Category: Lies

The Shape We’re In

I tell you this story from the vantage point of having lived through several presidential administrations which I thought at the time were the worst that ever could be, only to be judged wrong by a new one which was exponentially more terrible. The current administration may be the absolute bottom of that rancid barrel, and possibly so bad that it could conceivably be the last one we see. Though of course, I might be wrong.

A week before Christmas 1988, in the darkest hours of the year, I made gingerbread cookies.

I rolled flat the ball of cold dough I had made on the floured cutting board. I was listening to The Band. Levon Helm.

The Weight. The Shape I’m In. His voice was a muddy truck on a rough upstate road. His dirt farmer voice pushing through the roadside brambles. Singing how he felt. How I felt. How we all felt. The shape we were in.

It had snowed three inches that week, and by that time forty thousand eight hundred forty-nine men women and children in the country had died of HIV/AIDS in the six years since we’d recognized that an epidemic had begun.

I set the oven at three-fifty, pressed a cookie cutter into the dough and peeled each figure apart and laying them flat and brown on the baking sheets. Dozens of them. Arms and legs outstretched.

With the edge of a spoon, I drew eyes and a smile into each face. A Greek chorus, now, of eager Athenians bearing citizen witness to the events to come.

The number of deaths, their constancy, the relentless procession of them, had become the landscape. The gestalt. The number itself was benumbing. A monochrome veil over your vision while you could still clearly see and feel the enormity of each passing; each life’s loss.

The constant cloud of death hung about us; about all of those I worked with. The dread of it stitched onto the edges of everything, even in the campy, offhand-sounding humor. We cared for the sick and scared, studied the data and the pathology, the science and medicine and the hopeful rumors of unlikely cures.

Reagan had long since shown himself to be the devil. He surely knew better. His friends were dying around him. Nevertheless, he acted as if he was simply callously clueless, when he was, demonstrably heartlessly uncaring and cruel.

Regan’s willful ignorance and inaction were incomprehensible. To what end, six years in, would he not lead the mobilization of medical care, research and compassion?

The gingerbread cookies would be my Christmas gift this year for our work group. We all made cookies to share. Tiny pecan pies, peppermint bark, buckeyes, and pfeffernüsse. We had no holiday party. There was no holiday. We’d exchange the boxes and bags and jars before leaving work on Christmas eve and be back the next day.

I took a step away from the counter and looked at the figures. Each one of them. Arms and legs outstretched. Their smiling faces.

A smile came to my own face, and grew slowly, and I began to laugh. It became a big, head-tipped-back, body laugh, reaching out to the corners of the kitchen .

It upwelled from deep within me. I was work- and world-weary and sleep-deprived and the laugh did me good.

Rolling out another ball of dough, I cut the next batch of figures and found myself pressing a downward frown into each of the remaining cookie faces. And, by the same magic that made me laugh, I felt a wave of sadness wash over me.

Tears filled my eyes, overflowing my cheeks and I cried as I could never remember doing. He cried for myself, and everyone and everything. For all of us. Our frustration and fear. Our sadness, our rebellion, and anger and our helplessness.

A skin-prickling sadness, not only for myself but for John and James, and Emily, Kim, Rosario, and Jonathan, and all the Johns and James and Emilys, and every other one of the friends we had lost. The faces of those he would never see again. The faces I’d seen for the last time, only days or weeks before, in a hospital bed or covered in soft blankets on their mother’s long couches, or settees in their own dark living rooms. Faces of those who died, as they seemed to do almost daily then, of cryptosporidiosis, or sarcoma, cryptococcal meningitis, wasting, fever, or pneumocystis pneumonia or a other diseases that ravaged them. And those for whom AZT promised a cure but only made the dying harder.

Friends I knew and did not know, younger than me, who’d relentlessly suffered and too-soon lost everything they had and loved and had surely dreamed. All of them who had not had the care they needed, the research they demanded, the recognition as humans in need which they deserved, because the president of the country they lived in could not abide helping them or funding the research that might save them, and could not, even as men and women he knew, died all around him, Reagan could not even speak the name of the disease they had.

When all the cookies were done, the smiling and the frowning, I bundled them, warm, together and wrapped them in white tissue paper and tied green and red ribbons around their waists. The house was quiet. I was exhausted. I was drained, and I most needed to sleep.

