When Lee came home from the office that evening, he found Fay in bed. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. For a moment he simply stood in the doorway and gazed at her. Although he could tell that her eyes were open, he doubted Fay would see him even if she turned her head and looked directly at him. Every so often, especially on those early evenings when the light took on a lilac cast, as it did tonight, Lee saw something like a glow emanate from Fay. This glow had nothing to do with the glow from the lilac night or from the lamp at the side of Fay’s bed, but was something that was given off entirely by Fay herself, by her youth and her beauty, and Lee feared that one day it would grow so bright as to obliterate him entirely.

Never had Fay looked lovelier to Lee than she looked tonight. Never had the sixteen-year age difference between them been more apparent. Lying there on her back with her makeup off and her face framed by a mass of tiny red ringlets, she was to him as lovely and vulnerable as a child. Suddenly Lee thought of how children love presents, and he wished he had brought a present home for Fay. For a moment he considered running out before she realized he was standing there in the doorway and going into some store to buy her a present and bring it home.

Lee thought if he had a child—and always when he had such thoughts he saw that child as a boy—he would bring him presents home from the office on a regular basis. Once a week at least. Nothing elaborate or expensive, just some little surprise like a pack of bubble gum or a water pistol, a box of crayons or a colorful kite, to let the boy know he had been thinking of him during the day. Lee pictured himself pulling small, gaily wrapped boxes from his overcoat pocket or from behind his back and handing them to his son. Almost unconsciously now, his hands went into the pockets of his overcoat and rooted around in their depths, but he found nothing there to offer either to the child he didn’t have or to his beautiful wife lying there on her back with her face raised to the ceiling. Lee’s fingers touched only paper clips and toothpicks and here and there a cold, round coin. If the coins were gold, he would stack them at Fay’s feet. If the gold were formed into bars, he would ring her body with them so she would never leave him.

“Why would I leave you?” Fay had asked early in their marriage, and Lee had thought there were probably any number of reasons she might, but he hadn’t voiced a single one, fearing that might be the one she would seize upon.

Every night for five years, Lee had returned from his office to find Fay somewhere in the apartment. Some nights she was in the living room, sitting in a chair with nothing in her hands. Other nights she was in the kitchen taking a plastic wrap off a steak. Frequently she was in the bedroom, where she was now, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling. And if she wasn’t in any of those places, he would discover a note somewhere saying that she was out shopping or running an errand and would return soon. But even after five years, Lee worried that one night he would come home from work and find that Fay was nowhere in the house, and the note he would discover, if he discovered one at all, would say she had finally found an answer to her question and was gone for good. He imagined her walking off into the lilac glow that emanated from her skin as she might walk into a mist. He saw her disappearing into the age gap that lay like a chasm between them, for it was not unreasonable to believe that one day Fay would find someone younger than himself, someone who was a snappy dresser, a slick talker, a graceful dancer, and that she would simply dance away with him, forgetting that Lee existed, that she had ever been married to him.

Lee had married late in life. Too late, he sometimes thought. And Fay, too soon. Apart from a few brief and ultimately unsatisfying liaisons with women in his twenties, Lee had lived his life essentially in solitude until the age of forty-seven when, by chance, he had met Fay. Today, at fifty-three, he felt old and rapidly growing older. Fay, incredibly, seemed to be growing younger, somehow shedding years as he added them. Whether it was the clothes she wore or the cosmetics she used or the high-priced nutritionists and body trainers she consulted, Lee couldn’t say, but each year Fay appeared younger to him than she had the year before. Her body grew more supple, her red hair more lustrous, and her face smoother. Tonight that face, open and lifted to the ceiling, seemed to be made entirely of glass or china.

Lee removed his overcoat and folded it carefully, so that the shoulders and pockets lined up, and placed it over the arm of a chair. He took a step toward Fay’s bed. Sixteen years separated them. That age gap was a permanent, physical fact of their lives. Implacable, tangible. Lee could pick it up and hold it in his hands. He could toss it like a ball or mold it like a lump of clay into any figure he chose. And the figure he chose most often was that of a young boy—tall, large boned, long legged—his sixteen-year-old shadow son who would never get any older and had never been any younger.

Fay went on staring at the ceiling as Lee gingerly approached her bed. His own bed was separated from hers by a night table. On the table sat a lamp, whose light glowed through a peach satin shade, and a radio, which softly played the voice of Frank Sinatra singing “Ebb Tide.” Across the bank of pillows on Lee’s bed, a pale green spread was pulled so tightly it seemed some small cadaver might be buried there beneath.

