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*

‘One club.’ ‘Pass.’ ‘Two spades.’

‘Pass.’

Carole Federico studied her hand, biting her lips.

‘Pass.’

Bill laughed aloud, seeing her blunder. Russ Federico glared at his wife angrily.

‘Are you out of your mind, didn’t you see my jump bid?’

‘But we’ve got a partial, and that gives us game,’ protested Carole.

‘Damn it, I gave you a jump shift. I indicated we’ve got enough points for slam!’ Russ threw his cards on the table. ‘Of all the goddamn stupid things to do!’

The Federicos took their bridge seriously, and the Thursday night sessions generally wound up in a fight. The game would get going at eight sharp but would never continue beyond ten. By that time, after a series of minor faux pas, Carole would always pull the granddaddy of them all, sending Russ into a towering range and cuing Janice to put on the coffee.

The Federicos were slightly younger than the Templetons. Bill and Russ had come to know each other on the elevator, going down each morning. Occasional smiles and good-mornings had gradually ripened into conversation and then friendship. They would often walk to work together.

Russ and Carole had moved into Des Artistes in 70, having purchased one of the smaller apartments. They were married five and a half years and were childless. Russ owned a small sound recording studio on Fifty-seventh Street. Like Bill and Janice, they couldn’t abide TV, loved bridge, and best of all, were passionate about opera and owned a fabulous library of records, many of which were collectors’ items.

Their first evening together was at the Templetons’. Janice had spent the entire day preparing a cold veal tonnato, celery aspic, and a creamy chocolate mousse spiked with Grand Marnier. The Federicos were impressed and adulatory, proposing toast after toast from the jeroboam of Mouton Cadet they had contributed to the meal. Afterwards the relationship was firmed with one of Russ’s rarest discs, a 1912 Victor recording of Alma

Gluck singing selections from Faust, Aida, and Manon Lescaut.

*

The forceful combat of the Lieder singers worked the opera towards its tragic conclusion. Janice sat in the rocker watching the others as they intensely savoured the concluding strains. No one spoke, ever, during these musical sessions. Russ’ eyes were half closed in an expression of deep appreciation. Carole stared at the floor. Bill lounged sideways in the big club chair, his hand covering his eyes in a keenly listening attitude; however, Janice suspected he was dozing.

As the clash of cymbals punctuated the final orchestral crescendo, Janice glanced up and saw Russ gazing intently towards the opposite end of the room, a glint of mischief in his eyes. She turned her head and saw Ivy coming down the steps, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The effect she had on Russ was anything but subtle. Twice in one day, men had noticed her. Pained and puzzled, Janice wondered where the childhood had gone and why so fast.

‘I don’t feel well, Mom.’ Ivy yawned tiredly and walked across the room towards her mother. A floor lamp in the corner backlit her progress, turning the gauzy nightgown into a transparent veil.

Russ stood up and greeted her with a sultry smile.

‘Hey, you’re really getting there, kid,’ he said, his eyes shifting fleetingly to her breasts, peeking impudently through the sheer material.

Ivy smiled wanly at Russ and put her arm around her mother’s waist. Carole joined them, having caught the byplay.

‘Okay, buster.’ Her tone was mock serious and a touch too casual. ‘Take me home before you get into trouble.’

Bill had been sleeping after all, for he remained in the same position, draped across the club chair, his hand shielding his eyes.

After the Federicos gathered their records and left, Janice gently shook Bill awake, then sent Ivy upstairs. Janice followed her with a cup of warm milk and took her temperature. It was normal.

By the time Janice undressed, creamed her face, and slipped into her nightgown Bill was sleeping soundly. His soft, rhythmic breathing, not quite a snore, enveloped the room. It was a safe, comfortable sound and often lulled Janice to sleep.

She turned off the lamp and crawled into bed beside him.

Raising her nightgown to her waist, she gently snuggled up to him, fitting her body into the curvature of his warm nakedness.

Like everything else in their marriage, their sex life was perfect. Nothing between them was taken for granted. Both were experimenters, and every session brought with it something new and liberating. Bill bought books on the subject to widen their knowledge. ‘Bioloop,’ ‘biocurve,’ ‘mutual concentration/ ‘intimacy spiral’ were expressions they knew and used.

