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Jean wasn’t a stranger to sudden disaster, but no earlier desolation could help here. What she’d read was unmistakably a lover’s letter, and she felt winded, as if punched in the gut. She would confront Mark right away and take what came. That had been the extent of her strategy. She believed, and so it would prove, that the period of advantage, of nerve, was very short.

Still waiting, with Mark barricaded in the bathroom, Jean laid out a solitaire of old invitations—though no longer as if fingering a bruise, testing for homesickness. This time it was a genuine game of patience.

Until now, the ritual of the mail had been a comfort. It absolved her, briefly, of her failure in the field of domestic administration: her lifelong allergy to dealing with any kind of request. It could hardly be her fault, out here in the Indian Ocean, if letters went unanswered. Ever since her daughter’s early years, Jean had been oppressed by this kind of nonessential communication, and how
innocent
that all seemed now: the library-volunteer sign-up, the spring fair, charity day, the bright birthday invitations with their clip’n’send reply blanks (did
anyone
clip’n’send?), the uniform order slip that Victoria, by age eleven, was filling out for herself.

And now Victoria, who had stayed behind in Camden Town, minding the house in Albert Street, was still dealing with the mail. Though unlike in St. Jacques, they never greeted the mailman in London—in fact, they dodged him, the cheerless Korean who
drove
from house to house and still managed to get the post wet.

What exactly was being asked of Jean with this affair, and, moreover, how would Victoria cope with this, her mother’s ultimate failure in domestic administration? She must never know. Jean forcibly returned her attention to the spread on the blue tablecloth: the latest batch of expired announcements and last-chance offers seemed to prove that, if you waited long enough, nothing mattered. You wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. Very soon the most ASAP item would cease to exert the remotest tug. The same might be true of a lover’s letter.

Things losing their force—like this envelope that had lost its stickum and needed tape, Jean thought. Like
any
envelope on this humid island. Jean had taken to tracking fade-out in many fields. She was a health writer; decay was her turf. But not until now had she considered the field of her marriage.

Ten more minutes passed, and still Mark did not return. Jean’s fiddling was becoming clipped, agitated. She rose, covered the fruit with a mesh dome, rinsed the breakfast dishes, crumpled and cleared the junk mail. It would take her a good hour to get to the clinic, and she was running out of time.

“Mark?” she called, fully aware that this was the least opportune moment to consult her husband, let alone confront him. (He was the type who believed the entire square mile around his toilet should be discreetly evacuated every morning, until
he was done.) She coughed. “I’m going to have to set off now.” No reply. Fine, she’d go down to Toussaint on her own—space and time to think. She swooped through the house, collecting her purse, her hat, and, on impulse, her gym bag, and went out to the car.

The uniformed nurse at the front desk said her name twice before Jean recognized it.

“Jhanh OO-bahd?” the nurse said again, and Jean jumped up, catapulting onto the floor the straw shoulder bag she’d wedged beside her on the seat. Mark called these gaping nosebags of hers “beggars’ lucky dip.” Had he meant all along that
she
was the beggar? Jean wondered, squatting and raking in handfuls at a time of ink-stained lists, ink-stained pens, wads of nearly worthless ink-stained banknotes—basically garbage.

She was now on her knees, reaching after a rolling ink-stained lip sunblock and wondering how spoiled it would look to ignore the lottery of loose coins that had already bounced and wheeled so far out she’d have to crawl to the four corners to recover it all.

A glance at the nurse-receptionist told her to forget the coins—how childish the sacklike cut of her white dress suddenly seemed—and concentrate on the additional medical forms she’d been handed. With increasing speed and irritation Jean filled in the facts of her life: Jean Warner Hubbard, forty-five years old, born New York City, August 1957, daughter of…She skimmed over the questions: father, mother, education, driver’s license, nationality, insurance, marital status, first menstruation, number of pregnancies, number of children, age at first pregnancy, age at birth of first child, name(s) of child(ren), name(s) of child(ren)’s father(s)… How impertinent, she thought, to ask the names of “father(s),” about pregnancies and children in separate questions, as if expecting them not to match up, as if it was any of their goddamn business.

