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He wanted to tell Tricia all these things, but the thoughts remained jumbled, and by the time he could tease out the strands of an explanation, Tricia had already turned away from him.

He rose from the bed, pushed his shirt into his waist, re-zipped his pants. ‘You are an incredibly beautiful, sexy girl, Tricia. I would love to stay here and …' He didn't want to use the word fuck. ‘… keep going,' he said. ‘But it's not right.'

‘Then why did you come?' She stuck out her chin, defiant. But he thought perhaps there were tears in her eyes.

‘I don't know,' he admitted. ‘Because I'm attracted to you. But how would this work? What's our plan?' Timothy liked having a plan, and he couldn't see one here. ‘I'm practically fifty years old.'

‘You're not fifty,' she said, as if the three years' rounding error was what mattered.

‘I have a wife,' he said. ‘I'm not a saint; I never have been. But she's waiting for me at home, for Christ's sake. I can't do this to her.' He walked to the mirror hanging over her bureau, wiped the lipstick from his face. He patted down his hair, adjusted his shirt collar. He turned to her. ‘Look, I will see you tomorrow morning in the office. Let's pretend this never happened. You're a great girl, and I don't want to lose you.' Then, to avoid any misunderstanding, he added: ‘As an assistant. Okay?'

She sat down on the bed and didn't answer. He wondered: could this be the first time in her life that a man fled from her, even
after she touched his penis? Perhaps this was a new experience for this young girl.

‘Okay?' he asked again.

She didn't answer, but he didn't care, because he needed to get home. He left her in the bedroom, and ran from the apartment before he changed his mind.

10

He raced out of Cupertino as fast as traffic on 85 allowed. The clock in the BMW dash said 8.30 p.m. He reviewed the alibi he would offer Katherine. He would take the events of the afternoon, shift the timeline by two hours, make Tricia disappear. So: he had drinks with Pinky Dewer at the Circus Club at around six. When they were on their second vodka gimlet, Pinky used his cell phone to call his airline, at which point he learned his flight back to New York was canceled. Timothy would not give Katherine any details: neither the name of the airline, nor the cause of the canceled flight. Nothing for her to research, if the spirit moved her.

He continued building the story. So Pinky was trapped in the Bay Area. Timothy was upset, but he had no choice; Pinky was his largest investor, and he had to keep him entertained. So they left the Circus Club and traveled two miles down El Camino, from Atherton to Menlo Park, to the BBC. There they had a few more drinks. Finally, Pinky called his airline one more time and complained. Lo and behold, they found him a seat in first class. He raced out of the BBC and back to SFO to catch the flight.

It wasn't Timothy's best story, but it would do. There were a few weak spots, joists that didn't hang together, mortises that didn't fit. She would surely ask why Timothy didn't call her before heading over to the BBC. He thought about it, and then decided that his cell phone battery had, unluckily, died. He removed his cell phone from his jacket pocket, and – one-handed – opened the back battery compartment. The lithium block dropped into his lap. He put it in the BMW glove compartment. There, he thought. No more juice.

When he got off 101 at University Avenue it was a quarter to
nine. He sped through East Palo Alto, onto Waverly, and north into the Old Palo Alto neighborhood.

Five blocks later, he pulled into his driveway. Their yard was unkempt, with spiky brown ornamental grasses and wildflowers. Apricot trees stood on the left side of the house. It was an old 1930s Tudor, with high gables and thick half-timbers crisscrossing white stucco. The windows were tall and narrow, old-fashioned lead glass, beneath a steeply pitched roof.

Timothy raced up the slate garden path, through the grasses, and to the front door. The night was warm and dry. Crickets chirped in the yard. He rang the doorbell and started for his own keys. Moths fluttered around the entryway light. Timothy half expected Katherine to pull the door open even as he turned the key in the lock. But no one answered the door. Instead he pushed it open, and was greeted by an empty foyer.

He entered, closed the door. He flipped on the light switch. ‘Katherine?'

He listened for the sound of water running through the old pipes, a sign that maybe she was in the bedroom, showering. Nothing.

‘I'm home,' he called out.

