Some history, and a love story: Merle had met Jane at a cocktail party in 1959, thrown by some English major using his absent parents’ fancy house in Ann Arbor, with a full bar, silver toothpicks for the olives and cherries and pickled onions, mixed nuts in an Italian glass bowl. People were dressed up, smoking and talking pompously about Bergman, while Jane was joking about the movies—admiring them, but comfortable enough to make fun of the boatload of symbolism in every frame. Merle heard she was well traveled and knew French and Italian and some Spanish. She was only nineteen, an orphan, but she’d started college early, and her grandfather was a Big Deal in archaeology and mythology. She was tall, with light-blue eyes that jarred against her thick dark hair and gold skin, which looked as if she’d been sunning on an island instead of stumbling through a dank midwestern term. All this, and she was from Montana.

Jane told Merle that Bergman had consulted her grandfather for The Seventh Seal and The Magician, meeting at Le Pavillon for feasts while they talked about death and old dreams. This level of sophistication, as well as the way Jane smoked a cigarette and preferred whiskey to beer, made various parts of Merle’s body and soul expand. He’d grown up smart but poor, and he wanted the world.

What Jane liked about Merle: He was good-looking but gawky, with a high forehead and curly hair, a lanky Roman statue with an astounding, aquiline nose. He didn’t patronize her, he admitted ignorance rather than feigning seriousness, he truly listened, and he knew how to fix things like cars and clocks and doorknobs. He was honest, and ardent, and read books. She pitied his polio-withered left arm and marveled at the brown, muscled right.

Jane didn’t know Merle was a sweet but melancholic alcoholic who would have trouble, all his life, finishing anything—fencing projects, novel writing, the dishes. Merle didn’t know that every member of Jane’s family had at least one substantial secret, and that all these secrets had pooled in her body and her brain.