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hours. Karen recovered completely.
    I waited two weeks to tell Karen about the arrest. I seethed, waiting to tell her. I could hardly wait. This was my ammunition to send Kevin back to his father. I led up to it, and she could see how upset I was. “Something’s wrong,” she said. She asked me to lie down on her bed in the hospital room.
    â€œThere isn’t room for the two of us,” I said.
    â€œI’ll sit on the chair,” she said.
    â€œNo,” I said.
    â€œIt’s okay, honey, I feel much better,” she said.
    I lay down on the bed.
    â€œI have a headache,” I said.
    â€œI’ll get you a cold cloth.”
    She laid a cold towel over my forehead and sat down in the chair by the bed, waiting for me to speak.
    Looking up at her, I began. Slowly and dramatically, punctuating my account with little outbursts of rage, I told her about Kevin’s arrest.
    I’m not sure now why I was so outraged, except that it was my opportunity to get rid of Kevin.
    Soon after that, I gave Karen the ultimatum: Kevin had to go back to his father in Seattle. She threw herself into my arms. She said, “It’s so hard to resist you on anything—even my own child. But even for you, I won’t send him away unless that’s his choice.” And he went.
    Then I lost the job at Jewish Punchers. I was always walking away from jobs; I had Karen to support me, and my father threw in a check every month. “You’re lucky,” Karen screamed at me at the bus stop. “You lose all your jobs, so you have your freedom to write. I’ve been buying you and now if I don’t pay full price I can’t keep you. It’s my probationary period. I’ll just keep working until I drop.”
    â€œYou think I want you to die?” I said.
    â€œNo. I’m worth more alive.” Karen screamed. “I’ve been your slave for eight years, fed you, clothed you.”
    â€œI hate this,” I shouted. “It’s humiliating.” I lurched away from her, then walked back. I always came back. I didn’t have a job now; my father’s images of the Bowery, men on breadlines, helpless men like me, flared at me.
    â€œJust tell me you’re going to leave me and get it over with,” Karen said. “I’m one step ahead of the hangman. Your time is so much more valuable than mine. You can’t even stand spending time with me. You regret giving up a few moments.”
    We arrived home, but Karen kept screaming. At 5 A.M. she stood at the door of our apartment with a knapsack, ready to go out into the night. “The only reason you don’t want me to go,” she said, “is that the police would hold you responsible. I’ll die if you leave me. Nothing means shit. You want a young woman baby slave.” She paused. “You won’t even kiss me goodbye. You ration out your kisses to me.” She slammed the door, but I didn’t hear her footsteps on the staircase. I opened the door and saw her crying and hovering on the stairs. She moved towards me: “Kiss me if it isn’t over. I thought I had to hang on to the job to hold on to you, and felt I couldn’t. You think your work and your life is so much more important than mine.”
    And I kissed her.
    VII: Terror
    I measured my terror against Karen’s and it came out even.
    Karen recently told me of a nightmare in which the earth and green grass in front of her Portland home ripped open, like a huge sheet of sod with no ground under it, like a stage set. And she fell beneath it through dark space crisscrossed with timber understructure, clinging to the building slats and sticks that broke at her touch. She fell into open space, and terror.
    It was hers and it was mine. It kept us together.
    The two culprits who shaped my terror were my parents. I recently walked down the street and a bedraggled woman turned suddenly, stopped, and screamed at the stranger behind