That was over forty years ago. We lived every day with the consequences of the government’s lack of action and human compassion, and its willingness, born out of ignorance, to discriminate and marginalize people based upon its own politics. It resulted in an early and painful death by an infectious disease for many thousands in the U.S. and millions worldwide.

Our experience with the COVID pandemic was taken from the same disastrous playbook. Politics, marginalization, discrimination, racism, and willful ignorance of public health practices resulted again in the death of  tens of hundreds of thousands of men women and children.

Now, once more, politics, marginalization, discrimination, racism, willful ignorance, lack of human compassion, and a blatant disregard and disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law, is unfolding daily in full view. We can not yet know how many lives have been, and will be, sent into turmoil, hardship, disappearance, torture, illness, and possible death by a government sworn to follow the constitution and other laws, acting rightfully and impartially for the sake of the citizens and the society.

The Witnesses

Schreiber and I are having breakfast together. In a coffee shop overlooking the harbor. At another table, closer to the kitchen, a group of other men are talking.

Schreiber has brought his knapsack.

“What did you bring to show me today?” I ask.

“A book. I’ll show you. Let’s order something first.”

I look at the menu as does he and we order. Egg sandwiches. Mine with cheese and spinach. His with sausage. He orders two, one to bring home to Lorraine.

“Before you show me the book,” I say, “I have to ask you, did you see Swalwell’s post on Instagram last night?”

“Yes,” he says, “and that’s just what I want to talk about.”

We pause for a moment when our order is brought to the table. He lifts the book from his bag and reads me the title. “I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933 -1941, by Victor Klemperer.”  He hands it across to me. A hard cover. It must weigh four pounds.

“Have you read it?” I ask, opening it. He has underlined some sentences and written notes in the margins with pencil.

“I’ve started it,” he says. “It’s from a diary he kept. It was only printed a few years ago. There are two more volumes, 1941 to 1945, and one more but I haven’t gotten either of them yet. I read a dozen or so pages every night. I hate to put it down. It’s the most important book I’ve ever read.”

“Tell me.”

“I will but…,”  and removes another item from the bag. A daily calendar. I lay the Klemperer down on the table as he opens the calendar, turning it toward me. His handwritten notes in black ink. Smooth, even, rounded script, in tight lines filling the pages.

“I have begun to write my own diary,” he says. Once I started this one,” tapping his finger on the Klemperer. “And you should too. We must do this now, each day so that in the years to come there will be a record, a personal one, that tells people what is happening here. In our country. To all of us. The threats. The intimidation. The chaotic new rants each day. The silence and complicity of people who know better and should do better. I wake up and I write down what I am thinking and feeling. Not full sentences. What new angry idiocy I have heard he has said yesterday and overnight. Listen to this,” he says, taking his notebook back, opening it to the last written page. “Trump fired the FBI agents. Tariffs on Mexico and China. He’s crazy. It’s all bullying. Vendettas. Today I will get cash,” he reads, looks up at me, and then turns back the calendar. “I get cash now. A little each day. While I can. Chuck Todd and Jim Acosta are leaving MSNBC and CNN. Planes crash over DC. Trump blames DEI.”

He looks again at me. “That was yesterday. All that in one day. And this very morning I go to order the second volume, and I click on payment, and what do I see?… access denied in bold red letters. Do you know how I felt? I will find out why at the bank later, but still…”

I don’t know what to say to him. The look in his eyes.

He puts down the calendar and picks up the Klemperer book.

Opening it, “Listen to this,” he says. “This is from 1933… March 10, Friday evening…” He closes the book on his index finger and looks again at me. “Hitler was elected Chancellor on January 30 of 1933, and now it’s March 10, a month and a half, and he is writing, … ‘I called January 30 terror, but that was a mild prelude, the business of 1918 is being repeated, only under another sign, the swastika. It’s astounding how quickly everything collapses.’”

He looks up for a moment and then back to the page, lower down, “’Day after day, commissioners appointed, buildings taken over, newspapers banned, flags raised by order of the Nazi Party,’ are you hearing this?” he says to me.

“Yes,” I say, looking at him for an instant and then averting my eyes.

“And here, March 17, ‘No one dares saying anything, everyone is afraid. March 20 … every new government decree, announcement, etc. is more shameful than the previous one.’”

“Michael, …” I say.

