After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport. While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the museum's exhibits, hoping the list would give him a feeling of accomplishment. He couldn't deal with the exhibits themselves, their exhausting informativeness, their cheerful prose-for-the-masses. THE GOLDEN AGE OF STEAM POWER. THE DAWN OF FLIGHT. A CENTURY OF AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY Block after block of taxing text. What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed. Happily filling their misshapen heads with facts. As if facts were going to save them! Not one woman half as pretty or as well dressed as Caroline. Not one other man with a decent haircut or an abdomen as flat as Gary's. But, like Alfred, like Enid, they were all extremely deferential. They didn't jostle Gary or cut in front of him but waited until he'd drifted to the next exhibit. Then they gathered round and read and learned. God, he hated the Midwest! He could hardly breathe or hold his head up. He thought he might be getting sick. He took refuge in the museum's gift shop and bought a silver belt buckle, two engravings of old Midland Pacific trestles, and a pewter hip flask (all for himself), a deerskin wallet (for Aaron), and a CD-ROM Civil War game (for Caleb).

"You haven't said a sympathetic word since I hurt my back."

"Because you're lying about how you hurt it," Gary said.

"My God. Again?"

"Two hours of soccer and horseplay in the rain, that's not the problem. It's the ringing phone."

"Yes," Caroline said. "Because your mother won't spend ten cents to leave a message. She has to let it ring three times and then hang up, ring three times and then hang up--"

"It has nothing to do with anything you did," Gary said. "It's my mom! She magically flew here and kicked you in the back because she wants to hurt you!"

"After listening to it ring and stop and ring and stop all afternoon, I'm a nervous wreck."

"Caroline, I saw you limping before you ran inside. I saw the look on your face. Don't tell me you weren't in pain already."

"The truth," Caroline said, "is that forty-eight hours sounds just about right to me. I don't want my children looking back on Christmas as the time when everybody screamed at each other. Which basically seems to be unavoidable now. Your mother walks in the door with three hundred sixty days' worth of Christmas mania, she's been obsessing since the previous January, and then, of course, Where's that Austrian reindeer figurine—don I you like it? Don't you use it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is the Austrian reindeer figurine? She's got her food obsessions, her money obsessions, her clothes obsessions, she's got the whole ten-piece set of baggage which my husband used to agree is kind of a problem, but now suddenly, out of the blue, he's taking her side. We're going to turn the house inside out looking for a piece of thirteen-dollar gift- store kitsch because it has sentimental value to your mother—"

Each failed overture of peace made the next overture less likely to succeed. Before long, what at first glance had seemed to Gary an absurd possibility—that the till of their marriage no longer contained sufficient funds of love and goodwill to cover the emotional costs that going to St. Jude entailed for Caroline or that not going to St. Jude entailed for him—assumed the contours of something terribly actual. He began to hate Caroline simply for continuing to fight with him. He hated the newfound reserves of independence she tapped in order to resist him. Especially, devastatingly hateful was her hatred of him. He could have ended the crisis in a minute if all he'd had to do was forgive her; but to see mirrored in her eyes how repellent she found him—it made him crazy, it poisoned his hope.

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary—of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively _un_cool?

Well, there was still the citizenry of America's heartland: St. Judean minivan drivers thirty and forty pounds overweight and sporting pastel sweats, pro-life bumper stickers, Prussian hair. But Gary in recent years had observed, with plate-tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts. (He was part of this exodus himself, of course, but he'd made his escape early, and, frankly, priority had its privileges.) At the same time, all the restaurants in St. Jude were suddenly coming up to European speed (suddenly cleaning ladies knew from sun- dried tomatoes, suddenly hog farmers knew from creme brulee), and shoppers at the mall near his parents' house had an air of entitlement offputtingly similar to his own, and the electronic consumer goods for sale in St. Jude were every bit as powerful and cool as those in Chestnut Hill. Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity—

He raised his eyes to the intensity of whiteness that marked the sun's proximity to a corner of the office tower. The beds of mums and begonias and liriope all around him were like bikinied extras in a music video, planted in full blush of perfection and fated to be yanked again before they had a chance to lose petals, acquire brown spots, drop leaves. Gary had always enjoyed corporate gardens as backdrops for the pageant of privilege, as metonymies of pamperment, but it was vital not to ask too much of them. It was vital not to come to them in need.

A year ago, over lunch, Gary had told her about a married "friend" of his (actually a colleague, Jay Pascoe) who was having an affair with his daughters' piano teacher. Gary said that he could understand his friend's recreational interest in the affair (Pascoe had no intention of leaving his wife) but that he didn't see why the piano teacher was bothering.

"So you can't imagine," Denise said, "why a woman would want to have an affair with you?"

"I'm not talking about me," Gary said.

"But you're married and you have kids."

"I'm saying I don't understand what the woman sees in a guy she knows to be a liar and a sneak."

"Probably she disapproves of liars and sneaks in general," Denise said. "But she makes an exception for the guy she's in love with."

"So it's a kind of self-deception."

"No, Gary, it's the way love works."

Gary knew that he'd broken the sibling code of honor. But he was glad he'd broken it. He was glad Denise was taking heat again from Enid. He felt surrounded, imprisoned, by disapproving women.

There was, of course, one obvious way of breaking free: he could say yes instead of no to one of the dozen secretaries and female pedestrians and sales clerks who in any given week took note of his height and his schist- gray hair, his calfskin jacket and his French mountaineering pants, and looked him in the eye as if to say The key's under the doormat. But there was still no pussy on earth he'd rather lick, no hair he'd rather gather in his fist like a golden silk bellpull, no gaze with which he'd rather lock his own at climax, than Caroline's. The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.

Depressed? He was not depressed. Vital signs of the rambunctious American economy streamed numerically across his many-windowed television screen. Orfic Midland up a point and three-eighths for the day. The U. S. dollar laughing at the euro, buggering the yen. Virginia Lin dropped in and proposed selling a block of Exxon at 104. Gary could see out across the river to the floodplain landscape of Camden, New Jersey, whose deep ruination, from this height and distance, gave the impression of a kitchen floor with the linoleum scraped off. The sun was"rroud in the south, a source of relief; Gary couldn't stand it when his parents came east and the eastern seaboard's weather stank. The same sun was shining on their cruise ship now, somewhere north of Maine. In a corner of his TV screen was the talking head of Curly Eberle. Gary upsized the picture and raised the sound as Eberle concluded: "A body-building machine for the brain, that's not a bad image, Cindy." The all-business-all-the-time anchors, for whom financial risk was merely the boon companion of upside potential, nodded sagely in response. "Body-building machine for the brain, ho-kay," the female anchor segued, "and coming up, then, a toy that's all the rage in Belgium (!) and its maker says this product could be bigger than the Beanie Babies!" Jay Pascoe dropped in to kvetch about the bond market. Jay's little girls had a new piano teacher now and the same old mother. Gary caught about one word of every three Jay spoke. His nerves were jangling as on the long-ago afternoon before his fifth date with Caroline, when they were so ready to finally be unchaste that each intervening hour was like a granite block to be broken by a shackled prisoner ...

Caroline didn't look up when he returned to the kitchen. He might have wondered if he'd hallucinated her panicked calls to him if there were not a lingering humidity in his boxer shorts and if, during his thirty seconds in the basement, she hadn't thrown the dead bolt on the back door, engaged the chain, and reset the alarm.

He, of course, was mentally ill, whereas she! She!

"Good Christ," he said as he punched their wedding date into the numeric keypad.