and trees shed sharp things, notice residual heat in stones that were sun-drenched hours ago, sense the first cool dampness of evening dew. With clients he felt as if his soul was barefoot. They related miseries, confusions, hesitations. He listened, enraptured by their bareness. No two were alike, and the more he heard them the more distinct each became from every other, till it almost seemed that each person he talked with was a species unto herself, generically unique, priceless.

    He also was, in a technical sense, very competent and knowledgeable. A kind and well-informed man who encouraged clients to win, he got results.
To clients and other professionals he talked easily. Socially he was quiet. He had little to say. He was a cipher, almost. People in groups had no appeal for him. Parties bored him. He had friends but no following, and he was content with this.

    Driving that afternoon toward his office, not really worried about Barbara because he didn’t believe she actually would kill herself, lulling himself with the luxury of his car, admiring his mastery over life’s slippery conditions, Wolfe was the picture of pride going before the fall.
He found Barbara sitting on a couch in the lobby, her cloth coat draped over her knees, dressed in old, baggy jeans and a sweatshirt, a 7-11 Big Gulp of Diet Coke in her hand. Her brownish hair was pulled back over her sharp face in an untidy ponytail that allowed a few unruly locks to fall across her forehead and temple. Catching sight of her as he came through the door and felt the wet cold of outdoors change to the dry warmth of the building, he felt dazed. Blood seemed to rush to his face and love for her washed over him like one of the monster waves of the southern ocean he’d just been reading about. It took away his breath. He stood near her, wordless.

    "I’m sorry to put you out like this," she said, rising. They shook hands. Hers was cold and dry. He wanted to give it an extra squeeze but was careful to release at the exact moment that was socially and professionally appropriate.

    "It goes with the territory," he answered, as if he were in the habit of running down here on Saturday looking as he felt he did, dizzy and starry-eyed.

    They rode the elevator in silence, standing side by side. In his office she chose to sit on the middle cushion of the three-cushion couch, exactly as she had the first time he’d seen her. He picked up his notebook from where he’d left it on his desk and sat opposite her, clicking the switch on the tape recorder. Only rarely did he record a session but he kept a fresh tape in the machine anyway, just in case. He had always recorded Barbara’s sessions, he had been almost obsessive about it, so she expressed neither surprise nor interest at his action.

    She watched him, big brown eyes unblinking behind the then fashionable round glasses that perched on her thin, crooked nose, "the broken ski-jump" she’d called it once. In front of Wolfe’s sofa was a long, low coffee table. Two old rocking chairs that had belonged to his father faced the sofa, angled in from near the ends of the table. On the opposite wall stood a long, maple table that once was in his grandmother’s dining room and now served as a desk. Between that table and the sofa stretched a wall with two big windows looking out over West Street toward an undistinguished array of office buildings and the constantly heavy traffic on US Route 50. The other wall was lined with books on built-in shelves.
Wolfe sat in one of the rockers. Barbara perched warily on the sofa, on the very edge of her cushion, sitting up very straight, knees together, hands on lap, breathing rather quickly for someone who had not been exercising. Her position and posture had the same effect on him her voice had had when he first heard it earlier that day—put him back in time, to the first moment he had seen her in that exact place and in that same posture, perched on the center cushion like a bird on a wire ready to fly away at the slightest fright.

    He blinked his eyes, returned to the present.

    "What happened?" he asked her.

    She looked down at her hands, saying nothing.

    "Your husband?" Wolfe prompted. "Your son?"

    "No," she said, still looking down. "Ralph’s all right. Nothing’s wrong that wasn’t. And Jimmy’s still in prison."

    "So…?"

    "If I tell you," she began after a pause, "you won’t like me anymore."

    Sexual violation he decided. The raped feel indelibly soiled.
 
    "I more than like you," he told her, startling himself. He should not have said that!

    She glanced up, looking in his eyes, nodding. "I know," she said.

    He felt himself blush. How could she know?

    His face didn’t change much when he blushed. But the top of his head became bright red and now that it was pretty well cleared off up there anyone could see it. He hoped she didn’t notice.

    "It’s helped me," she said, "that I’m somebody special to you. I still think about that, when things are tough. It helps me keep going. That’s the problem."

    He kept a straight face. But he wanted to cry: he had helped her, by caring for her! He was worth something to her. He felt validated.
Such a stupid way to feel, his mind told him. That was the seething again. Of course you’re worth something to her, he told himself—you did a damned good job for her!