“One more, one more, and then I’ll stop, … April 20 to 25, “’… trembling and slavish fear all around… ‘they are expert at advertising… ‘everyone knuckles under,’” he runs his finger swiftly along the line and then down to another… ‘all the same conversations, the same despair… catastrophe is imminent.’”

He looks at me. I feel he is wholly there in that past moment in that past place. And then, now, he is here, and he still feels the same. The same pleading look in his eyes. “Do you hear these words?” he says to me. “This was from April 1933, mind you, not 1938 or 1941. This is before the SA men start rounding up people, or the SS and the pogroms and the camps, before the killings started. 1933,” he repeats.

He has not touched a bite. Nor have I. The waiter comes with two coffee pots. One decaf, one regular. “Can I warm them up for you?”

“Yes, thanks,” I tell him. “Regular.”

“Decaf for me,” says Schreiber.

“You want those wrapped up?”

“No thanks.”

The men at the other table have left.

“Schreiber,” I say, “the book can’t be all like that, can it.? He must also write about family, regular everyday things, his work.”

“No, you’re right. He does. He does. His teaching, his writing, his wife, friends, movies, just like we do. You and I.”

“And that’s the point though isn’t it,” I say. “You’re saying he’s seeing everything sane and normal and good is being broken apart, soon likely to be lost and…”

“… And,..” Schreiber cuts in, “still, he might be having egg sandwiches with a friend in coffee shop by the water, despite what the future might bring. Right?”

“Yes,” I say. “And we know what his future did bring. Don’t we.”

The Dreamer from the Dream

Between the end of his first and the approach of his soon-to-be second marriage, Arnold Bregman lived a quiet and peacefully life. Cooking what pleased him. Cleaning his tiny walk-up apartment. Shopping at a corner market after work. Most evenings making a modest meal, reading for a while, going to bed and sleeping well.

In time, though, his pleasant dreams, which had always been vivid, turned dark, leaking out of his sleep into his waking hours. He was terrified by them. In them, he’d been involved in a murder. A brutal murder, the details of which he could not remember. The murder of a man he might have known, whose name he could not recall, and whose disappearance would soon become apparent.

The certainty that this had actually happened, no matter how implausible, would not loosen its grip on him. Following such dreams, he was consumed with crushing guilt. Fear of being found out and of the looming horror of punishment.

Distraught, with no one he felt he could talk to, he consulted a psychiatrist referred by a friend. After a few sessions, the psychiatrist, a man named Ostrove, found no signs of psychosis, no signs of an aggressive, psychopathic, sociopathic, or dangerously disturbed personality. He was, Dr. Ostrove told him, a man living with ominous guilt, but it was not for the crime he believed he had committed.  

But why then, Bregman asked, would I have such horrible thoughts, and why can I not rid them from my mind?

Bregman was not an unintelligent man. He should have anticipated the response, being familiar with how psychiatrists worked, but he was nevertheless surprised when Ostrove said, neatly crossing his legs, his face as straight as the crease in his trousers, “Why do you think that is so?”

I don’t know. Why would I be here if I knew, Bregman replied.

“That’s a good question,” said Ostrove, shifting in his chair.

Bregman increasingly doubted the value of continuing with therapy. Ostrove seemed unconcerned about the depths of his despair, yawning, nodding off at times while Bregman was speaking. Bregman could not bring it up to the psychiatrist, feeling he must be a terrible bore and unworthy of the man’s attention. At two hundred dollars per session, which Bregman could ill afford, he would soon have to stop.

But perhaps, Bregman thought, Ostrove was being quite shrewd. Merely playing at nodding off just to test him. To see if Bregman could be pushed to react to being so badly treated. Goading him to the point that his true, typically male, belligerent nature would erupt.

As he approached Ostrove’s office, he decided to announce that he was going to stop coming. To try to work things out on his own but before he had the chance to speak up, Ostrove suggested that Bregman might agree to hypnosis as a possible and more productive approach to therapy and they agreed that the at next session Bregman would submit to what Ostrove described as light hypnosis.

The night before the hypnosis was to take place, Bregman once again entered the dream as if it were a present reality. He was standing with two men in a dank, cramped, basement.

It was cold and dark. The granite walls were damp and dimly lit. In the center of the dirt floor was a round iron plate beneath which Bregman knew was a narrow pit with the crumpled remains of the murdered man, his bloody clothes still clinging to his body.

They had come to move the body that evening, suspecting that someone, as absurd as that was, had told the police about the crime.

