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think I remember a pipe or something.”
    “He started smoking a pipe before he died, that’s true,” Hamilton said. “He used to smoke cigarettes a long time ago and then he’d get depressed with something or other and quit, but later he’d change brands and start in again. Let me show you something,” Hamilton said. “Smell the back of my hand.”
    The boy took the hand in his, sniffed it, and said, “I guess I don’t smell anything, Dad. What is it?”
    Hamilton sniffed the hand and then the fingers. “Now I can’t smell anything, either,” he said. “It was there before, but now it’s gone.” Maybe it was scared out of me, he thought. “I wanted to show you something. All right, it’s late now. You better go to sleep,” Hamilton said.
    The boy rolled onto his side and watched his father walk to the door and watched him put his hand to the switch. And then the boy said, “Dad? You’ll think I’m pretty crazy, but I wish I’d known you when you were little. I mean, about as old as I am right now. I don’t know how to say it, but I’m lonesome about it.
    It’s like—it’s like I miss you already if I think about it now. That’s pretty crazy, isn’t it? Anyway, please leave the door open.”
    Hamilton left the door open, and then he thought better of it and closed it halfway.

The Student’s Wife

    He had been reading to her from Rilke, a poet he admired, when she fell asleep with her head on his pillow. He liked reading aloud, and he read well—a confident sonorous voice, now pitched low and somber, now rising, now thrilling. He never looked away from the page when he read and stopped only to reach to the nightstand for a cigarette. It was a rich voice that spilled her into a dream of caravans just setting out from walled cities and bearded men in robes. She had listened to him for a few minutes, then she had closed her eyes and drifted off.
    He went on reading aloud. The children had been asleep for hours, and outside a car rubbered by now and then on the wet pavement. After a while he put down the book and turned in the bed to reach for the lamp. She opened her eyes suddenly, as if frightened, and blinked two or three times. Her eyelids looked oddly dark and fleshy to him as they flicked up and down over her fixed glassy eyes. He stared at her.
    “Are you dreaming?” he asked.
    She nodded and brought her hand up and touched her fingers to the plastic curlers at either side of her head. Tomorrow would be Friday, her day for all the four-to-seven-year-olds in the Woodlawn Apartments. He kept looking at her, leaning on his elbow, at the same time trying to straighten the spread with his free hand. She had a smooth-skinned face with prominent cheekbones; the cheekbones, she sometimes insisted to friends, were from her father, who had been one-quarter Nez Perce.
    Then: “Make me a little sandwich of something, Mike. With butter and lettuce and salt on the bread.”
    He did nothing and he said nothing because he wanted to go to sleep. But when he opened his eyes she was still awake, watching him.
    26
    “Can’t you go to sleep, Nan?” he said, very solemnly. “It’s late.”
    “I’d like something to eat first,” she said. “My legs and arms hurt for some reason, and I’m hungry.”
    He groaned extravagantly as he rolled out of bed.
    He fixed her the sandwich and brought it in on a saucer. She sat up in bed and smiled when he came into the bedroom, then slipped a pillow behind her back as she took the saucer. He thought she looked like a hospital patient in her white nightgown.
    “What a funny little dream I had.”
    “What were you dreaming?” he said, getting into bed and turning over onto his side away from her. He stared at the nightstand waiting. Then he closed his eyes slowly.
    “Do you really want to hear it?” she said.
    “Sure,” he said.
    She settled back comfortably on the pillow and picked a crumb from her lip.
    “Well. It seemed like a real long drawn-out kind of