How marvelous, modern design! These Scandinavian engineers with their taciturnity and their artful determination, their savvy to mold and market telephones that fit into the hand perfectly, contoured for any body type, comfortable despite discomfiting silence on the other end, unnoticed even as you mash it to your head craving the sound of anything but the rustling of readjustment or his jaw line’s stubble raking the mouthpiece or the odd exhalation!

“Oh, god, Harold,” she laughed, reclining into a mass of lumpy pillows on the window seat. As a teenager, and then a young adult, she had worried that her laugh – teeming, spasmodic – kept people from taking her seriously. In college she was given the nickname “Lamaze” by her sorority sisters for her deep, wide-eyed, suppressive breaths after a particularly riotous fit (Angie Wells, a first date, a disastrous handjob). It had been a
while since Claire last laughed that hard, that honestly, and she decided to allow herself to enjoy it.

She wiped the tears from her eyelids with the back of her hand and cradled the phone against her shoulder. She sighed,
collecting herself. Her skin was still ruddy and clammy from the shower. She wore her monogrammed terry robe, which he had given
her for her most recent birthday, her thirty-ninth. He had said that she needed to treat herself better. The wake of a passing ferry rattled the door of the armoire.

“I shouldn’t laugh. I really shouldn’t. But it was just too funny.”

She had been heading back to work after lunch at Miróku with Claudine. She sat on the train, staring at the Thursday crossword, idly twirling a pen, when she heard the tantara of the train’s squealing intercom signaling an obstructed door. A short, wall-eyed man stood in the doorway wearing an oversized and rumpled flannel shirt. In one hand he clutched a long white cane, and he rubbed the palm of the other, this one gnarled and discolored, against the canvas of his pants at his hip as if in preparation for a nervous introduction. He opened his mouth, revealing grey, snaggled teeth and swollen, bleeding gums and – his voice delayed, deliberate – he called out above the complaint of the intercom Is this train go to Stone Town?. There was a pause, silence but for the loudspeaker’s whining, as each passenger looked around waiting for somebody to say something. And again Is this train go to Stone Town? Finally (and Claire swore it seemed like an eternity with the man standing there, the doors closing in on him and opening and closing again, the alarm squealing overhead, deafening, the poor thing asking again and again Stone Town?) a nice-looking young man stood up. He grasped the blind man’s arm above the elbow and led him to a seat, assuring him Yes, the mall? Stonestown Mall? This train goes there. After asking two or three more times – and being reassured each time by the nice-looking young man, now sitting beside him, Yes, I’m sure, this train goes there… you have 1,2… um, 8 more stops – the blind man deftly collapsed his cane, and sat with his hands in his lap. The poor thing, all milk-eyed and misshapen. It might have been a birth defect? Or some horrific childhood chemical accident? Who knows? Well, he sat there quietly for about a half a minute, and everybody sort of turned back to whatever it was they were doing to pass the time, their music players, their newspapers… and then he asked again Is this train go to Stone Town? The woman sitting next to Claire snorted back a laugh and buried her mouth into her upper arm to muffle herself. The nice-looking young man once again said Yes, this is the Stonestown train and counted off the stops. Then – and this is the kicker, Harold – the young man opened up a soda, and at the pfft the blind man swiveled his head suddenly, and homed in on the bottle. What kind of pop you got? The woman next to Claire snorted back another laugh. The nice-looking young man fumbled for something to say, and the blind man sniffed. You got Diet Dr. Pepper he stated, true to fact, like it was as simple a matter as providing the correct time to some stranger on the street. Nobody could believe it, least of all that nice young man. He sat staring back at the blind man, struck dumb. Claire, everybody, sat there watching, captivated. There is only so much ridiculousness one can handle, you know? Another person’s awkwardness can be so embarrassing, as if it’s no longer about the situation but rather your misfortune of being privy to it. And to bear it publicly? Among strangers, Harold? Even if he was handicapped. They all waited for something, anything, to happen. Then it did: Can I have some? The snorter exploded into laughter and the rest of the car joined her, relieved of their reserve, as if she were some sort of neighborhood tough the preadolescents look up to, her action doubling as instruction. The blind man stared straight at, into, past the snorter and sat, jaw slack, for a second before joining her in raucous, chortling laughter. His head lolled back and forth on his shoulders, and those puffy gums of his glinted under the train’s fluorescent lights. He laughed so hard, laughed and laughed, until all the commuters began to quiet themselves and stare at him. They sat there waiting, hoping for reassurance that they were not contemptible to come down from their corner offices and cubicles for their lunchtime commutes and join in the mockery of some luckless dupe who probably couldn’t help himself. Claire’s stop came up, and she stood, and the blind man’s laughter stammered to an end. He turned his head to the nice-looking young man and reached out with his gnarled hand, placing it gently on the man’s forearm. He smiled. It was so sweet, Harold. Almost loving, you know? Forgiving and grateful and loving. The train’s door slid open, and Claire moved to exit. Just then – as she was feeling as if some minor, unintelligible miracle had taken place, exclusively for her and a half dozen strangers, right there on that train beneath San Francisco – she heard the blind man state, simply, Diet Dr. Pepper.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said, and sighed into the phone. “It was just so bizarre, the whole situation. I mean, it wasn’t anything. You know? I don’t even know why I told you. But it was just so bizarre. And too, too, too funny.”

