“Judy, what do you want?”

“What I said today.” She hesitated. “What I said to you. I was joking.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“You see, the thing is you made a joke earlier about that Englishman—”

“His name was Oliver. He lived with me for two years. You met him on numerous occasions.”

“Yes. Him. You’d made a joke that you stayed with him because he was hygienic.”

“Yes. Is that all then, Judy?”

“But that’s why I made a joke too.”

“Judy, you told me at the time you were joking.”

“Thank you.”

This hoarsely whispered thank you seemed to express genuine suffering and gratitude. All at once Ruth felt—as if she needed to feel this any more intensely right now—as impatient and cruel as her own mother. She became aware of her posture, the way she was holding the phone, looking up at the ceiling, her tongue running over the edges of her teeth, her other hand canted impatiently against her hip. When she was a child, her mother, in this exact posture, would roll her eyes as if she were on the phone with all the stupidity in the world. And Ruth would feel special, protected inside her mother’s impatience and contempt because it was never directed at her. Indeed, it was a way for her mother, obliquely, to express love in the implicit comparison of this venal, idiotic, ugly world with her beautiful, clever daughter. It was a thicket of thorns around them, protective and isolating.

“Don’t worry, Judy,” she said more softly.

“What would I have to worry about?” The defensive harshness was back. “It was a joke.” A sound then, like a sob, and the phone was hung up.

Ruth took a seat on the back porch. How long should she wait before she called Sheriff Siggy? The sun had almost set. Fifty-Three lay at her feet and began a loud liquid licking of his body.

What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she open herself up to others? She thought of poor Goldwin, who had courted her briefly before she met Oliver. Goldwin was the first man she had dated in almost four years. She knew immediately that it was absurd—a forty-six-year-old lifelong bachelor. She wasn’t in the least attracted to him, with his fleshy hangdog features and his obsessive fussing with those thin strands of dyed black hair, greased and swept so carefully over his bald crown. It was as if he considered his scalp something so obscene that the possibility of its exposure was the stuff of nightmare, his thick blind fingers constantly reaching up to make sure he was decent. (She tried to resist that snaky cruelty uncoiling itself inside her.) He was sweet, really, bought her flowers and chocolates. On their fourth date, he gave her a polished granite brooch that had belonged to his mother, which she politely refused. Why hadn’t she told him then that it wasn’t going to work out? She was lonely, that was part of it, frightened of becoming nothing. And curious to have herself mirrored in a man again as something desirable, to try to catch glimpses in his surface of a woman who had once been able to give and receive pleasure. What was she now, spending so much time here on this porch, taking in the sky, the barn against the sky, the sky behind the catalpas? Little more than a crude receptor, a coarsely articulated spine, to conduct, vaguely, the soft trembling of a deeper life. The alternative—ingestion, excretion, sex, reproduction, age, sickness, dying—she found horrifying, absurd; summed up in the sound of Fifty-Three licking his genitals. But she loved Fifty-Three. And for all her ascetic posturing, it required so little—Haig’s letter—for her to produce that foul language, the squid shot of ink.