Janice smiled as she remembered the Orissan posture book that Bill had brought home one evening. It contained drawings of more than one hundred intimate positions practised by sixteenth-century Arabians. Over the course of several weeks they tried a number of them, the more possible ones, which were mainly unrewarding. They were forced to give this up when Bill hurt his back trying the number seventeen, or cartwheel, position.

Her smile deepened with the memory of the joy, the fun, the perfect sweetness of their life together, high in the centre of Manhattan, in the dreamy duplex they owned.

How perfect their life had been. How safe and protected. No frights, no miseries, no sudden shocks. Except for that spate of crazy nightmares that had come to plague Ivy when she was a toddler and that lasted almost a year, not sickness, or want, or fear, or desire for others had come to challenge the perfect order of their lives.

Until today, Janice thought, with an aching stab of regret. Until today - in front of the school.

Janice was certain, and had been certain since three ten that afternoon, that life as they knew it was coming to an end. That even now, as she lay beside the warm, breathing form of the man she loved, forces were gathering to shatter their dream. She didn’t know how it would come about, or why. Only that it would happen.

That afternoon, in a flash of instant prescience, Janice had seen their doom reflected in the eyes of a perfect stranger.

Ivy awoke with a slight fever. It was just above normal, yet Janice thought it best to keep her home from school. With the weekend upon them, it would afford her three days’ rest. She would call Dr Kaplan only if the fever got worse. Janice rationalized the decision to her full satisfaction and felt a sense of relief at having made it, or was it a sense of reprieve?

Whatever, three days had been granted her before the next confrontation with the man.

*

The morning was cold and sunny as Bill stepped through the big glass doors of the old building and started walking to the corner of Sixty-seventh Street and Central Park West. The weather was perfect for walking, and Bill would make it to the office in good time since he didn’t have to take Ivy to school this morning.

He might even forgo the fast route down Central Park West and cut through the park directly at the Tavern on the Green. It took seven minutes longer; but the park was beautiful this time of the year, and Bill always enjoyed plodding across the soft golden carpet of crisp autumn leaves.

By the time the traffic signal had changed his decision was made. Bill crossed over to the Sixty-seventh Street park entrance and headed towards the famous old green and white clapboard restaurant.

As he entered the park gate, he casually glanced towards Ivy’s school, six blocks down the traffic-clogged boulevard. He wondered what Sideburns would think when he and Ivy didn’t show up this morning.

Bill ploughed through a thick crunch of dried leaves which the wind had gathered together at the kerb and proceeded on a southeasterly course through the park. The lanes at this point were wide and festooned with overhanging trees. The morning was still, and leaves drifted down gently around him under their own weight.

Bill had first become aware of the man on September 12, just four weeks and four days before. He hadn’t really spotted him until the fourteenth, two days later, but the moment he realized he was being followed, his mind did some fast backtracking and eventually placed the first encounter at a specific moment in time.

It was on the Sixty-fifth Street cross-transverse bus. Bill had just finished an all-afternoon conference with a media representative from the Doggie-Dog TidBits account. They had conducted their business in the client’s suite in the Hotel Pierre. As Bill left for home, it started to drizzle. He managed to make the four blocks up Fifth Avenue before the deluge began and happily found a bus parked there and taking on passengers.

As the loaded bus took off with its damp, surly cargo, Bill found himself wedged tightly in a mass of strangers, their breaths commingling intimately, their bodies swaying and jerking together in rhythm to the bus’s staccato progress through the transverse.

The face closest to his was a woman’s - middle-aged, careworn, drained of joy or hope, with a pair of eyes that gazed vacuously into his, registering nothing. He couldn’t see the person behind him, but knew it was another woman, as he could feel the soft, pliable form of her breasts snuggling into his back every time the bus came to a short stop.

