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How interminable they had seemed to him, those years, a kind of endless Sunday afternoon of the soul, every shop locked and shuttered! Now he could luxuriate in the contemplation of past miseries from afar. He could bask in that calm that descends when one thing is over, the next has yet to begin, all is potential and thus harmless; yes, for the moment Paul sits still and tilting, a rider atop a stopped Ferris wheel below whom the world spreads out its unexpected symmetries. That was then, it says. This is next. There is no now.
    On the train he got hungry, and regretted having thrown away the candy bar. It seemed extraordinary to him that the flight to Rome left in less than twenty-four hours, that in twenty-four hours he'd be in the air. And how remote this landscape of tract houses and chain motels seemed from the imagined vantage point of the plane! Through the sooty glass of the window, the lights of the houses seemed as pregnant with imminent loss as those on Christmas trees. He looked upon them with generosity. These days he was looking upon all kinds of things with generosity that until recently he had thought base and ugly. Just a week ago, for instance, having cleaned out his locker and taken a long-rehearsed final glance at the band room, he had gotten on his bicycle and pedaled away from his high school for the last time. In the dusk sky an orange lozenge of sun melted. Knowledge of lastness made the grim architecture almost beautiful. "Yes, you are beautiful, too!" Paul said to the high school, which regarded him with bemused indifference, hardly distinguishing his presence among multitudes.
    It would have been pleasant if Paul could have stayed a long time in that caesura, that bountiful sway atop the Ferris wheel. Such calm is rare in any life, and grows rarer as one gets older; in some cases it never comes at all; in Paul's case it was destined to last only the length of the train ride.
    When he climbed down onto the platform, his mother's station wagon wasn't there. Several other cars waited in front of the depot. Pamela's just wasn't one of them.
    He sat on the curb. How strange, he thought. She's always on time. She must be packing. Meanwhile the last of the cars took on its passenger and drove off. Paul was alone. As a child, not being picked up had been one of his animal terrors. Whenever his mother had been late to fetch him he'd sat in the school library and imagined twelve-car pileups. Now once again he imagined twelve-car pileups, in which case the trip to Italy would have to be canceled, he would have no choice but to go on living in this country of his childhood: this country which, because he was fleeing it forever, he could forgive, but which if he had to remain in it, he sensed, would never forgive him.
    He shut his eyes. To that demigod that promises (falsely) to fulfill the selfish wishes of the young, he prayed that his mother might be spared until they got back from Italy.
    A few minutes later, as if in answer to his prayer, head-lamps bloomed in the dark. He recognized the familiar trim of her station wagon, stood up, climbed in.
    "What happened?" he asked.
    Pamela had on her dark glasses. She sat huddled over the steering wheel, shoulders hunched, her hair held back with a rubber band.
    "Mother?"
    She didn't move.
    "He's not coming," she said.
    "Who?"
    "Your father."
    "Not coming where?"
    Switching off the ignition, she laid her head against the steering wheel. "God, it's just like him. Waiting until the day before a trip to spring the news."
    "I don't understand. What's happened? Dad's not coming to Italy?"
    "Your father is having an affair," Pamela said. "Is—has been for years. It all came out this afternoon. I had the feeling he's just been bursting to tell me. So now the plan is that you and I go off to Italy by ourselves like nothing's happened, while he and the woman shack up stateside, nice and cozy—"
    For air, Paul rolled down the window.
    "The bastard."
    "Mom—"
    "The