SOMETIMES WHEN Leora drives around her town in the evenings, she looks into the windows of people’s houses, not because she expects to see anything interesting, but just because she wants to see. The houses line up in the dark like wrapped glass boxes, their brass numbers embossed on their sides like Bill Landsmann’s boxes of slide carousels, their white-framed windows glowing like slides under warm gold light. As she drives by, she tries to look at as many of these little panels as possible. Most of the time, all she sees are curtains, or the bracing slats of a venetian blind. (“Here are the original venetian blinds, you see, in Venice. This picture is of the Jewish ghetto in Venice, the first ghetto in the history of the world.”) But sometimes, when she passes by at just the right moment, the windows are completely naked, and she can stare though the glass at the framed pictures on the walls inside and wonder if anyone is home. Occasionally her question is answered, and she looks into a white-framed window to see a family eating dinner, or an old man playing with a grandchild, or a father and son sitting on a couch, maybe watching television or getting into a fight.

And sometimes, but only sometimes, when the curtains are actually open, Leora sees a woman sitting by herself in a house that was once full of people. How she sits alone, desolate, like a widow, waiting for someone to come home.

CHAPTER 2

IN THE VALLEY
OF DISCARDED NAMES

WHEN THINGS happen gradually, even a tourist’s eye snapping pictures in the brain cannot fix them in place. And so Leora, several years later, was the last person to notice the cat getting bigger.

The cat was, for lack of a better term, a breaking-up gift, something to keep her company in what were supposed to be the long and lonely nights after Jason. And the cat might have done that if Leora and Jason’s had been a normal teenage romance, if Leora had been capable of such a thing—that is, if Leora were an ordinary girl, to whom ordinary things happened, if she were the sort of girl who laughed and cried and poured out her heart to her friends. But Leora didn’t have any friends. And besides, by the time Jason gave her the cat, a big gray cub of a kitten with strange curled-in ears that she had never seen on any other pet, Jason himself might as well have fallen down to the bottom of the ocean, like a diver plunging into the depths of the water, forgetting to save enough air for the return trip.

At the beginning, of course, Jason did seem like the sort of person who should have found himself an ordinary girl, the kind of girl who laughed and cried with her friends over him. He was tall, well built, blue-eyed, shiny-smiled—good-looking in a bland, conventional sense, and with that appearance went all the traits of a man who wouldn’t normally have been attracted to a woman like Leora, who had far more brains than looks. Jason was what ordinary teenagers would call a “good guy”—not a “great guy” but a “good guy”—just another varsity soccer player, Jason was, still out with his fellow Argonauts in search of a girl in a golden fleece. Or in search of anything, really, since Jason really wasn’t anything yet. Naomi had had a theory about this. Young people, she once told Leora, are like blind heaps of clay, formless, and in that formlessness lies an infinite number of possibilities. Some seize that wet potential in their hands, sculpting shapes never seen before. Others, bewildered by choice, simply pour themselves into a mold. Still others are afraid to commit to even the slightest dent, mercilessly kneading and unkneading every last piece, dreading the moment when they will inevitably harden.