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Seeing Mikolaj before the screening, however, pacing nervously in front of the auditorium in a brown suit and enormous wingtips, probably secondhand, Camille felt a stab of compassion. His eyes were bleary, as if he hadn't slept well the night before. Camille missed the old Mikolaj, his puppyish ineptitude and disdain for small talk: these days he tended to talk about AA meetings and his “personal struggle.”

She offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head. “I'm trying to quit. It goes to set wrong example.”

“Right,” Camille said, lighting a Camel. Somehow, giving up drinking had made his English worse. She noticed that his hands were clean, scrubbed of ideas.

“I look to you nervous?” he said.

“The committee can be a bit petty. Just remember not to take it personally.”

Mikolaj nodded. It amazed Camille that she'd kissed this sleepless-looking man standing in front of her. If Warren hadn't called her from jail that night, they might have done even more. After Dustin's accident, in the frantic, heartsick months that followed, Mikolaj and their spur-of-the-moment kiss had been the furthest things from her mind. Neither of them had mentioned it again. In the meantime, he'd become sober, capable, a changed man.
Uninteresting.

Now, as Camille took a seat among the board members and listened to their poised-for-battle voices, watching Mikolaj fiddle with the video projector stationed over the front row, she felt an old flicker of attraction. The feeling grew when she saw him sit down to collect his thoughts on his way to the podium, his sideburns dark with sweat, studying a yellow notepad in his lap. In his brown suit and gigantic shoes, he looked like a duck. A sitting duck. It took her a minute to realize it wasn't
him
she was attracted to but the certainty of his doom.

“Thank you for come to see my new film,” Mikolaj announced to the room, “
Even Educated Fleas
.” Silence. He cleared his throat. “Do you have any brief questions before the premiere?”

Rabbi Silverberg raised his hand. “I don't get the title.”

“Please, we have the time only for questions,” Mikolaj said, scanning the room.

“I don't get the title?” Rabbi Silverberg asked.

“It's from your American Songbook, by Cole Porter. We're using it as a sound track. ‘
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.
'” This last part Mikolaj actually sang. He had a suave, angelic, unaccented voice, so incongruous with his appearance that the audience was momentarily struck dumb. Perhaps they'd ask Camille to take her old job back. Eventually Father Gladstone raised his hand, breaking the spell.

“Wasn't Cole Porter homosexual?” he asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?” said Wendy Felsher of Planned Parenthood. She was sitting—deliberately, Camille suspected—in the same row as Father Gladstone. A large pin on her sweater said
KEEP ABORTION LEGAL
.

“Well, I don't think we should be endorsing his lifestyle.”

“Are you suggesting he's referring to male fleas?”

“Actually, some water fleas don't mate at all,” said Lane Mazerra, who taught science at Laguna Elementary. “They reproduce asexually.”

Carl Boufis turned around in his chair. “By themselves?”

“Yes. They basically self-clone.”

“This is very stimulating discussion,” Mikolaj said, “and I would like to continue about flea sex at a later date. The film, in fact, is about human beings. Boys and girls of America talking about the fact of life.”

“You don't worry it's a bit dumbed-down?” Rabbi Silverberg said.

“Dumb down?”

“
Dumbed.
To the kids' level. We don't want a repeat of last year.”

There was an awkward silence. Several of the committee members glanced in Camille's direction. Mikolaj leaned into the podium, narrowing his eyes. “You use this expression because I am Polish?”

“No,” Rabbi Silverberg said. He looked stricken. “I wasn't . . . I didn't mean anything like that.”

Mikolaj smiled, and Rabbi Silverberg flushed with relief. “I kid with you. You should see a mirror. Anyway, Polish people
are
dumb. They put up with Soviet communist for forty-four years. But we are dumbing up, I think.”