Bregman was stiff with terror. The police would imminently break in, find them and the body. He knew that he and he alone would be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to certain death.

They hurriedly placed the bloodied man’s remains into a leather duffel and dragged it out into a shadowed alley. He was filthy with grime and blood. Gagging on the ferrous odor. He stood with the others in a light drizzle. They looked to Bregman for direction, but he was unable to move.  

The next morning, Bregman was unable to discern the dream from reality. That he might have murdered someone seemed a palpable reality which he had effectively blocked from his consciousness. Surely, he could not allow himself to be hypnotized. He couldn’t go to the appointment, unsure of what was real and what he might say. But then, if he didn’t show up, and he were in fact guilty what might Ostrove do? Break confidentiality and report him? Had Ostrove presented the lure of cure by hypnosis as trap, a clever psychological ruse?

At Ostrove’s office door, he hesitated, tempted to leave, but he did not. He was not truly a murderer. Of course not. He would go in. Ostrove would hypnotize him and reveal a simple, plausible, explanation for his dreams. Some unresolved deep Oedipal feelings they would work on together. In truth, that was all he wanted.

Was it not uncommon, at the very cusp of a therapeutic turning point, for one to resist the prospect of change. Was not the known present better than the unknown future?

As he stood outside of Ostrove’s office, the woman who had the appointment before him emerged from inside. The faint smell of her cologne reminded him of a woman he once knew. Their relationship had ended badly. After they’d split, she haunted him, came to where he  worked, called him at all hours of the day and night. “I loved you and you left me like what remains after the vultures have finished eating,” she told him. He’d killed, she said, every loving cell in her body, and he would have to live with that on his conscience for the rest of his life.

The woman leaving Ostrove’s office smiled, nodded, and went on her way. Though they had never spoken, each time he had seen her over the past several months, he felt increasingly more attracted to her. Each time, smiling, she averted her eyes as she passed him on her way down the stairs. Just as she had now done.

He turned, intending to follow her. But then quickly stopping himself, What am I doing? This is absurd, he thought. Who am I? What a sad demented creature, chasing after a woman I don’t know. What could possibly be the outcome of that?

No, he thought, better for me to go in and tell Ostrove all about this. This may be the breakthrough I’ve been seeking and avoiding. The revelation of reality. The salvation.

Tormented with indecision, he leaned his head back against the wall, slowly sliding his back down the wall until his hands reached the soft edge of the matted green carpet. He closed his eyes, and there he sat, unable to imagine whatever might happen next.

The Game

Enrique Quinones started playing tennis at the age of four. He was good. Everyone in his town said he was good. His parents gave him lessons. His mother told everyone she knew that it was Enrique’s dream that he would one day be a great player like Alex Olmedo or Pancho Segura, or Gonzales. He, of course, wanted to be good like them but he said to his mother, “Mama, it is your dream for me to be a great champion, but it is not my dream.”

And so, when he was ten and old enough to travel on an airplane by himself his mother sent him to stay with her sister in America so that he could have a great teacher and become famous.

When his aunt Bellissima brought him to the tennis schools in San Diego, they looked at him and told her to take him home because he was too old to learn to be a really great player. And so she took him to the biggest and best and most expensive schools in California and soon found the one she liked the best: the SHOQ Academy.

“What does SHOQ stand for?” she asked the director. “Swing. Hard. Or. Quit,” he told her. She thought that sounded just right, this was America after all, and she signed him up. She told Enrique good-bye, that she loved him very dearly, that she would come visit him every two weeks, and that one day he would reach his dream of being a great tennis player. “Good-bye, Tia Bellissima,” he said.

When Enrique graduated from college and turned pro, Edberg, Sampras, Chang, and Agassi were the top pros and Djokovic, and Federer, and Nadal were about his age, and he knew that he would never win a tournament they were in. But his aunt told him not to be discouraged. She sent him money and care packages and told him to remember to swing hard and not to quit. And so, he did.

He played on the pro circuit, in feeder tournaments, traveling from one city to another, staying in cheap hotels and, reading Kant and Nietzsche and Arendt, and eating takeout and Clif bars with the other players.

He kept hitting hard and not quitting and he became better and better, earning more and more ATP points, which put him higher and higher in the draws, letting him play lower ranked players in the early rounds with a better chance to make it into the quarters, semis, and possibly the finals. The promoters were making money. The sponsors were making money. The coaches and managers were making money, and he was making money. But not anything like one might dream of.

