India, Arizona, New York City, Westchester, New Hampshire. Everywhere the veil of anxiety, like the statue I saw in a museum once of a beautiful woman, her face veiled—in fucking marble. The most incredible feat of artistic precision, to create a sheer veil over a woman’s delicate features…delicacy shrouding delicacy, and out of cold stone. It was in one of those museums M. and I visited in Europe, or in New York, or in Paraguay. The funny little museum in Philadelphia when we went there on a road trip, eating some kind of exotic egg dish one morning in a hotel dining room, just the two of us and a sea of tablecloths, the place overbearing in its fanciness and yet the windows stared out into a barren street and a cavernous parking garage, like a de Chirico painting of existential emptiness. The museum we went to later that day was a crowded, converted house, but still venerable. I was driven my usual mad by the fact that the art was hung salon-style, the paintings stacked on the walls willy-nilly. They always claim there’s a method to the madness in salon-style galleries but in fact the madness is the method, and who needs that when they’re already teetering. Anyway, it was fusty, but we had fun and met friends that night for dinner, and I saw after all the years of hearing about the husband from the wife that in fact he really loved her, and teased her—nobody teased her, you would think—but also I noticed that he flirted with me. Which was fun and engaging, to have him relate in that way to me, just me, Jo Ann the Plain. And I don’t mind being plain, I like the very word plain, which brings to mind tall grass, bending, and long flowing landscapes of same, like Julene’s family ranch in Kansas, where years ago we stood in the clearing by the back door of the house she grew up in—its windows knocked out, its wallpapered stairways and parlors rained on and faded, horse-drawn buggies and flowers peeling down toward the warped floors in long graceful arcs. Like a doll’s house, with missing exterior walls, only for dolls who were in despair, or London Blitz war dolls, and Julene and me standing in the yard, surveying the broken tractor sheds and silos, a rusty pump handle rising out of the prairie grass, which had overtaken everything like green water flowing in the breeze, and suddenly, from nowhere, a huge buck. He’d been sleeping, or hiding, in the yard, mashing the prairie flat in one spot, and he sprang up in front of us, big and brown and as male as it’s possible to be, balancing his big rack on his head like the workers in India with their baskets, and leaped—one, two, three enormous bounds—and then disappeared, diving into the green waves and never coming up. He’s still out there, and his brothers, swimming through the plains.