Drawing near to Fay, Lee saw something like a flicker of pain cross her brow.

“What is it, sweetheart?” he asked, and hurried to her side.

“Chiropractor broke my back,” she replied. Her voice was low, so low Lee had a sense of having heard the last sounds Fay would ever utter in this life.

He switched off the radio and bent close. “Chiropractor?” he repeated. When she didn’t answer, he bent lower still and tilted his head at an awkward angle and put his ear close to Fay’s mouth. Only then did he notice the cat.

Pure white and still as a pond, it lay on the pillow above Fay’s head. Its paws covered its face. White on white, cat and pillow were nearly indistinguishable.

After a moment, Fay whispered, “He did something wrong today.”

“Who?” Lee asked, wondering if she might mean the cat.

“The chiropractor,” she replied. “I hadn’t walked more than a block from his office when it felt like someone hit me in the back with a sledgehammer. I screamed. Right there on the street. Some nice woman came over and helped me into a cab.”

“Oh, Fay. Oh, dear. What can I do?” Lee was almost unable to take it in: his Fay in pain, attacked by a sledgehammer-wielding maniac, screaming on the street, being attended to by strangers. Very lightly, he touched his palm to her forehead. “Do you have a temperature?”

“Everyone has a temperature,” Fay replied. “Do you mean a fever?”

Lee said that he did.

“Why should a backache give me a fever?”

Lee asked if he should call a doctor.

“It was a doctor who did this.”

The cat grumbled and extricated its head from beneath its paws. For an instant it stared at Lee as if annoyed to have had its sleep disturbed, and Lee, understanding his questions might well be annoying enough to disturb a cat, felt an impulse to apologize to it. Certainly, he should know everyone has a temperature. Certainly, he should understand a doctor would be of no help whatsoever. As if the matter were settled then between them, the cat grudgingly replaced its head beneath its paws, and Lee asked Fay if he could turn her onto her side.

“But be careful,” she warned. “Don’t hurt me.”

The very notion of his hands doing harm to Fay was enough to make Lee consider abandoning the project altogether. But already Fay had raised herself up a little on one hip, indicating a willingness to be turned over, and he couldn’t very well leave her there, expectant and unbalanced. So, very gently, Lee slid his hands beneath Fay’s body. It was so light, no more than bones and air, he was half afraid to feel it come apart in his hands.

“That all right?” he asked, easing her over onto her side.

Fay nodded and drew her knees up toward her chest. And the cat, in apparent reaction to having had its sleep once more disturbed, stood straight up on the pillow, stretched its legs, rounded its back, and almost at once collapsed again. This time it fit its body snugly around its mistress’s head. Like a beret, thought Lee. And the image of a white beret perched on top of Fay’s red curls made him strangely uneasy.

Tentatively then, Lee lowered himself to the edge of Fay’s bed where he tried to sit without releasing his full weight, afraid even so slight a depression of the mattress would cause her further pain. One strap of her nightgown had slipped off Fay’s shoulder, and from where Lee now sat, his wife’s perfectly white, bared shoulder rose before him like a cliff. The White Cliffs of Dover came immediately to mind. And immediately thereafter, the straits beneath. The unbridgeable gap between their ages lay between them like the yawning channels of a sea. In those straits his phantom child might be swimming. Swimming up and down, doing endless, repetitive laps in the never-closing gulf between his mother and his father.

“Maybe we ought to have it x-rayed,” Lee suggested.

“Whatever for?” Fay asked.

“To see where it’s broken.”

“It’s not broken.”

“You said it was.”

“Don’t be silly, Lee. Do you think I’d be lying here with a broken back?”

Lee didn’t think he was being silly. He thought it was possible. He thought anything was possible now that Fay had taken her lovely back to a man who cracked bones.

Fay’s tight red curls glimmered in the lamplight like copper coins, but at the back of her skull was a flat patch where previously she had been lying on them. It disturbed Lee to see those beautiful curls crushed flat against her head like trampled flowers. Cautiously, almost reverently, he reached out and grasped the tip of a curl between his thumb and forefinger. Gently, he tugged on the curl, stretching its silken filaments to their full length, and then just as gently, released it. On a sound like a breath, the curl bounced back into place.