    Perhaps this is why he was silent so much. Feeling two things equally—which should he say?

    But he was frightened. He felt invaded. How could she so off-handedly announce to him his own inner feelings, that he had never breathed to anyone?

    "Well, then," he said in a confident therapist tone.

    And stopped. Well then, what? He couldn’t imagine what he had been going to say!

    She smiled a little, nervously, a worried expression. "I thought you knew I…" She struggled for the word. "..understood you," she murmured.
He shook his head a little. His mouth was too dry to be able to speak.
Her smile faded. She looked off, toward the windows. He saw he’d lost contact with her.

    "It doesn’t matter what’s happened to you," he said, desperate to get her eyes back. "I’ll still like you." He stopped, feeling the silence still growing up around her, taking her further away. "More than like you," he added.
She glanced at him and then away. "You won’t," she said. "It’s worse than you think." Her chest moved up and down but nothing else about her moved. She sat still with erect posture, as if entirely composed, staring at her hands as they lay in her lap, breathing almost as if she had just run a mile.

    He waited, silent.

    "This is no good," she said finally, still looking at her hands. "I should leave."

    "Please. No! Please tell me what happened."

    She looked around, taking in the room, tears standing in her eyes. "If I tell you and you don’t care for me anymore, I couldn’t stand it. I can’t take the chance. So I have to do something else. I have to get out of here."

    Her body tensed as she prepared to rise. She meant it. She was going to leave and kill herself!

    He got up before she could, circled the table between them, cut her off from a clear path to the door, then sat by her and put an arm around her. She had glanced at him as he moved, eyes widening, but now she looked down and away. She did give in to him a little, leaned against him lightly, not quite reluctantly but with definite reserve. Her head touched his chin, her left shoulder passed under his arm, her hair brushed his cheek—yet her body was stiff, she seemed distant. He sat staring toward her, paralyzed, no idea what to do or say, looking down at the top of her head, smelling the dry scent of her hair and watching his hand on her right shoulder move with the rhythm of her breath.

    "I love you," he said. "I’ll always love you, no matter what."
The goddamned recorder was still running, he suddenly realized! He stared at it, horrified.

    You shouldn’t love your clients—not like that!

    But it easily happens. Eighty percent are female. Many are lovely in their souls and not a few of those also have nice bodies. Distressed damsels abound, crying charmingly, desperate for help and support, wanting nothing so much as love. Bright, spirited young women describe their stubborn struggles with overwhelming adversities. Outrageously sexy women detail their intimate feelings while crossing their legs under short skirts. In the summer there are short sleeves, soft, supple arms with hands like tender pedals on the branches of flowering shrubs. Temptation is everywhere.

    Falling in love with your clients is even worse than having sex with them. Love is not only blind but also stupid, poor qualities in a therapist!.
He couldn’t do anything about the recorder so he tried to relax. But doing that let his cheek rest more snugly on the top of her head. Her breast pressed on his chest each breath she took. Her upper thigh was against his leg and she had reached out with her two hands to hold the one of his that wasn’t on her shoulder. Their three hands lay together on his thigh. She was crying very quietly. Or perhaps she had stopped, he couldn’t tell. But she still had not given in to him; her body was tense, poised.

    "I have to go," she said.

    He held her more tightly. "Tell me."
 
    "I can’t."

    "Please," he said. She didn’t answer. After a moment he felt her body gather itself as she prepared to pull away from him. His hand on her shoulder tightened and he had a wild thought of fighting with her, throwing her down and restraining her till she would give to him what he wanted, her entire trust. Fighting against that thought he found his eyes full of water. He couldn’t see! He blinked, breathed deeply, tried to stop himself, but succeeded only in gasping and choking. He was sobbing!

    "I can’t stand to lose you," he heard himself say, between catches of breath. Another part of him was horrified. It was screaming "NO, NO, NO!! Get away, to go back to your safe rocking chair!" But he couldn’t.
Suddenly weak, he loosened his grip on her and leaned back on the cushion behind them. Tears rolled down his cheeks to his neck.
Barbara sat up, turned toward him. Her face was a white blur though his tears.

    "Hey," she said softly. "Don’t cry."

    "I can’t help it," he bawled. He put hands to his eyes, tried to wipe them clear. Barbara gave him a tissue. He used it and tried to speak, gasping for the breath to get the words out, "I can’t believe… a client… had to gave me… a tissue in my own… office!"
]
    She was up on the sofa next to him, kneeling. "I’m not a client anymore," she said, and kissed him on the mouth.