The audience laughed. Camille was amazed; it never would
have occurred to her to make a joke at Rabbi Silverberg's expense. Before the good cheer had evaporated, Mikolaj dimmed the lights and began his movie: a little girl, maybe six years old, talking about where her baby sister had come from. Sighing, as if addressing a roomful of half-wits, she declaimed with perfect conviction that Daddy had planted a seed in Mommy's belly button. What followed were kids of all ages discussing where babies came from, some of whom—like the chubby five-year-old who claimed he'd been fed by “an extension cord” and delivered through his mother's “potty hole”—rocked the board members with laughter. But it wasn't a silly film. It was good. Very good. There was no voiceover, but Mikolaj had edited the interviews artfully enough that the more enlightened children—the ones he'd enlisted to educate the viewers, some with pictures they'd drawn themselves—were clearly in the know. The film was funny and entertaining and trusted the intelligence of its audience. It felt like a real documentary, something you might see in a theater. And the fact that there was no script to speak of, that the kids themselves were doing all the talking, virtually ensured that the board would find nothing to object to.

Nonetheless, the warmth of their response astonished Camille. They crowded around Mikolaj, shaking his hand and describing their favorite scenes. Camille tried to congratulate him, too, but couldn't get close enough to catch his attention. At one point he looked up and met her eyes; perhaps she imagined the look of triumph—the shyly delighted grin—on his face.

The rest of the day she spent holed up in her office, darting past Mikolaj's cubicle on her way to the bathroom. At one point he knocked on her door, calling her name in his Polish accent; she pretended not to be there, holding her breath until he'd left. Back home again, she dragged herself from the Volvo, trying to shake the stiffness from her legs. She wondered if spending so much time in the car was crippling her joints. No one met her at the door or took her bag or asked her about her day at work. The house smelled like a microwave, muggy with Chinese takeout. Camille wandered down the hall and glanced into her daughter's room: Lyle was sitting on her bed, reading a book called
The Icarus Agenda.
She'd scratched out the word “agenda” on the cover and written “pudenda.”

“Shouldn't you be at your SAT class?” Camille said.

“I didn't feel like it.”

“I thought you had to pay for the whole course!”

Lyle looked up from her book begrudgingly. “It's
my
money, right?”

Camille felt guilty enough for making Lyle pay for classes, without her missing them. She bent down and picked up a Snickers wrapper sitting at her feet. “But you have to take the test again in October. It's your last chance.”

“I'll just use my first score. From the spring.”

“You need a fourteen hundred. Isn't that what the counselor said? You won't get into Columbia.”

“Oh well,” Lyle said, staring at her book.

Camille blinked at her. “So you've decided to apply to UC schools,” she said, relieved.

“Actually, I was thinking of taking the year off. Staying out here and helping out.”

She seemed to be serious. It was Camille's own fault, probably, for trying to dissuade her from Columbia. Now that she seemed to have given up on the idea, Camille was in the sudden, inarguable position of wanting her to go.

Camille left the room and knocked on Dustin's door, hoping to at least converse with him once before bed. Surprisingly, he was not watching
The Searchers
but something else: a spaghetti Western, Henry Fonda wearing a black hat and looking archetypically murderous. The words were too loud for the actors' lips. Camille moved an empty plate off the foot of the bed and sat next to Dustin's feet. She'd begun watching movies with him sometimes, expecting nothing in return. His bitterness did not seem to preclude this intrusion. It was the only time they ever spent together and made her feel like she was doing something, however small, to stage a resistance.

“How can you trust a man that wears both a belt and suspenders?” Henry Fonda sneered to a guy on TV. “Man can't even trust his own pants.” Camille glanced at Dustin: he was beaming rapturously at the screen, the way a mother might at a newborn. At least there was something that seemed to bring him joy. She waited until Henry Fonda was offscreen before braving an interruption.

“I realized something today,” she said.

Dustin looked at her, his droopy eye still managing to startle her. “What?”

“The movies I made. The videos.” She paused. “It wasn't just the fertilization one. They were all pretty bad. Terrible, actually.”

He did not dispute this. She was less upset, surprisingly, than grateful. “That's okay,” Dustin said. “It's the same with Toxic Shock Syndrome.”

“Your band?” she said, taken aback.

“Yeah.”

“I thought people loved you.”

“We were a joke,” he said.