Claire had told the story to Maria, her assistant, even embellishing some of the details in the hopes of making it funnier; but Maria hadn’t laughed, she had just wondered aloud if the man was retarded. Claire knew that Harold would find it funny. If she had had to give the tale a title – a professional habit of hers which she did her best to subdue outside of the office, fearing it neurotic – she might have called it “A Blind Man’s Smile.”

She sat there in the window seat, staring out into the evening fog, for a few more minutes. She thought about when they were dating, how he would take hold her wrist gently and move her hand away when she began to absentmindedly twirl her hair.

Claire heard a thud against the sliding glass door that led out to the wet deck, and she sat up stark. The lights were off, and she could not see what had made the noise.

“Harold, I have to go. Please call again,” she said, and hung up.

She padded softly across the living room until she reached the sliding glass door leading out the wet deck. She turned the exterior light on, and saw through the glass the onyx nose and gleaming eyes and sleek sodden coat of a seal.

The light startled the animal, and it bolted to the lip of the deck. It looked back briefly over it’s shoulder at Claire standing, robed, framed in the doorway, before pushing off its rear flippers and slipping into the bay.

* * *

Despite the rain the commute across the bridge went quickly, but when Claire arrived at the office she wished it had taken longer. The “30 Under 30” shoot was derailed by the weather, and the young Bay Area innovators which Riviera Magazine’s editorial board had chosen to crown as this year’s ruling class of tomorrow were forced inside. While the photographers and designers rushed to rework their plans for the shoot, it was Claire’s job, as Editor-in-Chief, to hold court. She made introductions, and assured each of the unbearable little shits in turn that their time was valued, that the spread would look fantastic, that their work – of course! the work! – would be featured front and center.

“What event is this,” Claire later asked Paulina, Riviera’s Society Editor, in their standing mid-morning meeting. This month’s Out & About section had come in lifeless.

“I don’t recognize a single one of them. Who the hell are these people?”

“Some non-profit gala,” said Paulina. “Hodgkin’s or Tay Sachs. Or something.”

“You know we only run opera or symphony galas,” said Claire, removing her glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Or the MoMA… Nobody cares about this sort of thing.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

Claire put her glasses back on, and looked out her office window over the bay. The cloud cover had cleared.

“It’s ok,” she said. “But we’re not running this.” Claire instructed Paulina to find something else, a gallery event, or a restaurant opening. If that failed, Paulina was to pull together some of the regulars at some upscale lounge. “Half the people that read us are just hoping to see themselves, anyway,” she said.

The other half of Riviera’s audience read for the articles. Through the years Claire had cultivated a troupe of capable, occasionally brilliant, writers. She had a knack for telling each what he or she needed to hear in order to craft the story the magazine needed from them. She coddled and flattered the timid and anxious novitiates; she made it clear to the pompous bastards that she held all the cards. She encouraged them to expand themselves creatively, and commiserated with them when most of their creativity was edited out. She made sure they were all paid well above the market rate. The most reliable of them were offered annual contracts. “Uncertainty is the death of aspiration,” she said when pitching the idea of fixed contracts to the board. Eventually, after enough wheedling and rhetoric from Claire, they caved and let her have her stable. The board refused, however, to give an inch on health insurance.

Claire sat at her desk glancing between the bay, her calendar, and the piles of pitches and drafts in front of her. She was working with three different writers, two regulars and one freelancer, on the features for the coming months. One, tentatively titled “Anonymity & Ugliness,” was on the growing industry of people being paid to crowd online message boards with libelous posts about a product’s inefficacy, a politician’s infidelity, a policy’s inadequacies. Another sought to remove the “midlife crisis” from the ephemera of the social sciences and make it a concrete, external object from which the wealthy and well-educated – Riviera’s demographic – need not suffer, so long as they recognize that the blame for mid-life crises fell squarely on the poor and unemployed. The author was quite clever, Claire thought, but she feared that perhaps this article was a little too clever. She had worked with him for weeks at cooling some its acid. The third article had just been approved and entrusted to a new writer with whom Claire had never worked, but who had come highly recommended. The details of the piece were unclear to Claire, but the writer had told her he hoped to call it “The Etymology of Elitism.” Claire told him that they would work on a title together when the final draft was in sight.

It was Maria’s birthday, and Claire took her out for a late lunch. Claire encouraged her to order anything she would like, and when she ordered the chicken asked, “Are you sure?”
Claire adored Maria, and held hopes of someday grooming her into an editor. Maria seemed to Claire, reflecting on her own early twenties, precociously mature and centered.