    It wasn’t such a great kiss but it had a hell of a shock value. He felt a great surge of pain and longing. His crying redoubled. She put her arms around his head and pulled it to her breast. He lay against her, wailing. "I hurt," he said. "I just hurt. I didn’t even know I hurt. I hurt because I exist. And I’m alone. I pretend I’m not. I pretend I’m with someone but I’m not. I hurt from existing like this."

    "I know," she said, rocking him a little. "It’s the same with me." She kissed his forehead and held him tight and slowly he became differently aware of her body. She was kneeling next to him on the sofa, her knees a few inches apart while she sat on her calves and ankles. He slumped against her, his chin and cheek pushed firmly into the softness of her breasts. One of his forearms lay across her lap, touching her abdomen. He had fallen into this position, unaware of it, feeling only a sense from her of taking care of him. But now a tension grew in him of other possible meanings of opened thighs and his arm touching her lower belly. A faint odor arose from her—cleansing oil, cologne, a perfume?—he didn’t know but the sensation of it within his nasal passages suddenly caused flesh far from his nose to tingle and tighten. As he began to react to the female of her, to her womanhood, her breast seemed fuller and softer, her body even more opened. He seemed drawn into her, caught by a current from the whirlpool of the sex centered not so far from where his arm touched her. But she couldn’t want this! This was not right!! Alarmed and ashamed, he lifted his head, meaning to say to her he had to sit up, to pull away. But as he began the words she kissed him again, more firmly this time. After the kiss they looked at each other, eyes wide, faces close. He could hardly breath. His skin drew tight and tingling sensitive stiffness radiated over it from the place that had grown so big, so urgent. If he didn’t move he would explode. He couldn’t wait.

    "We can’t do this," he protested.

    "That’s tomorrow," she answered. "We can’t do this tomorrow." She kissed him again, her tongue opening his mouth.

    He surrendered to her.
 
 
 
    Wolf’s father only once gave him sex advice. This was on a Saturday afternoon of the summer he was fourteen. They were sitting together in the shaded coolness of the screened-in porch of the huge, old house assigned to them on Artillery Post Loop at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio. His Dad had played golf that afternoon and now was relaxing with a beer, supping from a tall, graceful glass that was wider toward the top than near the bottom. Young Wolfe sat with him for a while so he could look coolly casual when he asked to use the family car that evening. In those days, fourteen-year-olds could drive in Texas.

    His official reason for wanting the car was to go off post to a movie. The real reason was so that after the movie he could drive his girlfriend to a quiet corner where they could neck without fear of disturbance.

    "There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about," his Dad said.
 
    "Yes, sir," the boy answered.

    That was what you said: "Yes, sir" and "No, sir." Unless you had messed up. Then you said, "No excuse, sir"—even if you had one.

    His father took a little beer and peered over his glass at his son. "If you’re going to have physical relations with a girl of your own class," he went on, "a respectable girl I mean, be sure you are fully prepared to marry her."

    Young Wolfe was mortified! He had only just, a week or so ago, reached the stage where he not only tongue-kissed his girl friend, Lilly, but had begun also to fondle her fully clothed breasts. And his father was on to him. He knew!! He even thought he might do "it"! The boy turned red all over.

    But looking down or away from his father’s deceptively mild gaze wasn’t any more permitted than making excuses. The older man, fully the general, sure of himself in command, held the boy’s eye, took a long, slow, contemplative drag on his cigarette, a Chesterfield, then began to speak as he exhaled the smoke. "Men in our family," he said calmly, "we’re very susceptible to the ladies. My father was. I am. We have to be careful about not get ourselves or them in trouble. Because the ladies… well, bless ‘em, but they’re too likely to let us have our way when we shouldn’t. Do you understand that, Pie?"

    "Pie" had been Wolfe’s first word, supposedly, and had become his family name.

    "Yes, sir," he said, not looking away.

    "Then I will expect you to act upon your good understanding," the father said, "and to conduct yourself as a gentleman."

    "I will, sir," the boy replied.

    The father then lapsed into contented silence, sipping his beer, smoking his cigarette, watching the squirrels and birds in the trees around the house, enjoying the green stillness of this isolated corner of an active military base. Wolfe sat with him in agonized indecision. Dare he still ask for the car? Wouldn’t his father know why he wanted it? But Lilly was waiting for him to call about what they were doing tonight! So he did finally ask—and saw a warning glint in his Old Man’s as he said, "Yes." Or did he imagine that?

