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was Lewis’s. But I didn’t think so. Perhaps I should have been disgusted, it was really extremely sordid, or even frightened of being in the library with whoever had hid it there. In fact, I felt nothing like that, but rather a funny giddiness, an unaccountable lightness of heart. I felt remarkably cheered up. Standing there in the stacks, turning the pages, I realized, as never before, what an isolated moment each photograph represents, one flash of light, one frozen instant stolen from time, after which time resumes. It was what I’d thought when I’d first seen those Civil War pictures but had never known how to tell Lewis. Perhaps I’d been worried that if I told him, the camera would click and he’d move.
    I looked at the women in the rubber magazine, and I began to laugh, because all I could think of was how soon the strobes would stop flashing, the cameras would click one last time, how that day’s session would end, and they would collect their checks and rise from their rubber sheets and fill the air with hilarious sounds as they stripped off their rubber suits. It was almost as if I could hear it, that joyous sigh and snap—the smacky kiss of flesh against flesh, of flesh, unbound, against air.

AMAZING
    I N THE UPSTAIRS BEDROOM, three teenage girls lay on top of a pile of coats, watching Yasir Arafat with the sound turned off. “Neat headscarf,” said one. “Too bad he looks like Ringo Starr.”
    How sweet it would have been to fall back on the bed and stare up at the high white ceiling and listen forever to the liquid murmuring voices of these girls! But Grady couldn’t do that, he was working, he was supposed to be giving a puppet show at the children’s party downstairs. Also he was anxious about Harry, his six-year-old son, who’d come to the party with him and been sent down to the basement where the other children were.
    Three parties were going at once, one on top of the other. The TV teens were upstairs, the children on the bottom, and, sandwiched in the middle, adults. It had taken forever to find this place, out in the woods near Katonah. Grady kept missing the unmarked driveway, which, when he found it, went on so long he gave up in the middle and turned and drove back to the road. Harry had fallen silent. “We are not lost,” Grady told him. “We are absolutely not lost.” At last they reached a clearing and a perfect Victorian house so grand Grady felt he should be seeing it from above, in an aerial shot under the titles of some prime-time weekly soap opera.
    On his way downstairs he drifted past other bedrooms; everywhere, platform beds and pedestal TVs seemed to levitate slightly off the dove-gray industrial carpeting. The hall was High Victorian, the bedrooms High Tech, so that crossing a doorsill often meant a hundred-year jump in time. Grady bypassed the grownup party and continued down to the basement—a huge room, dramatically lit through a band of high windows beneath the ceiling. The polished wood floor was covered with Turkish kilims on which a dozen children were greedily helping themselves to the pleasures of Space Age child heaven: video games, a robot, a wall-sized TV showing vintage Betty Boop. The noise was unspeakable—volleys of shooting rockets and maddening video tunes. Grady lingered long enough to see that Harry had found an inflated brontosaurus and was gently punching it back and forth with another little boy. Then he went upstairs.
    The bar was set out on a carved oak hutch. Grady hovered nearby with a hopeful expression that eventually drew his hostess—a pretty, blond woman with sparkly girlish eyes that seemed startled to find themselves looking at you from so many spidery lines. A slight tic kept pulling one eye to the side, as if she wanted to wink at you but kept changing her mind.
    “I’m Caroline,” she said. “Did I say that before? Can I fix you a drink? Would that be all right? What would Miss Manners say?” Grady knew what she meant. Even