“I'm sure that's not true.”

“We were terrible. The songs were all rip-offs. Even the name was moronic.”

Dustin turned back to the TV. Camille reached out and touched his foot, gripping it as she used to do in the hospital. She didn't squeeze or anything, simply held it with her fingers. Dustin did not look at her. Camille waited for some sign of encouragement, a flex of the toes even, anything to nourish her hunger. She could feed on so little. But the foot only sat in her hand, still as a statue's.

She left Dustin's room and headed into the kitchen, grabbing a Diet Coke from the fridge. Outside, beyond the deck, Warren was walking Mr. Leonard in the last light of evening, the tops of the Joshua trees eerily aglow. He still had his tie on, perhaps to prove he'd been working. Something about the way her husband crept along at Mr. Leonard's gait, following him laboriously from bush to bush, filled Camille with an excruciating tenderness. She did not understand this tenderness or why it had come on so suddenly. She thought of the alien in Dustin's nightmare, its grouchy rebuke:
This world is not your home.

It was only when she looked away, safe from Warren's image, that she realized she'd come to a decision. She would leave him. Free herself from his misery. Not right away, but she would. She tried to pin herself down, before her resolve could falter, and decided she would move out as soon as Mr. Leonard died.

It didn't make sense, to choose such a random date. But what in this life made the slightest bit of sense?

The doors slid open eventually and Warren walked into the kitchen, carrying Mr. Leonard like a baby. The old dog whimpered when he put him down. Camille looked at Warren as if to greet him but he avoided her eyes, awkward with something other than dislike, an odd skittishness like guilt. There was a Band-Aid
around his finger, and she remembered that time on the tennis court when he'd nearly cut off his pinkie. He'd been opening a can of balls and sliced it on the edge of the metal top, down near the base, so deeply that you could see a frail twig of bone. She'd driven him to the emergency room in her bra, his hand swaddled in her shirt because she didn't dare take off his own. But it wasn't the terror she'd felt at her reddening shirt, or even the embarrassment of running into the hospital half-naked, that she remembered now. It was the pride—majesty, even—she'd felt when everyone stared at them from the waiting room. Shirtless, hugging Warren's waist, she'd felt the greedy omnipotence of love. Now his eyes met hers finally: his tie was covered in dog hair. They had been married for twenty years. She turned to the sink to hide her face.

“Mr. Leonard's going to be all right,” he said softly, as if to console her.

Lyle surveyed the room of drunk-looking UCLA students. A college party, her first. She'd been anticipating it all week—so bored out in the desert she thought her brain would die, would actually drain out of her ear like sap—and now she was here. At an apartment in Culver City. With actual undergrads. In her tedium-fueled fantasies, she'd imagined skinny men in vintage shirts, their legs crossed at the knees, listening to squawky jazz and firing off bon mots. She had not imagined a group of overgrown boys throwing a Ping-Pong ball into one another's beer. But this was what was happening in the living room, to the strains of “Addicted to Love.” The boys stood at opposite ends of a table, adorned in baseball caps, kissing a plastic ball with their eyes closed before lobbing it at a triangle of cups. As she watched the triumphant stupidity of their faces, any second thoughts she'd had about dropping her SAT class were gratifyingly squashed.

“Beer Pong,” Shannon Jarrell explained. She'd been here for a while and was already drunk, a beige barrette snagged in her hair like a moth. It was Shannon who'd told Lyle about the party, claiming it would make high school ones look like
Romper Room.
Lyle had promised to meet her here. She'd convinced Bethany and her French boyfriend, Gérard, to come along as well. He was visiting for a month, starved no doubt for a bit of culture. Shannon turned to him helpfully. “If it lands in one of the cups, you have to chugalug.”

“Chugalug?” Gérard asked.

“Drink. Slam. Down the snatch.”

“You mean ‘hatch,'” Lyle said.

“Right,” she said. She turned to Gérard. “‘Snatch' means vagina.”

Gérard nodded thoughtfully. This was his first time in America. “If they are so wanting to drink, why they don't just chugalug the beer instead?”