    "Maybe we shouldn’t do this," he said to Lilly that night. "Maybe we’re going too far."

    "Oh, come on!" she said, and pulled him onto her.

    The older Wolfe was a decorated war hero—he had the Silver Star for "conspicuous gallantry under enemy fire" during the Battle of the Bulge. He had a general’s star too, and in a few months would rotate to Germany where he would get a second star and assume command of an armored division deployed within sight of the Russians across the Iron Curtain. You had to be one the best to get that kind of a job, the boy told himself fervently. He stood in awe of his father and wanted to follow in his footsteps as the father himself had followed in his grandfather’s. To do that, he realized, he would have to overcome this weak, dishonorable, and dangerous inability to restrain his impulses.

    But… apparently he couldn’t! Lilly encouraged him to go further than ever that night, unbuttoning her shirt and allowing him to feel her through the thinness of her lacy bra. And he hadn’t protested. In fact he’d done his best to encourage her! When he even thought about touching her that way he could hardly contain himself. At a time like that he had to be careful not to let anyone see him standing up, the front of his trousers in view.
Now middle aged and with his pants down on his own therapy couch, a bare woman in his arms, he saw himself again a victim of his inability to control himself. He’d cheated on his wife, violated a client’s trust, and just to prove to him forever what a piece of shit he was, the whole thing was on tape, every moan, every creak of the couch!

    Then suddenly he wasn’t even thinking about Barbara or the tape. He was thinking about his sailboat, South Moon.

    The previous summer Wolfe and his son John had sailed South Moon to Nova Scotia. He’d once taken his daughter Amy, John’s younger sister, on a pretty good sail, to Block Island, hoping to distract her from adolescent depression. But he had never sailed far with John. The boy had been too busy with his own activities—school, jobs, friends—to take the time away. But now, just out of architecture school, he was about to start working for a big firm in Chicago, his first real job. So he took three weeks off to join his father for a maiden ocean cruise, a coming-of-age and graduation voyage.

    There were just the two of them. It was August. The Chesapeake and Delaware Bays were hot and windless, forcing them to motor, bored and sweaty, never raising a sail. Once onto the cool waters of the Atlantic, however, they picked up the steady flow of a Bermuda high’s southwest breeze and rode it all the way to Canada. For five days out of sight of land they lived together harmoniously in their own little world of round-the-clock watches, shared cooking duties, and desultory but enjoyable conversations. Moving along slowly but steadily, a white speck upon the ancient deep, encountering only fishing boats and seabirds, awed by the beauty of sea and sky, their shared experience of the lonely vastness of creation plunged them deeply into companionship

    Wolfe navigated the old way, keeping careful notes of conditions and courses to plot a dead reckoning. This he checked against a position laboriously worked out by using a sextant to shoot the sun, moon or stars, and the Sight Reduction Tables, a huge book of astronomical calculations—a process that took some 20 minutes. John meanwhile used an electronic positioning system that took its information from satellites. This bulky instrument was primitive compared to the slim handheld devices used today, but nevertheless took just moments to give John a position more exact than his father could ever hope to attain with old-fashioned methods. Wolfe senior would still be struggling to get a good sight with the sextant—a challenging task on a small boat—and John would say, "You might as well skip it, Dad. I already know where we are." But Wolfe wouldn’t skip it. "It’s important to be able to work things out for yourself," he explained. He gestured toward John’s gadget, which he was now packing away in its waterproof box. "What if you dropped that thing and it broke? How would you find your way then?"

    "I’d ring up the next fishing boat I saw and ask where they are," John answered.
 
    "You’d be a lost puppy," Wolfe told him. "You’d probably end up in Greenland."

    Wolfe’s way of getting positions was not only more practical than his son’s, he maintained, but it also was more fun and more fulfilling, because it involved the exercise of skill.

    "I get even more fun out it than you do," said John, "because I get to sit back and watch you do that silly old stuff." But they both knew the father enjoyed his silly old stuff all the more because it was done under the amused supervision of the son.