After the entrée, Claire suggested that they share the caramelized banana bread. “It’s fantastic,” she said.

Maria looked down at her plate, and smiled demurely.

“I don’t eat bananas, actually,” she said, picking at a fray in the hem of her napkin. “Or things with bananas in them.”

“Really?” Claire asked. “Are you allergic?”

“I have actually never really had a banana,” Maria said, chuckling lightly, looking up at Claire. “My grandfather always told me that spiders lay their eggs in bananas. That if you ate a banana, the eggs would hatch in your stomach. I know it’s not true. But I really hate spiders. I know it’s stupid but I just, I just can’t eat them.”

Claire laughed until she noticed the depth of Maria’s blushing. She took several breaths and, trying her best not to smile, said “Well… hmmm… that’s entirely understandable.”

* * *

After several years the charms of the fog pouring over the Marin headlands down about them in their houseboat had so faded, had become so quotidian, that they had to concentrate to notice it. Hour-long commutes, and decisions which had outlived their rationale, and maddening, suffocating routine had smothered their memories of the goals and dreams that were embodied in their decision to purchase the place, and fix it up, and live in it forever. There were times – short, and intermittent, but memorable in a way which good times can never be – of dinners alone, of entire days without a word spoken between them, of not a single loving gesture. The fog, for all its exquisiteness, had done nothing to remedy these quiet standoffs and Claire now could stare out into it from the window seat, or the kitchen table, or the deck without a thought to its wonders, and she often did.

In her robe, her hair held up in a towel, she leaned back against the kitchen counter and warmed her hands on a cup of chamomile. The cleaner had come that afternoon, and there was nothing for Claire to busy herself with. She was exhausted from her day at work, and the idea of reading gave her a headache. She had no interest in the television. Sitcoms bored her, and reality programs made her anxious and sad for the people being exploited by them; she could not turn on an educational channel without imagining Harold watching the same program wherever he was.

She wished he would call, but he did not. She wondered briefly where he might be. She had stopped tracing his calls after a few weeks, feeling that it was spiteful and futile. What use was it, really, if he felt he could not yet come home, if he would not just tell her? What would knowing where he was accomplish for her, when she already knew how he was? And knowing that, how could she stay angry?

She let out a weary breath, and set the mug down in the sink. Shuffling barefoot across the hardwood she slid open the door to the wet deck, and stepped outside. Clutching herself around the shoulders, placing in succession the ball of one foot over the toes of the other to warm them, she stared out over the moonlit water. Low waves collapsed around the legs of the pier and sloshed against the sides of the house.

She looked toward the potted crabapple tree, and examined the deck next to it. She had left a small bit of salmon steak there that morning. It was gone.

She wondered if it might have been a gull. She moved to the crabapple, and with a slight groan got down to her knees. She reached her hand out, and put her palm to the spongy, faux-turf surface of the wet deck. It was saturated. It must have been the seal, she thought, and it must have been there recently.
She laid her toweled head into the crook of her elbow, next to the crabapple pot.

It was hour, maybe more, she guessed, before she roused herself, and opened the door, and wandered inside toward the bed which no longer seemed her own.

* * *

Claire came into the office less and less. Over a series of weeks, however, she realized the faults of this plan. The seal never came while she was home, at least not during the day. It knew, somehow, and she had to leave each day to encourage it; but every time she was away, Claire grew desperate to see if the meat was still there.

So she began coming into the office every day, but leaving earlier and earlier. She rescheduled standing editorial conferences so that they, at the latest, concluded in the early afternoon. Whenever possible, meetings became teleconferences, hosted by Claire in the office Harold had built for her during the renovation.

Claire read everything she could about seals. She wanted to know what they ate, how they migrated, how they selected a mate. She read through the discussion boards and websites of seal enthusiasts; she wondered if these peoples’ obsessions were healthy. She studied scientific journals on topics ranging from habitat destruction to worrisome species-level shifts in breeding statistics. She worried. She had one of her writers delay a story she was working on and refocus on the dangers facing the Bay Area seal population.

“But isn’t this sort of, umm, off-theme for us?” the writer asked.

“I’m confident that you can find a way to make it work,” Claire told her.

The afternoons in which she arrived back at the house to see that the salmon or sardines or tuna she had set out was gone, Claire felt an immense relief. Otherwise, she kicked the air-browned meat over the lip of the wet deck and did what she could to keep herself from thinking about it.

* * *

In the first years of their marriage, they lived with another couple in an affordable flat in Parnassus Heights, barbequing on the weekends and ordering take-out during the week. She found a job in the San Francisco school system as an on-call substitute teacher, and Harold represented immigrants in labor law disputes. They learned to love the opera together, and purchased season tickets, but still found time for bluegrass. They spent holidays with her family. Saturday mornings Claire and Harold walked to the farmer’s market and bartered for produce which would each week speckle and rot on the kitchen counter above a trashcan filled with their take-out boxes.