He walked into the foyer, his heels clicking on the ceramic tile. Before moving in, they had gutted the interior and redone it in a modern style she favored but which he found cold and unwelcoming. A black lacquered table sat at the side of the foyer, displaying the abstract white sculpture she had bought in Big Sur.

‘Oh, Katherine?' he said, the first hint of worry creeping into his voice. This wasn't what he expected. He was accustomed to her pouncing on him immediately when he entered, to fending her off with hurried, breathless explanations. But now he was greeted by silence and darkness. It threw him off balance, and he felt like a Marine, on point, sensing an ambush.

But the ambush didn't come. He walked down the hall, turning on lights as he went. The only sounds were his own footsteps echoing off the plain white walls.

He climbed the carpeted stairs and walked into their bedroom.
She wasn't there. The big flat-screen television stood near the bed, mute and dark. Timothy peered into their master bathroom. Empty.

He wondered where she could have gone. He glanced at his watch. It was almost nine o'clock on a Monday night. She had said nothing about having plans. When they last spoke, she was lying in bed with a migraine. But now the bed was empty, neatly made.

He walked back downstairs into the kitchen and glanced at the refrigerator. Sometimes she left him a note there. But the refrigerator door was empty, a lone magnet (‘Think before you eat') askew on the metal.

He paced across the kitchen and out the rear door, which led to the garage. He turned on the garage light and descended three steps onto the concrete floor. Katherine's car, a two-year-old Lexus sedan, was gone.

He returned to the bedroom, called his cell phone voicemail, and then his office voicemail. The only message was from the Kid, who drunkenly explained that the yen had fallen to sixty-eight, but then started moving back up. He probably left the message after slinking out of the BBC, to show that he was still a team player, and that there were no hard feelings.

Timothy sat down at the foot of the bed and loosened his tie. He tried to think what this could mean. Only one thing: that Katherine suspected he was cheating and, angry, had stormed out of the house.

Her car was gone, so she had driven somewhere. Perhaps through the neighborhood, blowing off steam. Or maybe she had stopped at a girlfriend's house, where she was commiserating about how Timothy was a shit-head.

Timothy picked up the phone and called information, asked to be connected to Ann Beatty down the street. Ann was a forty-two-year-old divorcee who lived alone in the big house that used to belong to Apple Computer's CEO, Steve Jobs. Her husband, who had earned the money to buy the house, had been effectively transferred by a California divorce court to a small one-bedroom condo in San Jose, where the closest he now came to Steve Jobs
was passing the Apple billboard on Highway 101 during his one-hour commute to work.

‘Hello?' Ann Beatty said.

‘Ann, this is Timothy Van Bender, from down the street.'

‘Oh hi, Timothy.' Her voice could freeze water.

‘I'm sorry to call you so late. I'm looking for Katherine. I'm wondering if she's there.'

‘Your wife?' she said. He pictured her at the other end of the line, smiling bitterly. She had closely cropped graying hair and tiny eyes. She looked like a nun. He imagined the things that Katherine told her. Ann Beatty must hate me, he thought. He could hear contempt drip from her voice. ‘No,' she said. ‘I haven't seen her. In fact, I haven't seen her since you went to Big Sur. I hope everything's okay.'

The sing-song tone with which she hoped everything was okay indicated that she believed nothing was.

‘I'm sure everything is fine,' Timothy said. ‘Probably just got our wires crossed, that's all. Listen, if you see her, or if she calls, please tell her I'm at home waiting for her.'

‘I will, Timothy.'

‘Thank you, Ann.' He hung up.

He looked at the clock on his nightstand. It was ten past nine. He sat on the foot of the bed, waiting for his wife. He listened for the click of her heels on the slate path to the house; the tinkling of her keys in the front door; the sound of her voice echoing off the ceramic tiles in the foyer. But there were no sounds except for the crickets outside, and except for his breath, thin and ragged.

11

He slept fitfully, half-dreaming, and woke at seven o'clock in the morning. The sun streamed through the tall windows onto his face. He had not drawn the curtains.

When he opened his eyes, the events of the last night rushed back to him in a jumble, and for a moment he felt as if they too had been part of a dream. But then he looked to his left, at her side of the bed, and saw that Katherine was not there, that the bed was still made, and that he was sleeping on top of the covers.