    John was thirty and a better sailor than his father. He’d helped put himself through college by working at the Annapolis Sailing School, teaching lubbers to tack, gibe and give way to the unburdened vessel. He’d raced small boats in both high school and college and when he took the tiller from his father he could usually get a quarter knot more speed than the older man could manage. He also could steer a more accurate course than the wind-regulated self-steering mechanism Wolfe preferred to depend on most of the time. The father felt a little sad sometimes, sitting back and watching his boy do things better than he, while at the same time feeling himself getting older, aware of his legs creaking in new and unwelcome ways, finding he couldn’t get over the stiffness of exercise as easily as he once had. It was a sweet sadness, however, combined as it was with his admiration for John, and his pride.

    In Nova Scotia they anchored in lonely coves, admired scenery, and ate seafood bought right off the fishing boats. Coming back down the coast they stopped at Nantucket, rode water taxis from and to their moorings, watched the ferry boats come in and go out, admired the prettier girls and the more beautifully dressed tourists, and ate lobster till they could eat no more. They re-entered the Chesapeake Bay at the beginning of a day of storms, riding them out anchored in the Bohemia River. Being well away from land with a fair wind was Wolfe’s favorite sailing experience. But his second favorite was reading a good book and sipping wine in a warm, dry cabin while swinging on the hook and feeling his boat shudder harmlessly as she threw off howling wind and pelting rain. John was as happy as he, except he didn’t read, he played his guitar. In the morning there was a cool north breeze, the first hint of fall. They rolled back to Annapolis wing-out, the main to port and the jib to starboard, boiling along in a following sea on a clear and sunny day.

    They tied up in Wolfe’s Back River slip Saturday afternoon. Sunday Wolfe wanted to fool around with South Moon, putting things away, fixing stuff, laying another coat of varnish on the cockpit coaming and the main hatch, cleaning. He’d have been happy to do that by himself—would have preferred it that way, actually. That’s how he liked to finish a voyage, alone with his boat. John could spend the day with his mother, Wolfe told himself. But no! Determined (as Wolfe saw it) to make him suffer for hogging John most of his vacation, Ann insisted on a "family outing," specifically that they go together to an exhibit at Washington’s National Gallery—her kind of stuff, abstract and modern.

    John and Ann made a pleasing family portrait as they went around the exhibit—John playing the dutiful and loving son, listening with a pleasant and pleasing air to Ann’s convoluted but dulcet-toned lectures on the surfaces, rhythms, and colors of whatever it was they were looking at. Wolfe tried to stay away from them, wandering the far reaches of whatever room they were in, looking incuriously at the paintings, thinking about what he still needed to do on South Moon, and trying not to hear what Ann was saying. He did look at her a lot, because she still was wonderful to his eyes. Her face had creased with heavy lines but her figure was almost as trim, as girlish, as it had been at twenty. She walked with a bounce and still had bright eyes and that wonderful voice—if only she had been speaking Italian, or Chinese, so that he wouldn’t have known how inane her ponderous phrasings were!

    She’d get stuck in front of some big canvas, maybe something about twice her own size that Jackson Pollock threw paint at one day when he was in a bad mood. She’d stare and stare and talk and talk, filling the minutes with gibberish, making moments drag like hours. Finally she’d finish all she had to say but would still stand staring, caught there like a bug on flypaper. The big paintings did that to her. She just couldn’t leave them. So then she’d start saying the same things again, because she had to talk, she could never simply be quiet.

    John would to this point have confined himself to such wise comments as "That’s quite interesting" and "Umm." But now his marvelous tact would find a way to distract her: "Well, yes, Mum, I do see what you mean," he might say just as she paused for breath, "but isn’t it quite the other case if we look at that one over there?" This would break the spell and she’d move on to talk about that one over there.

    Ann disliked airports and hated good-byes, so Wolfe took John the next morning to his BWI flight. This gave him a chance to complain about Ann’s way of talking about art. His son was himself an artist and a musician—he played bass guitar in a jazz group—so Wolfe believed the young man should sympathize with him. He was right, after all. He knew he was right!

    John didn’t sympathize.

    "We both know Mum hasn’t any idea of music or art," he told his father. "She’s tone deaf, maybe she’s colorblind, and she talks trendy nonsense that she read in a magazine somewhere. But why not listen? Really, Dad, you get in such a state about whether something she says about a picture is sensible! What difference does it make?"

    "She’s nuts," he told the young man.

    "Oh, and you’re such a model of sanity, are you?" John retorted.

    Wolfe made a face. He was that, of course. He was!

    "And what if she were nuts, and you weren’t?" John continued. "Why don’t you just love her anyway? That’s all she really wants."