Harold often worked late, and she used these evenings to make time for her friends from college. He felt they were childish, and directionless; they said they adored him, but would admit after a few drinks that they thought him severe, discomfiting, unknowable.

Only once in those early years was the grace of their life together tested. Harold began to drink more than Claire was comfortable with. He was stressed by the rigors of his job, he said, depressed by the futility and thanklessness of it all. She asked him to stop.

He looked at her and swallowed. He rubbed his knuckles against his hairline. He pressed his lips together tightly, and nodded, and smiled. “Okay.”

The next week he came back to their apartment with the deed for a houseboat in Sausalito.

“I’ve always dreamed of living in a houseboat,” he said. “Aren’t you excited?”

Claire was dismayed that he could harbor a dream so tangible and never share it with her; but seeing her husband so happy, so excited about the direction their life – their life – was taking, she let it go.

Claire took a job editing for a local magazine. She told Harold that she was happy to finally be able to use her degree. He left the non-profit he was working for and took a job with a Silicon Valley intellectual property firm. To help mitigate the drudgery of the commute, Claire bought him books on tape. She often stayed late at the office, knowing that he would as well, and sometimes, when she finished with her work, she recorded herself reading from The Wall Street Journal or Harpers or The New Yorker. She left the tapes in Harold’s briefcase.

“I love them, Claire,” he told her. “It’s nice to have reminders of what I am coming home to, of why I’m working so hard.”

Harold was promoted to Partner, and Claire was promoted from Junior Editor to Editor, from Associate Editor in Chief to Editor in Chief. They traveled, and swapped sections of the Sunday paper over coffee, and attended fundraisers. Claire had a brief foray into local politics when a friend encouraged her to run for County Commissioner. She lost, and Harold held her as she cried, telling him over and over, “I didn’t really even want to win.”

He took up laser sailing and read non-fiction, occasionally leaving her his recently finished books with a single leaf of lined, yellow paper tucked under the front cover, outlining the factoids he found most interesting and listing the pages where they could be found. Together, they made enough money that they decided that the risks of the market outweighed its rewards. They looked at vacation property, but decided that it could wait. They decided against planning to have children.

They stayed at the Four Seasons for almost 5 months while their home was hoisted out of the bay and renovated. Harold had drafted the plans himself, and oversaw the process obsessively. He spent entire days at the contractor’s warehouse, going over the schematics and adjusting his designs. He ordered bathroom fixtures from Japan, and kitchen fixtures from Denmark. Claire was pleased to see him so engaged, so enlivened, but she believed that some of his plans were too extravagant, too impractical. She wondered why the house suddenly needed portholes, and why they had to be copper. She wondered why the soffits, the rivets, had to be copper.

“Imagine the patina,” he said, and squeezed her hand, and smiled.

* * *

The seal piece came back sparkling, a panegyric on crusaders, a review of the dying art of living ones ideals, a character study of a lone man running a marine mammal rehabilitation center along the coast of Marin. He was written as ruggedly handsome, with work-hardened features and a caustic, embittered sense of humor. He struggled to comport himself appropriately to the social expectations of raising money for his cause, and drank, and told bawdy jokes, and wept when one of his charges died of a lingering injury or illness. Claire was thrilled. Before she could finish the fourth page she found the center’s number, and called to volunteer.

The magazine had posted a record quarter in both advertising sales and subscriptions, and they rented a space at The Wind-Up Room to celebrate. After two martinis, and chants of “speech, speech, speech,” Claire stood up. She thanked her editors for their work and patience, and praised the talent of her writing staff. She thanked the few key people she knew personally in the advertising department, and thanked the department generally. She thanked Maria for being so assiduous, and reliable, and flexible, and wonderful; and told her that she “really, truly” thought the world of her, and expected great things.

Looking away from Maria back toward the rest of her staff it occurred to her that standing there for everyone to see, speaking to their collective achievements and their individual charms, seeing their half-finished meals and their European wardrobes and their expectations in their wine-flushed faces… it was more than she could bear. She swallowed, and pushed a fly-away behind her ear. The velvet of the high-backed chairs and the dance music thumping through the walls and the chandelier reflecting off the champagne flutes and through the diamond on her wedding ring and the people watching her… Claire sat down, suddenly dizzy.

She stood up immediately and, shrugging, explained “I think I might have had little too much to drink.” They all laughed, and raised their glasses for a toast, and somebody said something about being proud to work for her.

As soon as she was home she checked the wet deck and found the halibut gone. She got into her robe, and brushed her teeth, and rinsed, and it was while she flossed that the phone rang.
“This is Claire,” she said. The phone rattled against her ear and mouth, an extension of her trembling hand. Her eyes burned, and she blinked deliberately, realizing that she had been staring at the bookshelf since she answered.

