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He was impressed. Even though he alone would have been dining tonight with Maja at La Mer had she not chosen instead to dine alone on Seconol, he still had to keep reminding himself that he had as much right to be here as anyone. An unmitigated success in his own world, he lacked credentials in this one. Just that month the company that bore his name had earned him a coveted membership in the exclusive Young Presidents Club, whose card he carried proudly in his pocket alongside his credit cards, his pilot's license, and his Phi Beta Kappa key. His health was excellent, his hair, though beginning to gray at the temples, profuse. Short and lively as a Boston bull, compact in energy as an Idaho potato, he boasted a beautiful brainy wife who was two inches taller than he barefoot and had borne him two children. His shoes were handmade to the measurements of his unusually shaped feet (which Heather, his wife, suggested harbored
sixth toes under the skin, like their cat's); despite his atypical feet and small stature, his squash game was such that younger men were often unable to beat him.

Still, as sad music gave way to silence and a long-thighed blonde clicked up to the podium to launch the personal testimonials, Mack felt out of place and squat.

Now that his dinner with Maja was off, he wished his wife were here. Whenever he felt out of place, Heather's presence could boost his confidence. She was as lovely as any of these Hollywood types and probably a lot smarter. With her savvy eye she would get this scene in a moment and clue him in.

He turned off his cell phone and scanned the room. A striking man of strange demeanor, dressed in New York black from head to foot, stood motionless against the wall like some large predatory bird, an osprey, perhaps, or some mutant species, all bone and beak, perched to fly off if you startled him. He had a fixed scowl on his cadaverous face and the same arresting eyes reproduced on the jacket of a book Mack had intended to return to Maja that night, after carrying it around in his briefcase for more than a month without having
found time to read it: Zoltan Barbu, one of Maja's lovers. The love of her life, she once extravagantly claimed—but then she had said the same thing about Mack's friend Terry, back when she was with him. Zoltan seemed the more likely candidate. They had met, Maja explained dramatically, “practically in the womb” of her mother, a poet who had been part of the same group of student dissidents as Zoltan. Though he had been arrested when Maja was seven and had fled the country soon after his release, throughout Maja's childhood her parents had praised Zoltan Barbu as a hero. The writer's stricken appearance supported Maja's claim: his cheeks were creased, his eyes feverish, his mouth drawn, and though he was not sniffling like some of the women, his lean, slightly stooped body gave an overall appearance so morose and haggard that by the time the recessional music began Mack decided to say something consoling to him if he could catch him on the way out.

3
       
THE CHILDREN WERE ASLEEP
,
and Heather was curled up with Tina the cat in the big green chair, reading a book. For her, reading was more than a pastime, like watching a movie; it was an elevating, intimate act. She read slowly, carefully, pencil in hand, marking the margins in a private code, lingering over certain passages, copying into a special notebook those words or phrases that touched her or that she thought she might like to use in her own writing, occasionally posting over her desk brief passages that spoke directly to her. Such physical acts of communion made the authors' words seem almost her own. Ideas were real to her, a well-turned phrase sparkling like a gemstone made her laugh out loud, and certain images could cloud her eyes with tears. Sometimes she was
so swept up by a book that she wanted to read on to the end in a single sitting, one long caress, at the same time longing to go slowly, in order to postpone the climax, make it last. She liked to study the author's photo on the jacket, convinced of some mysterious mutual recognition.

She prized her books, of which she now owned several thousand volumes, inordinately, she wouldn't deny it. Realizing that the very survival of books—tangible, odorous, dog-eared, tear-stained, food-smeared, marginalia-enhanced, physical objects whose pages bore traces of each individual reading—was doomed under the onslaught of electronic readers, like precious species deprived of habitat, she steadfastly refused to buy a “device” (ugly word!) and speed the slaughter. On the contrary, she withdrew into her books like an addict nursing a habit. She sometimes joked that it was when their New York apartment didn't have room for another book that she finally let Mack convince her to leave the city.

But tonight she was reading fitfully. Not because that particular volume—a biography of Katherine Mansfield, rival of Virginia Woolf, passionate disciple of Gurdjieff—failed to interest her; biographies, particularly of literary women, interested
her immensely. But because her husband didn't answer his phone—which probably meant he was with a woman.

She marked her place with a finger and gazed through the dark window into the invisible woods beyond. She should have known this would happen. It was a cliché, for god's sake! Give a man enough power, lock his wife away with the kids, and he will stray. If not by seeking out other women on his own, then by succumbing to their seductions. The way he flaunted his success and went out of his way to be
nice
insured there'd be women available to him wherever he went. It was not inconceivable that he was one of those men who fooled around online, maybe had a whole Internet harem.

When Tina rubbed against her leg, Heather inserted a bookmark, put down her book, and opened the sliding glass door to let her out. All at once a range of autumn smells assaulted her, and the long low hoot of an owl (“their” owl, as they considered it) lent a melody to the lush cacophony of insect, frog, and mystery sounds that penetrated from the dark forest beyond.

She stepped outside onto the deck and took deep satisfying breaths. If Mack hadn't turned into your classic restless traveling man once the children
were born, she might have treasured the chance to write in this sensuous paradise and the opportunity, increasingly rare for women since the advent of the two-earner family, to care for her children herself—at least until they were both in school full-time. But with his rapid elevation to what was plainly becoming the big time, Mack was not a man to resist the usual power perks, even at the price of undermining their harmony. It angered her that he would risk so much for so little—or what she hoped was so little; and it annoyed her that she felt so threatened by an unknown other that she could no longer muster the concentration required to lose herself in a book.

There was still enough residual light for her to see the profile of mountains, standing against the sky like sentries.

