After I cleared customs at what had been Idlewild until recently, I phoned home. It was after ten o’clock, but I was powerfully glad to be again in the land of the free. My wife answered with something else in her voice besides welcome, like a fearful salamander under a flat rock. “Some letters for you came today and yesterday,” she said. “All from one person, it looks like.”

How bright, I was thinking, this place was, compared to the Moscow airport. Every corner and rampway was lit as harsh as a mug shot, the whole place packed with advertisements and snack bars and sizzling with electricity. “Did you open them?” I asked, my heart suddenly plunked by a heavy hand.

“Just one,” she said. “That was enough, Eddie. Oh, my.”

“It wasn’t anything,” I began, which wasn’t a hundred percent true. For, though in one part of me I was not happy with Imogene for making what looked to be an ongoing talking point in my little family, on the other hand you can’t blame a person too hard for thinking you’re a god. You have to feel a spark of fondness, remembering the way she held up one breast and then the other, each nipple looking in that black-and-white room like the hole of a gun barrel pointed straight at your mouth. You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.

HIS OEUVRE