In the window seat she told Harold of the magazine’s recent success. She told him that she had thrown a party at the house, that the entire staff came, that they were all in such high spirits. They all said such wonderful, kind things, she said. She told him that she had been nominated for an award celebrating her contribution to the industry. She thought to tell him that the award would be announced in the next few days but decided against it, feeling that he might suspect her of trying to bait him. She did not want to seem as desperate to hear from him as she was.

She ran her fingertips against her lips, and along the slight indentation at the bridge of her nose from when she broke it in high school. She plucked at the crow’s feet which she had recently noticed at the corners of her eyes. She told him that she had been going to the gym, and seeing a personal trainer, and thinking of doing a triathlon.

“It would just be a sprint,” she said.

The idea came up, she told him, while she was out to dinner with Claudine and Marguerite and Sarah. They decided to try a new Eritrean place that Riviera’s wine and food editor had been raving about. The four of them had been eating out so much recently, and were interested in trying something new. Marguerite looked stunning. She was wearing this gorgeous – gorgeous! – topaz-inlaid broach, and a wonderfully tailored black blouse, and these oxblood knee-high boots made from this incredibly lissome leather. They gripped her calves so nicely, almost like driving gloves, and they didn’t do that terrible bunching thing at the ankles. Marguerite told them that they were actually ostrich, not leather. Sarah told her to stand up and show them off, and she did a little twirl behind her chair and those amber ringlets of hers whirled like the gown of a dervish over her shoulders and bounced into and away from her face, and she smiled this big resplendent smile. She was radiant. So sexy, so pulled-together, so upright and confident. It’s truly amazing what presentation and a head held high can do for a woman, isn’t it? They all wondered what had gotten into her – Are you seeing someone, Marguerite? – and Marguerite smiled, and sighed, and put her chin in her palm, and feigned a frown. No. But I’m working on that. She has developed this adorable crush on a junior analyst in her office. He’s quiet, and sticks to his work, Marguerite told them, but occasionally he’ll say the most devastatingly clever things and walk away with this happy little smirk. And it just destroys her. He never goes to their office functions, and he doesn’t work directly for her, so Marguerite has never really been able to speak to him at length; but every once in a while he’ll send out these vague emails about his work at this or that gallery. He sculpts! Well, Marguerite finally worked up the courage to go to a show of his, and when she got there and saw him speaking to some other woman she tried to hide, but he saw her and came over and thanked her and thanked her and thanked her for coming. He was so shy, saying You know, I didn’t expect to see you here... I just invite you all so you get the idea that I don’t live and breath by the opening and closing of the market each day. Marguerite told him that this was completely understandable, that work-life balance was important. He asked her what she did when she wasn’t finding thing for her subordinates to do. She nearly chipped her tooth, she said, bringing her sauvignon blanc to her lips for an intermissive sip… she did not want to tell him that she split time between dinner with friends and TiVo. Out of nowhere she heard herself say I do triathlons. And he was so impressed! And the very next day she went online and found a program and began to train for a triathlon. Claire was thrilled to see Marguerite so adorably flustered like that, and she offered to train with her, just like that. And that’s how it happened, more or less. Except for the lack of dessert options, the restaurant was great. A little messy, eating with your hands, but great. It was the funniest thing: the only desserts they serve there are banana-based. And Harold knew how Claire felt about bananas. That story of her grandfather’s about banana spiders, and how their eggs incubate in the mushy seed-blackened ends, and how they’ll hatch inside of you and scramble up your esophagus to crawl out of your mouth and nose and the tickle at the back of your throat will make you crazy to vomit but the spiders block the gag mechanism somehow and it seems like it will never, never, never end.

“You know how sick I get,” she said, her voice tinny, her palm to her temple. “Just the thought of it.”

She told him that she was suddenly exhausted, and wished him a good night and hung up.

Balling her hands into fists, Claire made a mental note of the title “A Great Day for Banana Spiders.” She was disgusted at her own wretched, feckless, asinine steganography. She wanted to scream, it was so pathetic. Who was she kidding? She had not even spoken to Marguerite since before he left. They served bananas foster at their wedding, for the love of god. Harold made her banana sundaes when she had a sore throat. He would mash them up with the back of a spoon so that they were easier to swallow. If she was sick and unable to get out of bed, he would feed them to her, insisting upon it, softly batting her hands away if she struggled at the cosseting.

* * *

The Marin Marine Mammal Hospice sat on the side of a hill overlooking abandoned barracks, and the Pacific, and the salt marshes of the coastal headlands. The Hospice was an unassuming and low-slung building, weather-beaten and grey. Craning her neck to look up at it through the swirling mist as she drove in approach, Claire thought that she might not have ever seen so compelling a structure.

They put her to work scrubbing cages. She sprayed each down with a noxious, foaming antifungal agent and scoured them with a long-handled metal brush.