The cat rose straight up out of what only a moment before had seemed a profound sleep. It dropped its head and pushed its back high into the air until it formed the shape of a hairpin curve. Then it dropped its back and ambled down the length of the pillow, following a route so near to Fay’s face it barely missed stepping on her nose. Lee envied the cat its confidence. To be in such proximity to beauty and not to falter. What fearlessness, what control. Exercising an altogether remarkable ease, the cat continued its perambulation of Fay’s body. It hugged her contours as if she were an island, dipping now into one inlet, now another, allowing its four white paws to step daintily in at her neckline and out around her shoulder. Executing a sharp turn at Fay’s underarm, the cat came at last to that luscious cavity between her knees and breasts where, with a move connoting the divine right of kings, it plunked itself down.

“It could be sprained or something, couldn’t it?” Lee ventured.

“It could be sprained, I suppose,” Fay replied. “But it’s not broken. If it was broken I couldn’t wiggle my toes. Look, Lee.” She stuck one foot out from beneath the covers and wiggled her toes. “And I couldn’t bend my knees.” She drew her knees up toward her chest and screamed.

“Oh Christ, Fay!” Lee surged forward, hands extended, fingers offering endless, inexhaustible help.

“Don’t touch me!” Fay cried out, and onto the barricade of her hip leapt the cat, ears flattened, mouth opened. It stared at Lee and hissed.

Lee jumped back, retracting his hands but holding them open above Fay’s body in case they might yet be needed. The cat made one complete revolution in place then dropped like a stone back into the spot it had only just vacated beneath Fay’s breasts.

“Are you sure I shouldn’t call a doctor?” asked Lee.

Fay drew in a long, assessing breath that came up from her extremities and went out over the surface of her skin. Lee envied that breath its passage through Fay’s body, as he envied the cat its position beneath her breasts.

“It’s better now,” she said. “But maybe you could rub it. Gently, Lee. Not hard.”

Of course gently. Of course not hard. Did she think he needed to be told? Never would he place his hands on any part of Fay’s body except in the most tender, caring way. Not on that long fragile neck, for instance, that would snap like a twig beneath his fingers. Not on that lovely white face that would crack like china.

From the moment Lee had first laid eyes on Fay, his fondest hope had been for their two lives to unite and produce an array of other lives. After forty-seven years, he’d had enough of solitude. What he longed for now was a multiplication of life. A hatching, a bursting, a doubling, a tripling, even a quadrupling was what he had in mind. And he had not been ashamed to give into that longing with persistence and passion. Relentlessly, rigorously, selfishly, even, he had pressed his desire upon his wife, yet when several years of what he assumed were good faith efforts on both their parts had failed to bear fruit, he relinquished his dream and accepted the notion of childlessness as a condition of his life.

She was not made for it, he had come finally to believe. The puffing up, the insidious swelling, the eventual ripping of the womb, the tearing asunder, the voluminous flow of blood. She could not have withstood it. The pain alone would have killed her. In retrospect, he saw that Fay was not meant to be reproduced. She was one of a kind.

“You won’t ever leave me, will you, Fay?” Lee asked.

“Are you going to rub my back?” she replied.

Obligingly, Lee edged closer to her on the bed. He rubbed his hands together to warm them. He stretched his arms and flexed his wrists. He arched his fingers high and positioned them over the wings of his wife’s lovely shoulder blades. For a moment he held them in place without applying any pressure, like a pianist sensing the keyboard before he begins to play. Then, very lightly, he pressed down.

“That feels nice,” Fay whispered, and the cat made a sound high in its throat like the cooing of pigeons.

Vastly encouraged, Lee lifted his hands an inch into the air, then returned them to Fay’s shoulders. Fay sighed, accepting his touch. Again, Lee lifted his hands and returned them to her back. Again, Fay sighed. Emboldened by her sighs, Lee moved his hands, fingers arched high, in a series of light ten-fingered taps across her back.

“You can press harder than that,” Fay told him. “You can put your whole hand down. Unless you’re afraid of touching me.”

“Of course I’m afraid of hurting you,” Lee replied.

“I said touching, not hurting.”

“What?”

Just over the hump of her body, the cat appeared to be in a deep sleep. But Lee knew, immobile as it now seemed and fixed for all time, if he glanced away for a single instant the cat might not be there when he glanced back. It crept about the house, silent and white as the walls, appearing when he least expected it, suddenly gone from its favorite chair where he had seen it firmly ensconced only seconds before. Like Fay, it was actually wide-awake when he believed it to be soundly asleep. Like Fay, its thoughts were closed to him.