He was hungover. He hadn't realized last night how much he'd drunk. First there was the afternoon at the Circus Club with Pinky, drinking vodka in the sun, and then the hour and a half at the BBC with Tricia and her friends – three Dalmores more.

He remembered what had happened with Tricia. How he followed her back to her apartment, with the upside down letter D on the door; how she climbed on top of him, unzipped his pants. He remembered that they had kissed. That her lipstick rubbed off onto his lips.

He stood up – too suddenly – and the room whirled around him. He sat back on the bed, took a breath, tried again to rise. He stumbled to the bathroom, looked in the mirror. As if he was in an old, bad soap opera, he saw lipstick stains on his collar. He took off his shirt, put the collar under the faucet and scrubbed it with a bar of soap until the lipstick vanished, then crumpled his shirt into a ball and threw it into the hamper.

He unzipped his pants, and, with one hand on his hip, urinated.

As he stood there, pissing, the phone rang. He stopped, snapped his underwear back up. Urine dribbled down his leg. He waddled across the bedroom with his pants bunched at his ankles, to the phone. He picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?'

‘Timothy,' she said. ‘It's me.' It was Katherine. She sounded far away, and there was noise in the background – a rhythmic static, rising and falling, alternating loud and soft.

‘Where are you?'

‘You have to listen to me. I need to tell you something.'

Timothy's stomach coiled into his throat. Could she know about last night? Was she leaving him? Had he destroyed his marriage of twenty years in a fit of craziness, a mistake, with a stupid secretary?

She continued. ‘I'm dying, Timothy. I don't have long.'

‘Dying?' He was confused. ‘What are you talking about?' Her words did not fit the neat story he had already constructed: Angry Wife Walks Out on Pathetic Cheating Husband.

‘I didn't want to tell you before. I didn't want to drive you away. I've known for a while.'

The only thing he could think to ask was: ‘Katherine, where are you?'

‘At Big Sur. Near the rocks.' And then: ‘It will be easier this way, you'll see.'

On the phone he heard the static, loud and soft, rising and falling. He finally understood the source of the noise. It was ocean crashing against the shore. ‘Better like what? What do you mean?' But, inside, he already knew the answer. A sick feeling grew, and he felt a wave of nausea sweep over him. He said weakly: ‘Katherine, what are you doing?'

‘I love you, Timothy. Everything will be okay. You'll see.'

‘Katherine, wait—'

She hung up the phone. ‘Katherine!' he tried to scream into the receiver, but it came out a hoarse croak. His heart pounded in his ears, and he tasted vomit at the back of his throat. He dropped the telephone and lunged across the room toward the bathroom, but couldn't make it. Vomit poured out of his mouth, a torrent of yellow mucus and phlegm and bile, splattering the hardwood floor. He stopped in the middle of the room, vomit dribbling from his chin, his hands clenched at his sides. He was powerless. In his whole life, forty years and seven, he had never felt like this, never felt so small, so little, so out of control, so helpless.

12

The Palo Alto Police Department sent an officer, Detective Neiderhoffer. Neiderhoffer was short and muscular, a little plug of a man, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a black caterpillar mustache.

Palo Alto property taxes bought the best services in San Mateo County, including: a city-owned cable TV franchise which, in addition to delivering HBO and Showtime, also dug up city sidewalks and ran a fiber-optic T1 cable to any home that requested it; the only city-owned electricity generating co-op in the country; and a suburban police department whose officers called citizens
customers
and which annually surveyed city residents to determine its ‘customer satisfaction score.'

Detective Alexander ‘Ned' Neiderhoffer had been promoted twice in four years – and had seen his pay rise from forty-five thousand to eighty thousand dollars per year – largely because he knew how to keep his customers satisfied. He followed two simple rules: he always said, ‘sir' and ‘ma'am,' and he treated every citizen that he spoke to as if that person were a millionaire, because, odds on, they were.

Neiderhoffer arrived at the Van Bender house and Timothy led him to the kitchen. The policeman sat down at the table, but Timothy paced back and forth in front of the patio doors. He stared through the glass into the backyard, as if Katherine might come walking through the yellow sedge at any moment, with sand on her shins, dripping seaweed.