They gave her a wooden shield, and trained her briefly on how to use it, and sent her and another volunteer into a cage to block for a marine biologist who needed to collect fecal samples from an adolescent bull elephant seal. The bull charged the volunteers and smashed them up against the chain-link of its cage, bellowing and gnashing its teeth at their shields, until the biologist ran over and knocked it in its head with a broom handle and angrily told Claire and the other volunteer to get out of the cage, that he was better off in there without them.
They next sent her to the infirmary to help Lucas, the Hospice’s director, give some infant sea lions their medicine. He carried one over from a nearby tank by its flippers, flopped it onto the surgical table, and told her to hold it down while he injected the antibiotics into its body cavity. The sea lion squirmed away from Claire, and snapped at Lucas’ wrist. “God damn it,” he bellowed, and used his palm to smack the sea lion on the tip of its nose.

“Oh! But…” Claire said. Lucas sneered at her from across the table, and stabbed the syringe into the creature’s gut.

The sun had gone down, and the mist had turned into rain. Claire stood with a net at the side of a converted above-ground pool, waiting for the three infant harbor seals inside to finish their meal. The volunteer manager told her to collect what had not been eaten after 10 minutes and bring it to the office so it could be weighed. The seals had barely touched the fish she had given them, and Claire was concerned. They were adorable, she thought, like chubby, aquatic puppies, all sleek and smooth with their wide, flat heads and huge black eyes and their little whiskers and their mottled, grey-black coats.

“Come on, you three. Eat up,” she said, using the net to unsettle the fish from the bottom of the pool. “Eat up. That’s right.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing,” asked Lucas, watching from an adjacent pen. Claire looked at him, stricken, at a loss for words. She had not seen him standing there.

“Don’t talk to them. Don’t whisper, don’t coo, don’t make a sound,” he said. “You’ll get them accustomed to being around people. What do you think lands them in here?”

He stared hard at Claire until she thought that he might be expecting an answer.

“Uh, well…”

“Look here,” he said, pointing to an oozing black abscess on the neck of a nearby, prone sea lion. “Gun shot wound. You think we make you wear that rubber suit, that mask, that hood… you think we do that to protect you?”

Before leaving the Hospice she washed – her hands, her wrists, her forearms – three times, but she could not get the reek off of her. She sat waiting at the mouth of the narrow one-way tunnel which burrowed under and through the headlands and out onto the highway above Sausalito, uncomfortably aware of herself, watching the red traffic light flash, listening to the rain lash the roof of the car, smelling the putridity of the animals and their sicknesses.

* * *

Right before their fourteenth wedding anniversary, it was announced that Harold would be his firm’s lead litigator for a sprawling case involving the patent rights to a particular GPS device. When his cousin Wyatt came to San Francisco for a two-day conference, and called several times about seeing Harold and Claire over dinner, Harold told him that he was sorry but they would not be able to. He had to work.

Claire offered to take Wyatt out and, when Harold pushed back, insisted.

“There’s no reason I can’t have dinner with him. He’s family, and he’s all alone in town,” she said. “Plus, I’ve never met the guy.”

Harold tried to dissuade her, but eventually acquiesced. He gave her a worried look.

“Don’t take him anywhere he can drink,” he said.

Claire met Wyatt, a chubby, shabbily dressed man with a patchy beard, in the lobby bar of his hotel. They had a cocktail, and then walked a block down the street to an Italian place that Claire liked. Over a plate of bruschetta and a bottle of Barbera, Wyatt told Claire about his work as a demographer.

“After a while,” he said, chuckling, shaking his head, “you see a person, you see a number. You see a couple bickering, you see domestic violence statistics. You see a well-dressed woman, a crowded highway and an empty carpool lane, you see consumption trends. These things that make us us, quirks and decisions, they’re not that charming on the macro level.”

Wyatt ordered the veal parmigiana, and another bottle of Barbera, and Claire chose the gruyere gnocchi. Claire told him about her work at the magazine, and about life on a houseboat, and about Harold’s success as an attorney.

“I’m so happy he turned out so well-adjusted,” Wyatt said, slurring slightly. “Truly, truly wonderful. That thing with his parents would have screwed most people up. So terrible.”

Claire said nothing and listened to Wyatt as he maundered through the story, pausing occasionally to guzzle wine and shovel veal. Harold had come home from school to prepare the house for his father’s fifty-first birthday party, and discovered his parents sitting in an idling Cadillac, in the closed garage, dead of asphyxiation. The police ruled it a murder-suicide but none of the neighbors, no one in the family, believed it. They were despicably selfish for abandoning their young son and forcing him to fend for himself, for leaving their bodies in a place where only he would be likely to find them, sure, but neither of them were murderers. After the estate process got ugly, and Harold received everything, he refused to live with anybody in his extended family. He entrusted what he had inherited to the lawyer who had represented him, living off a monthly stipend. He rented a small room above a seamstress’ shop. He went years without communicating with his aunts and uncles. Wyatt had not even known that he was an attorney until Claire had told him.

