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Forces During the evening news, I got a phone call. It was Laura, Ernie Mcintyre's wife, calling about refreshments for the next week's square-dancing. I said of course I'd bring something, as long as I didn't have to bake it, and then she asked if I had heard about Fred Primack. "Oh, no!" I said, "Is that who the ambulance was for?" "Yes, but it's not so bad as they thought. Marie said he's feeling fine now and they're just going to keep him in the hospital over night. He had a little chest pain, and she didn't even wait for his pill to act before she called them. She's so nervous, you know." "Well, better safe than sorry, Laura." I was remembering Stanley's last heart attack, three years before, and my chimichanga was sitting poorly. I steadied myself by staring at the Hopi God's-eye on the wall above my sink. "We have to look after these menfolks." Menfolks is a word I would never use on my own, but you develop certain ways of talking in a place like this. After we hung up it occurred to me that Laura would make a fine wife for Jack after Polly died. She had a lot of backbone. She was healthy, ex- cept for a little blood pressure, and she was well organized; Jack would like that. Of course, the trouble was, she was married, and Ernie had the constitution of a pack mule. It was silly even to think of it, but I had a way of doing that: running down lists of women Jack might marry and thinking what I'd do if he did. If he married Elizabeth Cunningham, for instance, I'd simply have to dig up my hibiscus and move. If he married Matty Waterhouse I'd kill him. I wouldn't kill her, though; I'd make her live on and on, tormented by grief and desire. Before I went to bed that night, I went out to the edge of my yard, where the hill falls away to the next level in a steep bank covered with ice- plant. I looked down over the roofs of Buena Vista Village, and across the galley and way out to the ocean. I could actually see it, a fragment of glass reflecting moonlight out on the horizon. I liked to think of all that was going on there — the whales singing to each other and the dolphins quoting Plato and even the sharks, who can't help it if they're hungry. I looked at the Maynards' house. The moon was full enough to show the different colors of the roses along the patio. There was one light on in the house, in the bedroom. I couldn't help wondering what they did — whether Polly was strong enough to make love at all. She had said to me once that she was getting too sick to be a woman. That would be the worst, I think, to lose your husband that way, while you were still alive. <<| 1
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