Fay lay only inches from him now. His knees, pulled up beneath him, grazed her buttocks. His hand rested on her shoulder. Yet there was a gap between them wide enough to contain an entire human life. How he had struggled to bring that life into being. His child. The continuity of his life and Fay’s. He had thought Fay wanted it as ardently as he did. Not until they were into their fourth year of marriage did she tell him she’d had her tubes tied before their wedding. Gone and had herself fixed, and without a word to him about it. Just like that. Like a cat.

He had stopped trying then, of course. She was different to him after that. Not unloved, but altered.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Can you cook?” she replied.

Their differences were vast, Lee understood. And immutable. Like the sixteen-year age gap between them in whose image he shaped the figure of his eternally absent, eternally adolescent son. That shape would be all that was left of him when he was gone. A shape in space, his immortality.

“I could call someone,” he ventured.

“Who?” she asked.

It was a frightening prospect, being alone in the house with Fay when she was injured and not knowing what to do or who to call. “Rosa!” Lee cried, suddenly inspired. “I’ll call Rosa.”

“Your secretary? Why? Do we need a chaperon?” Fay gave a little laugh which ended abruptly in a cry of pain.

“Oh Christ! Bobby then.” Lee pulled up his hands and extended them again above her.

“Bobby?”

“My office boy. He’ll come right away. He does what I tell him.”

“And what could Bobby do? Keep you company? Protect you? You’re afraid to be alone with me, aren’t you, Lee?”

“No, I’m not. Of course I’m not.”

“You are. I know you are.”

The cat crept out from the hollow between Fay’s knees and breasts and stepped over her legs, which opened like a pair of scissors to accommodate it. Beneath the covers, Fay’s left leg slid toward the right side of the bed, her right leg toward the left. In the direct center, the cat made a series of small, ever-descending circles, working its way closer and closer to its desired spot, and sank at last, coming finally, definitively to rest with its body insinuated high in that coveted space between Fay’s legs.

“You’re afraid of what you might do,” Fay said, and her shoulders began to shake.

Lee observed his wife’s shaking shoulders and could not tell if she was laughing or crying. He placed his ear between her shoulder blades but could detect only a kind of muted rumbling, like the trembling of the earth before a quake. Very gently, he rested his hand on her back.

“Hush, Fay,” he said.

“You’re afraid to put your hands on me as if you meant it.”

“Of course I’m not.”

“I know you are. You’re afraid if you did, you might not be able to get them off.”

“No, Fay. No.”

Slowly, the cat stood up. It stepped carefully over Fay’s outstretched left leg and walked toward Lee. When it reached the space between Fay’s body and his own, it stepped into it and lay down. Fitting itself perfectly into that narrow space between their two bodies, the cat pressed its back to Fay’s back and closed its eyes.

“You’re afraid to press down,” Fay said. “You’re afraid your thumbs will break my bones.”

“No, Fay. I’m not.”

“You’re afraid your fingers will curl about my throat.”

“No, Fay. No.”

“You’re afraid they’ll crush my windpipe.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

On the word yes, the cat opened its green eyes and stared at Lee.

“Yes, you are. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.”

On each of the successive yes's , the cat’s green eyes grew greener. To Lee it seemed that although Fay’s words came out of her own beautiful mouth, they looped around her body and back through the body of the cat and emerged through its eyes to find their expression.

“I love you, Fay,” Lee said hopelessly.

Fay was silent then, and the cat lay wide-eyed but motionless in the space between them.

After a while Lee reached out and stroked the cat. He stroked it over and over, beginning at a spot on the top of its head between its ears and ending at its tail. He was careful to stroke it in long, firm, continuous motions and always in the direction of the fur, which Fay had told him was the only way the cat would tolerate his touch.

After a few minutes, the cat closed its eyes again, and soon Lee believed both it and Fay to be asleep. For a long while he went on stroking the cat. He could feel its lungs expanding and contracting beneath his hand. He could feel the ridges of its bony spine and the sinews of its fine, long muscles pushing up into his fingers. He could almost feel its blood coursing through its veins.

“It was my child too,” Fay said.

“Hush,” Lee answered.

“Or would have been.”

“Hush, Fay. Hush.”

“Not just yours.”

Lee moved his hand steadily, evenly, over the body of the cat, drawing it in one continuous motion from the top of the cat’s head to the base of its tail.

“Not just yours,” Fay said again.

Each time Lee reached the base of the cat’s tail he picked up his hand and put it back on the cat’s head, squarely between its ears, as Fay had taught him, and drew it down again along its spine to its tail. “I know,” he said. “I know. It was ours.”

Again and again, Lee stroked the cat, drawing his hand down from its head to its tail, evenly and steadily, and always, as Fay had taught him, in the direction of the fur.