For a couple of years, during which he was playing both singles, doubles, and mixed doubles on the tour, he made enough to cover the airline and hotel costs with a little left over.

In his tenth year on the circuit, at a tournament in Palm Springs, Fiona Adler, a woman he knew at SHOQ and who had become a sports journalist when she realized her tennis career wasn’t going to happen, approached him and they started seeing one another when they were both in the same city for a tournament. They ended up spending more and more time together, nothing serious, and eventually she told him her sister had seen him play and she had a young son for whom she and her husband wanted to find a teaching pro.

“Enrique, face it,” said Fiona, “you’re good but not that good, you’ve been in this game ten years and you’re never going to make it big. Quit while you’re a name people know and have some money saved. You’re good looking. You start teaching and women from all over will want to bring their kids to you.”

“I doubt it, but okay,” he said. And so, Fiona introduced him to her sister, Ariana, and her son.

The boy was quick and confident, with near-perfect, sweet, natural strokes. He could feel the game. You could see it in the way he met the ball, not overswinging like most kids. He was loose. He hit like he was having a conversation with the ball. A natural talent. Enrique moved to Long Island took a job at a upscale tennis club and took the boy on.

Ariana brought the boy for lessons every day after school and all day on weekends, though Cal, her husband told her it was a waste. He said, “Let’s take him down to Bollettieri’s school in Florida. The hell with this loser teaching pro. What can you possibly see in that guy?

Ariana saw a lot. “He’s a good teacher and he knows what tennis academies do to a young kid. He knows that Conor is good, not enough to beat a Djokovic. But he sees him playing in college and maybe pros and loving it. Let him do that. Don’t turn Conor into a commodity you can market for your own sake. Give Enrique a year to get him into the juniors and see how he does.”

“You’re being small minded,” he told her. “Conor needs a chance to be great. He can have six months. That’s all.”

Ariana said, “Thanks. You won’t regret it.”

Enrique took Conor to the boys’ twelves and in three months he got a national ranking in the juniors. Ariana went along to all his matches. The three of them got along well. Conor liked Enrique and Enrique liked Conor. The problem was that Ariana liked Enrique a lot and Enrique liked her too. A lot. And one night after they had all said good night at a cheap hotel in Cincinnati … well, you know what happened.

So Cal, hurt beyond belief, said, “Ariana, what did you think would happen?” He sued for divorce and he took Conor, who was hurt well within belief and would not say a word to his mother, and their other son, Chris, who was too young to believe or understand anything or even to know what was going on, down to Bollettieri’s, leaving Ariana the house and all of his winter clothing.

She was heartbroken. All she had left was a home with an island in the kitchen and a gazebo in the backyard, friends who didn’t call, and the hope that Enrique would not leave her too.

He did not. He told her he loved her, and they sold the house with the island in the kitchen and the gazebo in the backyard and moved to Ecuador, where he taught tennis at a club outside of Guayaquil, not far from where he’d grown up.

Ariana cried a lot, missing her boys, sending them cards on birthdays and holidays and in three years they went to see Conor play doubles at the US Open where he lost in the third round, and they all went out together to an Asian fusion restaurant on Queens Boulevard in Flushing.

Their waiter asked everyone to smile and to lean in together. “More close, please” he said, and he took their picture with two separate iPhones and brought them two separate checks.

When We Were Mallards

When we first met, my husband, Mycola, told me that he thought we were like two ducks. Two mallards in a vast lake in a country far away. Like mallards, he said we were.

We were walking then, in our long overcoats, on a busy street in the city where we both lived. There were people and families all around us going into and out of shops and restaurants and sitting in the sun on benches in the park. Children running underfoot. Cars. Buses.

“Petra,” he said, as that was the name my mother called me by, “like we live in a mile-wide and ten-mile long lake with tall firs growing close to the very edge of the rocky shore, and plenty of places for us to build a nest and hide our ducklings in the reeds, whenever we would be fortunate enough to have them. And when the last of them grows up and flies away, we will swim side-by-side and stick our heads down deep below the surface and pull up bits of grass and noodle around for tiny crustaceans in the muck. And, we always be together and always be beautiful.

Sounds good, I told him.

And he said, “qwakk, qwakk.” And I loved him. You silly goose, I thought.

He is gone now and I live each day in great and constant misery. I live in a place of icy dark and metallic fear.