“Poor guy,” said Wyatt, pulling his napkin from his lap to mop marinara sauce from the corners of his mouth. “I’m real proud of how well he’s done, though.”

Looking at Wyatt from across the table – his face rosy from the wine and candlelight, his glasses crooked on his bulbous nose, his jacket threadbare, his expression earnest – Claire thought that he was the ugliest person she had ever seen.

When he spoke of it to Claire, Harold had always told her that after his parents’ deaths he had lived with his grandmother. They died of cancer, he told her, prostate and breast, two years apart.

A few months after Claire’s dinner with Wyatt, her friend Amanda’s mother died of intestinal cancer. Claire arranged for Harold to be home on a particular Saturday afternoon, and told Amanda to call him to talk through the grief of losing someone to cancer. When she called, Claire stood watching Harold struggle through the conversation, tallying his lies, disentangling menace from parsimony, trying to comprehend the man she had loved for nearly fifteen years.

* * *

The writer argued adamantly for “The Etymology of Elitism,” saying anything else was a disservice to the intellectual merits of his article. After hearing him out, Claire calmly explained that “Say What You Will: The Language of Lifestyle” would play better with Riviera’s audience. She tried to make the writer laugh by saying that she was reluctant to make their readers look up a word about words. When he snorted derisively at this, and accused her of “pandering to the plebes,” Claire took a deep breath and explained to him that it was her decision to make. She stated clearly that Riviera would not publish an article by that title.

Now he refused submit a headshot for the contributors page. In an email to Claire he wrote that he was “not willing to contribute to the culture of celebrity,” and he was disappointed in Claire for not “recognizing that the work comes first.” She had had enough.

“You listen to me, you little prick,” she told him, standing behind her desk, shouting into the phone. “This is a great article, but you’re no Hölderlin, alright? Are you listening to me? You’re a whole lot of talent away from being able to pull this kind of shit. So get your act together, and send me that fucking headshot or, or, I swear I’ll do everything I can to make sure nobody ever gives you a second chance.”

Claire slammed the phone down. She stood sucking in shallow breaths and clenching and unclenching her shaking hands in an effort to pacify herself. She screamed, and grabbed her half-empty coffee mug from her desk, and hurled it across her office at the far wall. The mug shattered and cream-tanned coffee ran down the wall to the baseboard in rivulets.

“Maria?” Claire called out, and looked to the doorway to see Maria standing in it, wide-eyed.

Claire told Maria that if the writer did not submit his headshot within one hour, she was to pull the plug on his article. Maria was to contact one of the regulars, and ask them if they had anything ready to go. If whatever they had was for another magazine, Riviera would triple what they were being paid. Maria was then to contact legal to see if the writer’s actions were in any way interpretable to be in violation of his contract. Claire had no intention of paying the son of a bitch a dime.

“Thank you, Maria” Claire said, walking through the door of her office, past her stunned assistant.

She locked the bathroom door behind her, and ran the faucet, and waited for the tears to come, but they did not. She splashed some water on her face, and ran her cool, wet hands over the back of her neck. She clutched the sides of the sink and stared into the mirror.

The screaming, her anger and frustration, had brought a flush to Claire’s complexion. Her russet hair curled behind her ears and down the length of her neck, framing her jaw-line, emphasizing the height of her cheekbones. It occurred to her that she might have lost some weight. The bags under her eyes were larger than she liked, and she saw an intensity in her hazel eyes which she had never noticed before. She took a deep breath and smiled, attempting to soften her countenance. She blew a kiss to her reflection in the mirror. She had always loved the plumpness of her lips. It occurred to her that she had aged well.

* * *

The days were getting longer, and the sunlight had not quite faded when Claire got back to the house. She set her briefcase down, and removed her coat and shoes. She took three tablets of ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet behind the bathroom mirror, and washed them down with a glass of water from a carafe she kept in the refrigerator. Her day, her argument with the writer, had given her a headache. She walked across the hardwood floor to the deck door, and slid it open.

Startled, the seal raised its head and looked up at her from its place next to the crabapple tree. Claire could see that it was a little more than half-finished with the fish she had left out that morning. She had only seen the seal in the flesh once, and then only through the glass of the sliding door. She felt like she could reach out and touch it and, as the seal began to lurch anxiously on its front flippers and craning its neck between the bay and Claire, she took a step forward, her hand extended.

The phone rang and the seal bleated and Claire stopped stock, straddling the limina of the wet deck and the den.

