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experiment,” he said, with satisfaction,of their sleeping together. “You do something to the bed that makes me nervous. You always did. With Harriet I have no problem. I sleep like a baby.”
    “Don’t tell me about it.”
    “I’m just reporting it as a curious physiological fact.”
    “Just relax. Re-lax.”
    “I can’t. Evidently you can. Your poor father’s being dead must be a great relief.”
    “Not especially. Lie on your back.”
    He obeyed. She put her hand on his penis. It was warm and silky-small and like nothing else, softer than a breast, more fragile than a thumb, yet heavy. Together, after a minute, they realized it was not rising, and would not rise. For Martin, it was a triumph, a proof. “Come on,” he taunted. “Do your worst.”
    For Lynne it had been, in his word, an experiment. Among her regrets was one that, having held her dying father’s hand so continuously, she had not been holding it at the moment in which he passed from life to death; she had wanted, childishly, to know what it would have felt like. It would have felt like this. “Go to sleep,” someone was pleading, far away. “Let’s go to sleep.”

Still of Some Use
    W HEN F OSTER helped his ex-wife clean out the attic of the house where they had once lived and which she was now selling, they came across dozens of forgotten, broken games. Parcheesi, Monopoly, Lotto; games aping the strategies of the stock market, of crime detection, of real-estate speculation, of international diplomacy and war; games with spinners, dice, lettered tiles, cardboard spacemen, and plastic battleships; games bought in five-and-tens and department stores feverish and musical with Christmas expectations; games enjoyed on the afternoon of a birthday and for a few afternoons thereafter and then allowed, shy of one or two pieces, to drift into closets and toward the attic. Yet, discovered in their bright flat boxes between trunks of outgrown clothes and defunct appliances, the games presented a forceful semblance of value: the springs of their miniature launchers still reacted, the logic of their instructions would still generate suspense, given a chance. “What shall we do with all these games?” Foster shouted, in a kind of agony, to his scattered family as they moved up and down the attic stairs.
    “Trash ’em,” his younger son, a strapping nineteen, urged.
    “Would the Goodwill want them?” asked his ex-wife, still wife enough to think that all of his questions deserved answers. “You used to be able to give things like that to orphanages. But they don’t call them orphanages anymore, do they?”
    “They call them normal American homes,” Foster said.
    His older son, now twenty-two, with a cinnamon-colored beard, offered, “They wouldn’t work anyhow; they all have something missing. That’s how they got to the attic.”
    “Well, why didn’t we throw them away at the time?” Foster asked, and had to answer himself. Cowardice, the answer was. Inertia. Clinging to the past.
    His sons, with a shadow of old obedience, came and looked over his shoulder at the sad wealth of abandoned playthings, silently groping with him for the particular happy day connected to this and that pattern of colored squares and arrows. Their lives had touched these tokens and counters once; excitement had flowed along the paths of these stylized landscapes. But the day was gone, and scarcely a memory remained.
    “Toss ’em,” the younger decreed, in his manly voice. For these days of cleaning out, the boy had borrowed a pickup truck from a friend and parked it on the lawn beneath the attic window, so the smaller items of discard could be tossed directly into it. The bigger items were lugged down the stairs and through the front hall; already the truck was loaded with old mattresses, broken clock-radios, obsolete skis and boots. It was a game of sorts to hit the truck bed with objects dropped from the height of the house. Foster flipped game after game