    Wolfe understood John was right but he couldn’t do it. Knowing what Ann’s words meant stopped him from hearing her music.
So now, exposed on his couch, his sharpest agony was not for whatever had brought his lover to the point of suicide, or even for the injury he thought he had done to her that afternoon. It was for himself, because he had just understood that for years his one true intimate relationship had been with his boat.
 
 
 
    They lay together on the sofa. Barbara was crying.

    "It’s because I’m happy."

    "You won’t kill yourself now?"

    "No. It’s okay now. I’m fine. I’ll tell you about it."

    They lay with their bodies pressed together, noses touching, mouths almost in contact, breathing each other’s exhalations.

    "It’s like you’re in me now, you’re part of me," she said. "So it’s all right for you to know, it won’t make things worse than they are already."

    "But I can’t talk seriously," she added, "with my pants off like this." She bent one knee, kicking up the leg and showing it still partially encased in jeans and black panty. "It’s not decent."

    "Your top half looks pretty funny too," he told her. Barbara’s sweatshirt was bunched up under her arms and around the top of her chest, above her breasts. Her bra was up there too, unsnapped but not removed.

    "Thanks," she told him, beginning to struggle upright so she could put herself back together.

    But when she rose from the couch she staggered, half fell back down. Wolfe sat up, put his hand out to steady her. She sat back down still unclothed.

    "Dizzy," she said. She broke into a profuse sweat. Her face was extraordinarily pale.

    "I need to lie down a bit more," she said. Wolfe scrambled out of her way as she stretched out again, on her back, still mostly naked. He stood to put on his own clothes as he tried to imagine what was wrong.

    It didn’t seem right to look straight at her when she was like this, both ill and bare. Averting his eyes he noticed her feet, ankles and calves were a dark purple. He stared.

    "That happens all the time," she said, noticing his stare. "I don’t know why. Nobody understands this illness."

    "I’m so sorry," he told her. He had been thinking her condition must be a result of guilty chagrin, of acute regret over the adultery they each had committed with each other. Now he recalled that she had an illness that made her tired.

    "It’s the way I’ve been pushing myself the last couple of days," she told him. "I kind of expected it. But this is real bad." She put her fingers on her throat her jawbone to take her pulse. Wolfe picked up her coat, which they had brushed to the floor in their passion. He tried to put it over her, to cover her apparently shameless nudity.

    "No, no," she said, pushing the coat way. "I’m too hot as it is."

    He stared at her body, at her breasts and pubis. He couldn’t help it. Then he looked away, embarrassed.

    "Don’t worry about that," she said. "Worry about my pulse. It’s about 150. If I stood up it’d go astronomical. I don’t know how I’m going to get home."

    "How can I help? " he asked. "Can I get you anything?"

    This old office building had windows that opened. At her direction he shoved them open them as wide as he could. Cold permeated the room. He couldn’t believe that’s what she wanted. But she seemed pleased and asked for cola and something salty so he got stuff from machines in the hall. He sat down on the table next to her as she sipped and nibbled. She was still naked except for the sweatshirt and bra bunched around her neck and the underwear and jeans still clinging to one ankle. But she was still sweating.

    "Aren’t you chilly?" he asked. "Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to cover up?"

    "No, no. The air feels good. Here, put your hand on my arm."

    She was soaking wet with sweat.

    Wolfe got up, put on his coat, sat down again.

    "Don’t think this is because we made love," she explained. "It’s not. I’ve been doing too much, that’s all. I’m supposed to pace myself and avoid stress. I need a lot of fluid and salt too, those help a lot. But I’ve been so upset I haven’t been doing that either. So now I’m crashing."

    "This is from the illness you had when I saw you before? This is what it does to you?"

    "Sometimes worse, sometimes better" she answered. "But it’s got a name now. It’s called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Or CFIDS, sometimes. Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome."

    "Yuppie Flu?" he burst out. "That’s what this is?"

    He might as well have slapped her. Her face hardened, she stared at him a moment.

    "Fuck you," she said then "if that’s what you think. The hell with you!" And she turned her head away, twisting her body so that she lay on her side facing the back of the couch. A dark, damp splotch of sweat showed on the cushion where she had lain.

    He felt she had left the room, and would never return. In her place was a naked stranger, somebody else’s wife, suffering from an illness he hadn't known was real.
 

 This is the first of the sequence of three chapters posted here.  A separate chapter, number 8, in which Wolfe meets a teenager with CFS, is also posted.

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