This is my life now, and for how much longer it will be I don’t know. This is not how it had been. When we were mallards. But that matters little now. Now, I cry and my body shakes so hard it is hard to take a breath. I wish for death but I only vomit.

I have no place to go. I have no home. No clothes apart from those I have on.

Two weeks ago, while we were sleeping, the door to our house was being battered and we could hear it beginning to buckle and break. Mycola and I woke my mother and our little girl and we ran out through the side door. We knew they were coming but none of us knew when that would be. We had heard the trucks but we thought they had passed through on their way to someplace else.

We ran in the rubble of the streets. My mother stumbled. She could no longer run. She fell and we tried to pick her up. She screamed in pain. She could not stand. Or she refused to get up. I don’t know.

Our entire world has been changed. We mean no harm to anyone. We hurt no one. Not once in my life have I hurt anyone.

I should say we meant no harm to anyone. Now, I have lost all my balance. My forgiveness.

When your mother has fallen and you cannot pick her up. When your child is running and trips on bricks and glass from the walls of the apartments your friends lived in on the fourth floor of the building you pass, and you can see their now-empty rooms and their broken, blackened, walls, and you see the face your daughter as she sees them too.

When you hear the crack and see the flashes and feel the air itself beat like a bully against your chest so hard it crushes you and a moment later it sucks the breath from your lungs, and you lose your grip on your bag and you cry out in the pain you have not yet felt.

And you cry out in a voice so loud it it hurts your throat, to a god you have believed in all your life, in a voice you never used before and to a god you do not know and who no longer can hear you.

And you think of Isaiah 2:4, “And he shall judge between the nations and shall decide for many peoples and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks and nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” You had read those words and you had once believed them.

And now you know that the world itself is a sword lifted up and thrust toward your throat. And your hands are tied behind your back like your husband’s were when he was beaten and dragged away and another man who lies dead on the ground beside you.

When nothing else has any meaning. This god or that god, or the rules of war.

What kind of people make rules of war like rules of grammar or poker? How do we need rules about who to kill, and when it is permissible and when it is not? Words without meaning which are ignored. Humanitarian is another of those words.

And then you see the last bus pull away without you. And there is no water and no food and no toilets.

When there is no hope, and the days of the hopeless hope you once had have passed, when you are crowded in amongst the dead and the starving and the dying, in the cold and dark, you will see, only then, what you could not ever have imagined when the world was big and the sun was bright and the air was clear, and war was only a word for a place where others lived and died, and conflicts which were given names and had dates of when they began and when they ended, and numbers of dead and wounded were counted, and crosses were hammered into the thawing ground with the rounded iron backs of shovels that had dug the shallow graves by men too old to fight.

And you will know how it was that men had done this because you saw the grim and vacant disregard in their faces, inches from your own. And know that they they had planned and considered this one option and that other option, and each one had only one intent and that was to kill this many nobodies here and that many nobodies over there as they could. And the greatest sinfulness that we have known and written down in all the holy history books and agreed to since the beginning of time, held no sway with them. That men with no souls had done this. And they did it with hot white hatred.

I know that now, and I know that this war, this new war without an historical name yet, and with no end date to write in books, will have no end for me. I will die in the midst of it.

And I hope for death to come. I need to live and I want to die.

The Hungarian Deception

Erik slept in fitful bouts of disturbed sleep all night. Words, phrases, faces, as if pasted on to the rims of a perpetual motion machine, or better yet, a snake devouring its own tail, woke him, or at least, brought him to the thin subliminal edge of nearly-waking. In those moments in which he did awake, he looked over at the clock and out through the parted window blinds behind him.

His wife slept quietly in their bed. Bliss, their three-year old, lay in the space between her parents, curled against her mother’s back.

Snow began falling shortly before he woke. He knew it was coming. Expected it. Moving in from the northwest, off the lake, tracing the path of the highway south and eastward toward the city. By six o’clock there were already four inches of fat, wet flakes blowing in swirls around the streetlights, sticking to the road in front of his house and to the west-facing sides of the other homes in the neighborhood.

Feeling ragged when he got out of bed, he shaved and dressed silently in the bathroom. He’d set out his clothes for work the night before. His brown wool knit tie, grey flannel shirt, jeans.

He hurried.

“Hová mész?” his wife whispered, (Where are you going?) in Hungarian to him in the near-dark room.

