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is that I never explained to him what we were laughing at. It belonged to Stuart and me. At some point in the presence of Howard and his parents I had understood that Howard had compartments, hermetically sealed off from each other, and if these were not to communicate with each other, on acertain level I accepted this. My acceptance was automatic. I had been raised that way. It was how I had survived.
    One word they used to his face was inappropriate, which I know because I overheard it, and which was a very mild word, but they’d already used all the others.
    In the spring, his mother and father came to the wedding. Then we went out for dinner in Chinatown. Conversation was stilted. The food was mediocre. They paid. We said good-bye, walked up Mott Street, waited till we’d gotten to the corner and ran as fast as we could up Canal to the lip of the Manhattan Bridge and we kissed and kissed. We walked up Bowery, bathed in the greasy scent of hot oil, past the kitchen supplies stores, wandered through Union Square where the April buds were just starting to come out.
    He told them he loved me, and they knew it was true. That their view didn’t infuriate him infuriated me, at times, and baffled me at others. I didn’t care so much that they disapproved. I cared that he didn’t seem to care and that I had no idea why he didn’t. We had a few minor fights over it, but then it simply became background radiation. I always knew that he loved me. That—and we agreed on this, Howard and I—was what counted.
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    When Sam was born, we lived inside him.
    We soothed him with tiny promises.
    We fed him orange flowers from blue islands and imported sunsets to his nursery.
    He had the fingers of an artist, the lungs of a stevedore, and the ears of an artilleryman.
    We cursed the clock, that it did not give us more hours in a single day to spend with him.
    I taught him words: flower . And tree . And clematis , at which Howard said, “Oh, boy,” and rolled his eyes. I was not deterred. I would bring Sam with me to lectures at West Valley Nursery on Ventura, educated, interested women sitting on wooden benches with ourcoffees in paper cups, the smell of mulch curling around our ankles, evaluating forsythia in arid Southern California. I never join in the decrying of eucalyptus. It is not indigenous, an import to this area, but then so am I, and it thrives here. Besides, it smells heavenly—astringent, fresh earth. When Sam was a baby, he slept. When he was older, he toddled around among the seedlings, and the nursery’s salespeople watched him. In grasses, they knew him by name; I love grasses. At age two and a half, Sam pointed at a vine I was planting in the garden—which was coming together very nicely—and said, “Clematis!” Howard, reading a contract on a teak lounge chair, sat bolt upright, then burst out laughing.
    His febrile intelligence, his curiosity, were obvious. As we watched him moving about the garden with his toys, placing a truck just so, investigating a bee, Howard murmured a line of Keats to me: “The creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it.”
    There is a pop song Howard and I heard on the radio. I thought it was so lovely I used to sing it to Sam, when he was little and afraid of the Disney villains.
    I’m stronger than the monster beneath your bed
    Smarter than the tricks played on your heart
    Howard would watch me hold Sam and sing to him. Years later, Sam said that he had been conscious that I was focusing on the line about being stronger than the monsters. But actually, he said, he himself as a child was relying on my being smarter than the tricks the animators sought to play on his heart. Those fake villains they drew into existence. Imagined sources of threat.
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    EVENING, THURSDAY, THE L.A. AIR is darkening and lovely. It is almost 6:00 P.M., and I ask Consuela to set the table next to the crape myrtle. Jennifer calls