She wondered what Thing 2’s real name was. Was this her business? Maybe she should just open the e-mail herself. Why not—she’d already opened the letter. Surely she had the right, whether or not she had the stomach for what she might find there. It was clear they’d just seen each other, presumably on Mark’s recent trip to London, and Thing 2 was trying to keep it going. Still working on the form, Jean imagined a male version in which there was one question about the number of ejaculations and another about the number of children produced. But they didn’t have these for men, and there was no men’s clinic on St. Jacques—though she supposed the island’s one hospital had mostly geezers racked up in rows of steel-tube beds, inmates looking down from high windows at the old buffers still upright enough to bowl in the sand under the lavenderfeathered jacaranda trees.

Jean had noticed that, unlike the men, St. Jacques’ women didn’t linger in the square. As their reproductive function ended, they grew to resemble their husbands—thickening and flattening and even sprouting whiskers—but they didn’t have time for bowling, and when they hurried past, expertly balancing shopping on their hips and heads, the square must have looked to them like nothing so much as the hospital’s waiting room. On any other day, Jean would’ve used this time to stitch such thoughts into a column; but sitting here now, stunned and unprepared, all she could conjure up was an endless procession of old women, bent under heavy bundles, shuffling along single file…

She handed back the form and tried, in an effort to tame her panic, to think chronologically, to remember their purpose here. For Mark, time on the island offered a practice retirement.
He was only fifty-three, but it was a phase he’d planned as assiduously as his many business trips. In fact, his retirement might be a business venture: he was talking again about the advertising-world board game he was going to devise, what he called, and thought he might just name, “my pension.” Cocktails on the terrace were ever earlier; he’d at least set up his easel on the back terrace. She’d been pleased to think he’d be around more. But now she wondered. Was all this exaggerated retiree behavior overcompensation for a frenetic, belated oatsowing when he went away without her?

Jean had never even considered not working. On the contrary, as they both got older, things would pick up. Advanced age, the older the better, would be a boon for a health writer—all the new ailments to cover, and so many keen readers, readers with time. This was one thing she’d never doubted they had—time. She’d always assumed, naïve though it seemed to her now, that separation would come only with death.

The clinic was virtually empty—just the lady in the turban and Jean. What was taking so long? She rested her head against the wall and watched the geriatric fan. The looming terrors—infidelity, denials and recriminations, the sundering—made her long, almost physically, for the respite of a more innocent time. Closing her eyes, she placed herself thirty-five years before, in the Adirondacks. Those end-of-summer dances with all the chairs pushed back against the walls of the high-ceilinged Quonset hut, girls on one side in calico and gingham, helplessly gripping their seats, and the boys opposite, wetted-down hair cleanly parted and no eye contact whatsoever. Everyone listens to the caller, the buzz-cut head of camp, and Jean tries not to think about being left unpicked when the next line of boys crosses over.
Do-si-do! Swing your partner round and round! Duck for the oyster, dig for the clam!
She
needs
to be picked. This is the best night of the summer and it’s half over.
And it’s on to the next in the valley, and you circle to your left and to your right…and you swing with the girl who loves you maybe, and you swing with your Red River gal.

Again someone called her name. She was led down a long echoing hall, shown into a small examining room, and abandoned.

Affairs don’t just happen, Jean told herself, not sure if she should undress or just wait. There had to be a reason; if only she could think hard enough, she probably already knew what it was. So she tried, and found nothing. She was aware women liked Mark, felt lucky if they were seated next to him. Of course they did—everybody did. He was handsome and witty but not too challenging. He was at ease with most people and a frank appreciator of womankind. Jean felt clear about that, and also that he didn’t like to be cornered by other men’s wives. She assumed he had his chances—successful males always have, since long before man separated from monkey—but was also confident he played it straight, did his work, paid his taxes, and slept well at night.