“To work,” he said.

“Verk? Te örült vagy? Egy tonnaszar hó esik teher!” (Are you crazy? It is snowing a shitload out there!”)

“If I leave early, I can come back early.”

“Coffee?” She pronounces it, kahvee.

“Nope. I’ll get it on the road.”

“Dehogy?” (Nope?)

He told her to go back to sleep, he’d be fine, not to wake the baby and he went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, keys in his hand. He did feel crazy.Crazy and irresolute. Irresolutely trapped knee-deep in a mess of his own doing. He needed to leave. Right away. To not leave, to even think of not going, of letting Liesel go by herself, was more than crazy. Unforgiveable. He wanted to be with her. It was the right thing to do. He said he would. Given his word. That was a laugh, was it not. His word. He wanted, too, so very desperately to put an end to all the deceit. He would tell her that.

The snow was steadily deepening.

The few people left in the waiting room looked down at their cellphones or at the folded magazines in their laps. No one spoke. They shifted in their seats, making as little a disturbance as they possibly could. Crossing and uncrossing their legs at the ankles. Jittering bended knees. Wet footprints marked smudged lines across the carpet. A table lamp lit in the corner of the room.

Each of the women there shifted their eyes to the inner door when they sensed it opening, anticipating when the nurse would appear and read their name from a clipboard. The few men among them only looked up when the woman they’d come in with heard her name being called and then she’d get up quickly. And then the men would leave.

They had planned to meet at six-thirty in the parking lot at the commuter rail station. He’d often met Liesel there, leaving one of their cars at the uncrowded south end of the lot and then driving to some other place, in some other part of the city, to a park or to the back of a library, or to a café where they might not be seen by anyone who might know them. This had been going on for almost a year. They’d once met for an afternoon at the empty apartment of a friend of hers. Muzzy, a high school friend, he thought. He had never met her.

He stood to get up and leave the house and then he stopped and sat back down.

Leaving home in weather not fit for driving would only mean another lie he’d have to concoct. He could call Liesel’s house and pretend to be from the clinic saying they were not taking patients for the day, and she could call later to reschedule. But then what would rescheduling do? It would only put this off for another day. That would have solved nothing and how would she explain to her husband a call from anyone that early in the morning. But then, perhaps Muzzy would take her to the new appointment.

Liesel was punctual (always), obsessively well-organized, more of a person in control of things than he. She demanded punctuality. Of course she would certainly have called the clinic, checking to see that they were open and expecting her. She should have canceled when they knew about the storm. Maybe she had. But more likely, she’d already be waiting for him, parking lights on, engine running evenly, her hair still damp from the shower, and the lizard like tracks of her near-slick tires being eradicated by the freshly falling snow.

The procedure Liesel was having this morning was scheduled for eight o’clock, twenty miles in toward the city. A grey one-story clinic building by the highway, behind a tight hedgerow of cypress trees.

At six forty-five, Liesel turned off the engine, pounded her open palms against the steering wheel until they hurt. “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck him.” She got out of the car, her head and face wrapped in a thick woolen scarf against the wind. She scraped clear the windshield of encrusted snow and got back in and started it up the again. Turned the wipers on. And then saw, through the gauze of snowflakes, the lights of his car. You bastard!

When they called Liesel’s name, she rose, bent over, and whispered closely, and sharply, into his ear, “Erik, lisen to me, menj el most, és gyere vissza értem két óra múlva.” (Leave now and come back for me in two hours.)

He turned his head to look at her, but she stopped him and grabbed his chin in her stiff, long fingers.

He nodded.

“End von more tink,” she said, in a voice just loud enough for the others to hear, “yu dirty peeze of cow sheet, tek of det Filadelfia Freedum beisbol het frum yur beeg bawld hed, end tek doze googly eye glesses frum of yur fayz, vitch yu tink meks yu look jus lik Elton John, becose you only lokk like a ful, end yu r embearazink me. End ven yu cum bek fur me, brink me a plen begel vit crem chees end a blek coffee. Du yu here me?”

He nodded.

“Pliz belif me, Erik. ven I tel dis tu yu, És ha valaha is mesélsz errõl a húgomnak, meg fogsz halni!” (And, if you ever tell my sister about this, you will die!”), she said.

She then stood up, straightened her bek and left the room without looking bek at him.

He shrugged on his overcoat, left by the front door, and got into his car.