Mohawk

point.”
    “Come here,” he says, reaching for her hand. But Milly calls again, this time more audibly, and Diana turns away. On impulse he grabs a blue-green decorator pillow and flings it the length of the hall in pursuit of his wife; it lands at her feet. “You forgot something.”
    Dan Wood struggles into his windbreaker and wheels outside. The pool, now drained, is a gaping concrete maw in the center of his backyard, a few brittle leaves stirring near the drain. He watches them energetically dance and swirl up the turquoise sides of the pool before sliding back down to await another gust. It occurs to him that he had allowed himself to get more keyed up over the operation than he should’ve. The resulting disappointment was as slow and subtle in coming as the realization that, yes, once again he’d somehow gotten his hopes up. His grip on reality had always been a point of pride with him, and he felt a little like a backsliding AA member for losing that grip. Hope was a luxury he could not afford—a cruelty, really.
    He didn’t need anyone to tell him what the problemwas. He hadn’t even seriously considered further operations until Anne’s return to Mohawk. But seeing her again had recalled him from the comforting numbness that had made life bearable. Naturally, she didn’t realize this. She was too kind to steal the anesthetic knowingly, and he couldn’t think of a way to explain to her, even if he wanted to. And he didn’t want to, not really. Even pain was preferable to numbness, at least for a while, and hope, once indulged, was only as delicious as it was short-lived.
    He should’ve realized that it would be dangerous. From the beginning, everything about Anne had been risk. She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time. Never wantonly playing the part of temptress, she, nevertheless, remained his personal temptation. “I will never say I don’t love you,” she once told him. “I’ll be as circumspect as you need me to be. We won’t talk about what you want to avoid. But I will love you and go on loving you, and you’ll have to live with that much, whether it embarrasses you or not.”
    In the beginning he had not believed she could be so circumspect. Neither Diana nor anyone else could have inferred anything between them from her behavior. Ironically, there were times when Diana probably suspected that her husband was partly in love with Anne, but only because Anne was so lovely that any sensible man would be in love with her, at least a little.
    There was no way to know if Diana resented her cousin, no way to read what Diana wanted to remain a closed text. It was perhaps the oddest thing about his wife that she could be so open about her delights yet so secretive about her wounds, always retreating intosome dark inner place to nurse herself back to health rather than admit to having been injured or reveal the scar. At her center was a code, something formulated when she was so young that the reason for it was long forgotten, a code that governed her most intimate thoughts and behavior and made her so fundamentally decent that she could never be otherwise. If Dan both admired and regretted any single quality in his wife, it was this profound spiritual stability.
    And perhaps it was its lack in Anne Grouse that qualified her as his personal temptress. At her center was not law but profound lawlessness. Its initial revelation had left him stunned, excited, afraid—because it corresponded to something he had long suspected in himself. Her physical beauty seemed to him an expression of this inner wildness and was perhaps the reason Anne had changed so little since the night he had returned through the black woods to the lakeshore, moving quietly, holding his breath, until he stumbled over Dallas, passed out in his own mess, and finally found Anne, drying herself in the sliver of moon. She alone had remained unchanged throughout the years, when he himself had been reduced and Diana had been worn away by the friction of nearly constant giving. Even Dallas seemed diminished, as the already narrow circle of his experience and desire had tightened around him. But neither time nor childbirth nor disappointment seemed to have touched Anne, whose daily existence, the undeniable reality of it, seemed unconnected to that inner life, which remained as feral and hopeful as ever.
    He had stayed away as long as he could, as if the