Not that Mack flaunted his affairs or was indiscreet; he was so discreet that she had virtually nothing to confront him with. Still, there were too many signs to ignore: his guilty gifts to her; his evasive behavior when he returned from a trip; the way he disappeared in his plane every Sunday of the increasingly rare weekends when he was home; and most tellingly, her inability to reach him, though he knew it made her anxious when he turned off
his phone. Her various hypotheses had narrowed down to one: Maja Stern, Terry's ex, according to Mack a notorious seducer, whose name came up too oddly and too often to be innocent. Mack's jabbering on about her whenever he returned from L.A. was a giveaway that he was sleeping with her—though it could also be viewed as evidence that he was not. Well, if not Maja, then someone else.

She did not know what to do about it. She should probably have gone back to work after Chloe was born, instead of giving in to Mack's pressure to move to the mansion he built for her (picking up two architectural awards in passing) and having another child. She couldn't disagree with Mack that hiring someone to replace her full-time at home while she became another commuter slogging through the major traffic arteries was wasteful and absurd, particularly at the price of missing the chance to watch her children develop. But the alternative was becoming increasingly clear: as Mack's power expanded, hers decreased. Given his nature, she should have vetoed the move, dream house or no. Unfortunately, his nature wasn't revealed to her until it was too late.

The owl hooted again. This time Heather responded. On they went exchanging hoots back and
forth for a few exhilarating moments before the owl fell silent or flew away. But not even the thrill of engaging in call-and-response with a wild bird, as she had learned to do at summer camp, could dispel Heather's ambivalence. She wasn't sorry to be done with the frantic deadlines and the steady jockeying for position at the architectural journal where she had been an assistant editor. But she did miss the office camaraderie and the mild glory of writing a monthly column on the Ecology of Everyday Life, which at least sported her byline and made her feel useful.

Mack had promised her greater usefulness to come, dangling before her ever more seductive concessions to her green ideals. He offered to rescue a pristine mountaintop from rumored development as an industrial park by a rival consortium. He embraced Heather's alternative energy schemes, designing their house as a model of efficiency, with every appliance but the restaurant stove run by solar energy, and every usable drop of household waste recyclable. The sun would keep their motors turning, heat their rooms and water, light up their nights, and after serving all their own needs provide enough extra energy to sell as a backup source to the nearby village. Surely, he argued, she would
find it worth leaving the city in order to make her vision real.

Her vision was one thing, her ambition another. It was the opportunity to indulge her ambition and test her talent for writing stirring stories that finally convinced her to move. A room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year (adjusted for inflation) was a rare privilege, one that other women at her stage of life could only fantasize about. But she also knew it was a gamble with her future. That her stories had been admired by her professors and published in college journals was no guarantee of success in the world. What if her ambition outstripped her talent and she failed to produce anything worthwhile? Then she would have sacrificed what she'd had for a mere fantasy, however alluring, and wind up with a life as limited as those her generation of women believed they had escaped. If she eventually returned to the world of publishing, she'd be years behind those who had not dropped out to have children, and if the widely reported research was correct, she would never catch up. If she didn't return, then for all her classy education she might wind up living like the mothers and grandmothers so pitied or scorned by their ambitious, successful progeny.

After she and Mack left New York, the excitement of their collaboration did seem to fulfill Mack's predictions. Working on the house with him, Heather was no less engaged than she'd been on the magazine, happier in the country than she'd thought possible. But once their “project” was completed, the rooms furnished, the kinks straightened out, their second child born, the architectural awards reaped, and Mack had moved on to other, bigger projects, Heather gradually began to feel bereft. The leisure and beauty she inhabited, for which civility dictated that she be grateful, sometimes, paradoxically, left her feeling like someone under house arrest, however magnificent the house.

The owl returned. They spoke again. Heather slipped inside and grabbed the night vision binoculars Mack had given her, then perched on the deck railing and aimed them toward a certain tall oak tree where a week ago at dusk she had briefly seen her interlocutor. No luck this time, not even with the night vision promised by the infrared illuminator could she find him (or her).

Absorbed by the demands of house and family, she had been surprised to find that with Mack away two weeks out of every three, and no one else to talk to, she had become increasingly (without
pronouncing the shameful word) lonely. Françoise, who helped with the children, though interestingly European, was barely eighteen, hardly out of childhood. Carmela, the thrice-weekly cleaner, was embarrassed to speak English. Heather would rather sew up her lips than upset her mother in Topeka by revealing her discontent, nor could she confide in her sister, with whom she'd once been close but who had grown distant after Heather had moved away. As for her best friend from work, Barbara Rabin, Heather suspected that Barbara disapproved of her stay-at-home life or perhaps simply envied Heather's freedom. Whatever caused the tension, Heather feared that if she confessed her rage at Mack and her fears for her marriage, Barbara would become smug or, worse, defensive about her own. Heather's few single friends were either innocents about marriage or opposed to it; why should she confirm their preconceptions?

Perhaps if she'd been able to write her stories she would not have resented Mack's absences. But with her children at home, and even during the brief morning hours that they were in preschool, she found herself unable to summon the necessary concentration or will to work. Later, she promised herself, when she had larger blocks of time.

After a few more exchanges the owl went silent again. Heather drew another deep draft of nature into her lungs and returned to the house. When the real estate market collapsed under an avalanche of foreclosures and frozen credit, she thought it would slow Mack down, forcing him to spend more time at home. But somehow the economic catastrophe had an opposite effect. As Mack explained it to her, projects on which he'd reaped profits before the crash gave him sufficient capital to enable him to buy up newly distressed properties at a small percentage of their original market value. While his undercapitalized and overextended rivals retreated into bankruptcy, he found himself staring into the opportunity of a lifetime. Far from diminishing, his ambitions soared. He had only to hold on until the market rebounded to become a wealthy man. Meanwhile, every day presented him with new bargains to investigate or acquire.