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By Root 417 0

of the ceiling as it traveled over our heads and then down the rickety stairs, one by one, finally emerging into the living room in the form of Emily Warshaw. And as forms went, as Julius Marx might have added, this one wasn’t half bad. She was a slight, slender woman, my wife, though broad across the hips, with hair that was always cool to the touch and a face, Crabtree used to say, like Fallingwater, all sharp outcroppings and dramatic angles. Her lips were rouged and her eyelids inked and she was dressed in black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black cardigan sweater. When she saw me she didn’t stop dead, or flee, or suffer a brain hemorrhage, or anything of the sort. She had a single moment of crushing shyness, no more, during which she glanced at James and gave him a practiced friendly smile. Then she walked right over to the empty chair beside me and, to my astonishment, sat down.

“How are you?” she said, just loud enough for me to hear. Emily had a voice that while soft, and at times even inaudible, was throaty and masculine, like the voice of a man in a crowded room talking on the telephone to a lover. On those rare occasions when she grew emotional it would rise and crack like a teenaged boy’s. She met my gaze for a moment, her expression tender and surprisingly pleased, and then looked away, almost flirtatiously, as if we were strangers seated together by a designing hostess. I guessed that, so far, anyway, Deborah had managed to keep my secret. It was going to be up to me to ruin the evening.

“I’m glad to see you,” I said, my voice emerging from my throat cracked by a pubescent little wrinkle of its own. Seeing Emily again I felt an intense desire to kiss her, or at least to give her fingers a squeeze, but she was sitting demurely on her hands, eyes lowered; closed off, untouchable, thinking her unimaginable Emily thoughts. I could smell the talcum powder on the nape of her neck and the clove shampoo she used on her gun black hair. I felt a bright black wobble of sex pulse across the six charged inches that separated her left thigh from my right. “This is James Leer. From workshop?”

She brushed an errant strand of hair from her eyes—she had the long, narrow eyes, like a pair of recumbent check marks, that in Korea they call buttonholes—and nodded to James. Emily was never one for handshakes.

“The movie man,” she said. “I’ve heard about you.”

“I’ve heard about you, too,” said James.

I thought for a moment that she might ask him about Buster Keaton, one of her idols, but she didn’t. She sat back in her chair, shoulders hunched, and looked like she was wishing for a cigarette. Nobody spoke for a few seconds; the advent of Emily at a party or dinner table was generally followed, in the face of the deep and devouring power of her silence, by such a period of conversational adjustment.

“Is Deb coming down?” Irv said at last.

“In a minute,” said Emily, her tiny mouth twisting into a faint smirk of mock disgust. “Or maybe not.”

“What’s the matter?”

She shook her head. For a moment I thought she might not say anything more.

“She’s all freaked out about something or other,” she said, and shrugged.

As she spoke there was another creak of the ceiling, and then a loud syncopated clatter on the stairs, as if a croquet ball and a grapefruit were racing each other down to the bottom.

“Look at this,” said Philly, impressed, as Deborah came into the room.

“That’s what you’re wearing to the Seder?” said Irv.

Deborah ignored him, took the chair next to her brother, and then waited, chin raised, with an air of long-suffering patience, while we all came to terms with the discovery that she had shed the unfortunate purple dress, along with her tights and shoes, and come down to the table barefoot, wearing only her bathrobe. It was a nice bathrobe, though—we all agreed about that—heavy and brightly colored and patterned with chevrons, as if it had been made from an old-fashioned trader’s blanket.

“It’s Alvin’s,” she informed us, with an exaggerated wince as she pronounced the name of her most recent ex-husband. “I figured