And she knew, however much she didn’t like to admit it, that he’d
had
his sexual obsession, more than a decade before they’d even met, one summer in Brittany. Now, by extension, he loved all things French: French clients, which meant more time in France; French wine, French islands, French actresses, French butter—tasteless logs, in Jean’s opinion, unsalted fat. Like Thing 2’s “sweet thighs”? What kind of person called her own thighs “sweet”? But she didn’t mind Mark’s French bug, even if it was a trip to Paris that had made him miss the birth of their daughter. Energetic enthusiasms,
comprehensive
enthusiasms—these were his kind of charm.

“Put this on,” said a surprise nurse, leaving Jean alone with her folded green smock. There was a large cutout for the head, and open sides, so it hung over the torso like a saddlebag. Thus
draped, she crossed her naked arms, looked around the cramped examining room, and waited.

This dead time spent waiting, especially in poor countries…it converted everybody going about his daily business into a disaster victim, queuing for relief. Mass paralysis—a phenomenon, she thought, to compete with mass migration, meriting international treaties, conventions, philanthropic interest. And for Jean? She somehow knew, having failed to confront Mark at
once,
she’d entered the waiting game of her life.

The room contained a padded table, another lethargic fan, and, in the corner by a high window, an old-fashioned wicker hat rack where Jean had hung her clothes, bra discreetly tucked under the childish sundress, and the letter folded into childish sundress pocket. Another standing object filled the center of the room, stainless steel and glass, loaded with dials and levers—yesteryear’s futuristic. After a decade of annual mammograms, Jean knew the machine and the drill. Here she was again, stripped, bored, and coursing with dread. She tried to distance herself by considering alternative uses for the Senograph, with its motorized compression device: patty maker, phone booth, mechanical valet, time machine.

But distraction was not encouraged here. On the wall, above the examining table, hung a framed poster of a vagina and a womb—in the family of the butcher’s chart, sectioned, colored, and neatly labeled in teachers’ script. Jean wondered what sort of image awaited Mark at the Internet café. Photographs of Thing 2’s privates would be a lot harder to ignore than this diagram. As if being ignored might come into a Thing’s plan.

In England, she thought, hearing footsteps and checking her gown, such a room would have a picture of wild ponies on Exmoor, Brighton Pavilion, or an Alma-Tadema muse draped in billowing gauze. In the States you might get fall foliage or Capitol Hill. And in either country—she now saw a hairy arm opening the door from the corridor—the radiologist would not have been a man. This one was wearing short sleeves and a hospital V-neck, as if to feature his pelt. And a paper hat.

Jean didn’t want to look at this man, so like an entertainer escaped from a children’s party. She didn’t want to look at the vagina and womb. She didn’t want to say anything, with her hopeless French and miserable state of mind. He wasn’t even a doctor. More like a mechanic, brought in to mind the precious robot. Someone else would interpret the pictures he took, hunting for messages among the lucent smudges and ghost tracks, the familiar crescents rendered deathly in monochrome. So she studied the ceiling fan and imagined herself levitating to just the right height whereby the rotating blades could serve as a guillotine for her obviously imperfect breasts.

Meanwhile the radiologist busied himself. His soap-scented arms extended one of hers around the time machine. Dignity demanded that she be as involved as a mannequin being dressed in a store window, and she, shy flower, could only submit as he fussed with the display—frowning, squinting, making several seemingly insignificant changes to her position. The pose she struck was elaborately casual, like in the first photograph she’d sent her parents of herself with Mark, her arm reaching awkwardly up around his shoulder. Too tall by half, was her mother’s verdict following that first experimental airing of his existence, not knowing that Jean had already decided. His height was the first thing she loved about him, her personal lightning rod. Feeling safe with Mark: before she felt it, she had not been aware of any special vulnerability or want. Much of what he brought her came in this form of unanticipated necessity.

With her upper body strained into the leaning position, Jean’s breast had naturally swung out from the sideless smock
onto the machine’s glass tray—the coolness of the glass not unwelcome in this close heat—and the technician positioned it with his hairy hands, as focused as a potter centering a lump of clay. This, Jean thought, was the real reason younger women didn’t get mammograms: their breasts couldn’t yet
swing out
onto the tray. And then she thought of Thing 2, “26 this week.”