The third face, only partially seen in profile, belonged to a man about Bill’s age. What fascinated Bill here was the single perfect sideburn on the right side of his face. It was fascinating because of its perfection. Each hair was separate and distinct and seemed to have been trimmed by a draftsman. The thick crop of the man’s sideburn was matched by his moustache, which was equally perfect. Still, there was something very wrong about them both. Bill puzzled over this halfway across the park before finally coming up with the answer. They were phonies. The guy’s cheeks were nearly hairless; he could never have grown bushes like those on his own. Bill smiled with satisfaction at having solved the mystery when suddenly he realized that the man was looking at him. Bill quickly looked away and began studying an ad over the bus driver’s seat.

By the time Bill got off the bus at the corner of Sixty-sixth and Central Park West, the rain was falling heavily. Tiny glistening explosions of Water battered the wide street as Bill jogged the short block to Des Artistes. The man with the sideburns was totally forgotten.

Two days later Bill met him again. In the elevator of the building where Bill worked. He was standing in the rear of the car behind a group of people as Bill entered. He didn’t look at Bill, and Bill pretended not to notice him. It could have been a coincidence, but Bill didn’t think so.

Later in the day, to confirm his suspicions, Bill ran a tape in the big computer that Simmons Advertising used for its demographic breakdowns. He fed the machine all the data he could think of: population density, area of encounters, time elapsed, distance between two encounters, and even fed it their sexes, probable ages, and an estimate of their physical fitness. The machine came back with a probability of one in ten million that two such encounters could occur within two days.

Still, Bill was willing to grant the outside possibility that it might have been a coincidence. Twice, yes. Three times, no.

One of Bill’s accounts was a mutual fund with offices down on Wall Street. He and Don Goetz had spent an entire Monday morning presenting their spring ad campaign to the board of directors. The wrangling by the board would continue through the day, so Don and Bill escaped to a nearby restaurant for an early lunch.

They had finished their sandwiches and were sipping their second cups of coffee when Bill’s eye caught the familiar sight of Sideburns floating in the rear of a mob of waiting customers near the doorway. The man was barely visible since people’s bodies were blocking all but a fragment of his head. Yet Bill was certain he was the same person.

After they paid their bills, Bill pushed through the waiting mob clotting the doorway, keeping his eyes peeled for the man with the sideburns. But in the time it had taken him to pay his bill and put on his coat, the man had vanished. Bill glanced back into the restaurant to see if he had been seated. He was nowhere in sight.

Bill was worried. He was obviously being followed. By whom? A cop? The FBI? And for what reason? That evening, balmy with Indian summer, Bill strolled slowly up the path that flanked the small lake in Central Park. Swans and geese swam in gentle, patient circles in search of stray crumbs of popcorn or peanuts. Bill walked to an empty bench and sat down.

His was a logical, orderly mind. If he was being followed and if it was the FBI, then there had to be a reason. Sitting in the shadow of the Plaza-Hotel which loomed impressively above the lake, Bill probed his memory for anything he might have done in college, any organization or club he might have joined, any donations he might have made, any lectures he might have attended that could possibly give the FBI a reason for being interested in him. He reviewed each episode of his youth, each small area of his school years, minutely scoured each miserable day of his one-year hitch in the Army, and still, he could come up with nothing. He was clean. Of that he was sure.

The man was obviously wearing a disguise. The moustache, the sideburns, the whole thing was amateurish. Maybe he wasn’t a professional at all? Maybe he was just some nut. God knows, the city was filled with them. You met them on buses, in subways, in broad daylight, walking down Fifth Avenue, screaming, yelling, cursing, no cops around, and nobody daring to stop them. Yes, the city was infested with psychotics. And if you were smart, you never let them catch your eye.

Bill remembered what happened to Mark Stern. A promising career was cut short because of a nut. Mark and his wife had parked their car on a side street near Lincoln Center. They were members of the Metropolitan Opera Association and had lifetime seats in the Founders’ Circle. After the opera they’d gone to where their car was parked and found this person pissing against the fender. Mark got angry and pushed him away from the car, so the man started pissing on Mark and his wife. Mark hit him in front of witnesses and knocked him down. The man suffered a small concussion but was out of Bellevue in two weeks. He got a lawyer and swore out an assault and battery complaint against Mark. The trial was by jury. Mark was found guilty. He did sixteen months in jail, lost his job, a vice-presidency with Gelding & Hannary, and the last that Bill heard, his wife was divorcing him.