“Before this it never really mattered. After I messed things up with Bookstein and we were divorced I was actually happier. But I can’t stand the thought of messing things up again.”

“We’re not going to mess anything up,” he said helplessly.

“When you’re home everything is all right. But the damned hospital takes you back every thirty-six hours. Next year when you go into practice it will be worse.”

He traced her lips with his finger, but she moved her head. “If you could go to bed with the hospital I’d never see you,” she said.

“Next year it will be better,” he said. “Not worse.”

“No,” she said. “When I remember my Aunt Frances I always remember her waiting for my uncle to come home. She almost never saw him. He sold his practice and went to work at the hospital only after she was gone. When it was too late.”

“You won’t spend your life waiting for me,” he said. “I promise you.”

Her arms tightened around him. To keep from falling from the couch he held her where the back of the thigh spread, a solid grasping place. In a little while her breathing became slow and even against his neck; she fell asleep like the little boy, he thought. He felt desire but did nothing about it, unwilling to spoil the comfortable intimacy. Presently he dozed himself, dreaming unaccountably that he was a small boy again asleep in his bedroom in the big house in Havana. It was an incredibly clear and realistic dream, down to the certain knowledge that his mother and father were in the big carved-wood bed in the master bedroom down the hall and Guillermo was asleep next door.

The buzzer on the stove in the Boston apartment awakened them together, the sleeping dream-family and the man whose flesh-and-blood wife leaped up to turn off the oven timer before it disturbed their son.

Meomartino lay there on the sofa.

The television was still broadcasting news and he watched a thirteen-year-old South Vietnamese who had been adopted by an American infantry regiment against his parents’ wishes. The soldiers had given the boy cigarettes and beer and a rifle and already he had killed two Vietcong.

“How did it feel to kill two men?” the TV reporter asked.

“It felt good. They were bad,” the boy said, although he had never seen his two slain countrymen until just before his small finger had pressed the G.I. trigger and the automatic rifle, constructed to work so simply that the mentality of the user was not a factor, had fired.

Rafe got up and turned off the set.

She doesn’t know a damned thing about me, he thought.

Sometimes now he dreamed again of war.