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By Root 1033 0

if he were a tree, taking him inside her, her hazel eyes tearing up slightly and her face flushed. She let him kiss her and she kissed him back, and though he needed and wanted her now what he wanted most was to kiss her; he would have been content with that, for he’d discovered that this kiss was the same one they’d shared from the beginning, since they were children, really, their current embrace seemingly eternal, existing before and after them, as if at this moment they were themselves a buried, undiscovered sculpture of a kiss, that was, he thought, a kind of mystery, something whose particular brand of bliss—no science could explain it—bound their lives together still, and it was through this kiss they were trying to reach down deeply into each other through this netherworld, inhabiting it and feeling for something they were sure was there, as if they were at once two mutes lost in a cave and the cave itself.

Later, as they walked up the steep steps from the beach to the patio, Sheppard said, “The house is awfully quiet.” Marilyn, holding his hand and leaning on his arm, said, “You don’t suppose Chip managed to kill himself, do you?” Truth be told, she was a little worried. And when they got upstairs and saw Chip, she gasped.

He was napping on the daybed.

Sheppard checked the time, then massaged his temples with his hand. “God,” he said. “He’ll never sleep tonight.”

“I’d better wake him,” she said, though she was afraid to start the whole process. She looked at her husband and he at her and their exchange of glances was nearly telepathic.

“Or not,” she said, and then they walked quietly and quickly together upstairs.

Such afternoons, he thought later as they lay in his bed, Chip still deeply asleep, Marilyn’s bed white and pristine next to them, such afternoons when the breeze blows off the water and leaves a taste of the lake in your mouth, when the tree limbs rattling against the screens becomes the world’s only sound, when the body rises from sleep and is perfectly warm or cool, made Sheppard believe in God. And not the god whose son entered history, not a god of specific instructions and protocols who rewarded good behavior eternally with afterlife or punished conversely for the opposite, which no doctor who’d seen as much senseless trauma as Sheppard had could ever rightly believe, but rather a god of this moment, an even more generous god who conferred on those who fought through all the obstacles of love, and held on through all of its cycles, this perfect silence, this tranquility, this bliss. He held Marilyn to him. He touched her hair. He kissed the top of her head. Never in their lives together, not even when they were children, had they made love as they had these last few weeks. Sheppard, trying not to wake her, sat up gently and stared out the window at the lake, where a sailboat bounced like a toy triangle on the cast-iron and white chop. He realized now when it had started. Not just the lovemaking, but his and Marilyn’s recycling, this new era, the change. It had started in Big Sur, after the long, three-hour drive north from Los Angeles, when Chappie told him how his and Jo’s life together was falling apart, Jo onto his affairs now, the mistress he kept in Santa Monica, Susan Hayes on Sheppard’s mind the whole time, whose sex for so long had seemed so important to him but was now somehow diminished, who’d panicked at the sight of the dying dog, bending over to vomit in the road. There was something so weak in her, he thought, as well as something explosive that made him even more so. Something that didn’t know the things Marilyn knew, or had always known, about herself and about the world: something so un-Marilyn. What a strange turn of events. For so many years he’d seen Marilyn in terms of lack, had compared her to other women and found her wanting, but as he drove Susan to a gas station to clean herself up after being sick he compared her—and all the women he’d been with—to Marilyn, and they all fell short. He found a Shell station a few miles down the road and Susan got out of the car, taking