Claire turned to look inside, and then back at the seal, unsure of what to do. She feared that she might not get a chance to be this close to it again. She took another step forward, but looked back at the phone when it rang again, its harsh electronic treble echoing in her pained head. She heard a splash from behind her and squeezed her eyes tight in resignation, knowing that if she turned around there would be nothing for her to see.
She answered the phone but took a few moments to collect her thoughts, saying nothing. She took a seat at the dining room table. She leaned back, and put her feet up on the chair that Harold always sat in when they had the time to prepare and eat a meal together, when they shared the newspaper on lazy weekend mornings.

“Hello,” she said finally, running her thumb and forefinger along the crest of her brow.

She had had a tough day, Claire told him. She had been forced to threaten a writer of hers, she said, a freelancer, and she hated doing that. It was not that she was afraid that it would damage her reputation, that the writer would spread the word that she was unreasonable or erratic, or that her being a woman would impact her staff’s construal of the incident, would make her outburst seem less justified, attributable to hormones; rather, Claire was disappointed at how easily, how often, she forgot that it was a business, that what she spent more of her time doing was, on reflection, little more than telling people what to do, than forcing their trust that the decisions she made were the right ones. Anyway, the writer’s article was brilliant, and Claire was happy that he finally saw the light and sent his photograph. The article, well… it is, well, sort of a treatise on tragedy, and the way it has of lying dormant, of being talked around, and denied. The way we’ll change the terms we use to discuss it, hoping that this will change the facts… the way we turn away from it, ignore it, lock it away until it calcifies within us and drags us down until we’re crushed under the weight of everything that’s not said. It’s really quite clever, the way he structured it. It’s a story, a study of a man, an attorney, who takes a leave of absence from his job, and packs up an old duffle bag with a few changes of clothes, and leaves his wife without telling her why, or where he’s going, or when he’ll be back… if he’ll ever be back. The only way she, the wife, knows that he’s even alive is that he calls every once in a while. But he doesn’t say anything. Not a blessed word. And she has no idea what’s going on. She has no idea what she could have done to drive him away. Has he met somebody else?

“Claire…”

No, please, wait a moment. This is worth hearing. What’s happening? Is he in some sort of trouble? The wife has no idea. At first, she hires a private investigator to find out where he’s gone, to trace his calls, and she learns that he’s going from side-of-the-highway motel to motel, up the coast. The PI says there’s no real pattern to it, that’s its leisurely, unconcerned for time, and the wife can’t imagine what her husband is doing. She can’t fathom it. She is so hurt, and so confused. What had she done? The man’s birthday comes and goes, and the wife weeps and weeps and weeps, and can’t get out of bed she’s so heartsick that he has left her to celebrate his birthday by herself… and she took a few days off of work, that’s how upset she was. While she was home, one of those days, looking over his things, looking for some clue, she realized which birthday of his it was.

“Claire… Please…”

And she suddenly remembered a story his cousin had told her. The cousin was a sot, and the wife hated him for telling her what he did, for clueing her in the way he did, for the way he looked and spoke. She hated him so much. She decided to never tell her husband what she knew. She decided after thinking about it – a lot, she thought of it constantly – that if he wanted to tell her, he would, that it was his story to tell, not hers. Maybe he would tell her someday, she thought, maybe not. It had nothing to do with them, with their life together. He was a good man, and theirs was a good marriage. But then he left, without telling her a thing. He would just call, and say nothing. And it made her so sad, even though she felt like she was helping him somehow, just talking to him, telling him this and that. But it also made her so angry. It made her furious, Harold. Absolutely furious… and, after thinking about it, constantly, after carrying it around with her for months, she decided that it was her story after all. So she decided that the next time he called, she would tell him. He was fifteen. He lived with his parents in a small town in Idaho, until they died. They killed themselves, the both of them, together, and left him to discover their bodies. They left themselves sitting in the Cadillac they drove him to school in, dead. On his father’s fifty-first birthday. And no one knew why in god’s name they had done what they did, why they left him alone, least of all him. They had always seemed so happy.

“Claire… Claire, please… I’m…” Harold said, blubbering.

Claire sat staring at her feet, focusing on her breathing.

“Claire? I just couldn’t… I didn’t want to be what somebody else did to me. And how? After so long?”

She told him that she was sorry, and choked down the lump rising in her throat. She said that she was too busy, and maybe too old, to spend her life reconstructing someone else’s. Even his. She stood up, and walked over to the window seat. Standing above it, she stared up into the headlands. The fog was coming in. Before she hung up, Claire asked Harold not to call again. She told him that she loved him and that whenever he felt up to coming home the house would be there for him. She would not guarantee, however, that she would be.

Claire stood above the window seat and focused on the ringing silence, on the hot dull throb of her ear where the phone had been pressed up against her. She registered the facts and fabrications which would factor into a retelling: how her throat hurt, almost too much to speak, how at points she could focus only on a slight tear in her stocking or on the blood rushing in and away from her knuckles as she clenched and unclenched her fist. How the smell of the salt air was suddenly overpowering. How Harold had wept, and begged to be understood. How she understood everything, everything, perfectly.