"You'd tell Cesaria you suggested it?"

I sighed. "If I must" I said.

"Then that's settled. I'll go talk to Alice now."

"Just give me a little warning. So I can organize myself."

"I'm excited."

"Oh Lord. I don't like the sound of that."

Of course I'm regretting it. Who wouldn't? The best it can be is a fiasco. But what else was I going to do? This obviously isn't some overnight romance. Marietta feels something profound for this woman. I can see it in her eyes. I can hear it in her voice. And it would be hypocritical of me to be writing with such enthusiasm about the grand-if stymied-passion between Rachel and Galilee and at the same time turn a blind eye to something that's happening right in front of me.

Anyway, I've agreed. The woman will come to us and we'll see what we'll see.

Meanwhile, I have a story to tell.

The Central Park apartment was deserted when Rachel got back from her expedition to the Trump Tower. Even so, she didn't sit down at the dining room table and open the two envelopes she'd found, just in case somebody were to walk in on her. She went to her bedroom, where she locked the door and drew the drapes. Only then did she sit cross-legged on the bed to examine her booty.

In the less bulky of the two envelopes she found the letters and the photographs. Danny was quite the eroticist, to judge by what he'd written. His concern that if these letters had fallen into the wrong hands they might be used to besmirch Margie was well founded. There were dates and times and locations here; there were heated reminiscences of deeds done and boastful promises of how much more intricate it was going to get next time. Nor was any of this put in a roundabout way. "We're going to have to start fucking in a soundproof room," he said in one of the letters, "the way you like to shout. I'm sitting here hard as

a rock thinking about you yelling your head off, and me just sliding in and out, long strokes, the way you like. There isn 't a thing I wouldn 't do for you, you know that? When we 're together I feel as though the rest of the world can just go to hell-we don't need anybody but each other. I wish I could have been a baby, sometimes, and drunk the milk from your beautiful tits. Or been born out of you. Fuck, I know that sounds twisted, but you said we shouldn 't be afraid of any of the things we feel, right? I'd like to fuck you so deep I get lost inside you, and you 'd carry me around for a while, like I was your baby. Then when you wanted me out and giving you the nasty you 'd just open your legs and out I'd come, all ready to service you."

The photographs were not as graphic as the letters, by any means, but they were still notably perverse. Danny was obviously proud of his endowment, and quite happy to have it recorded for posterity, while Margie's sense of humor was evident in the way she toyed with him. In one photograph she had drawn on his lower belly and upper thighs with lipstick; flames perhaps, as though his groin was on fire. In another, he was coupling with her while wearing her pantyhose, through which his dick stuck, ripe cherry red. All good old-fashioned fun.

Rachel called Danny at home and told him the good news. He was just about to go down to the bar to start his shift, but he was happy to call in sick and come and pick the letters and photographs up immediately if that suited Rachel best. She told him not to do anything that would make people even faintly suspicious. The stuff was quite safe in her possession, she said. They could meet when Danny's shift was over, at midnight or so, and she could give everything to him then. They agreed on a meeting place, two blocks north of the bar where Danny worked.

That duty done, she turned her attention to the contents of the other envelope. She was expecting to find further evidence of Margie's philanderings; but what she found was something else entirely. It was a journal, clothbound and in an advanced state of disrepair, its cover stained and torn, its spine cracked, its pages loosened from their stitching. A thin brown leather strap had been tied around it to keep its contents together: when she untied it she discovered that several separate sheets of paper had been interleaved with the journal's pages. Their condition varied wildly. There were a few neatly folded, and well preserved, there were others that were little more than scraps. What was written on the sheets similarly ran the gamut: from perfect copperplate to a chaotic scrawl. Some were letters, some seemed to be fragments of a sermon (at least there was much talk of God and redemption there); some were crudely illustrated, their subjects always the same: soldiers, in what looked to be Civil War garb. There was no form of identification at the beginning of the book-indeed it seemed to start in midsentence-but when she flipped on through it she found that the first four or five pages had come loose at some point, and the owner had slipped them into the middle of the book. On the first page was an inscription written in an elegant, feminine hand.

This is for your thoughts, my darling Charles.

Bring it back to me when this horrid war is over, and we'll put it away, and put all the suffering away with it.

I love you more than life, and will show my love a thousand ways when you are here again.

Your adoring wife,

Adina

Below this, the date: September the Second, 1863

So they were Civil War soldiers in the sketches, Rachel thought. This journal had belonged to some military man who'd used it to record experiences as he went to battle. She knew little about the war between the states; history had never been a subject she'd warmed to. Especially when it was brutal; and what little she did remember of her lessons about the period concerned the cruelties that had brought the war about and the cruelties that had ended it. There had been nothing to engage her sympathies, so whatever dates and names she'd learned had quickly fled from her head.

But a history book and a journal such as this were very different things. One was filled with facts, to be learned parrot-fashion. The other had a voice, a drama, a sense of the specific. In a short time, she found herself entranced, not by the details of what was being described-much of it was a forlorn catalog of woes and privations: inedible food, dying animals, long, exhausting marches, foot rot and gut "rot and lice-but the tangible presence of the man who was doing the describing, his self-portrait becoming more detailed, line by line. He loved his wife, he had faith in God and in the cause of the South, he hated Lincoln (a "damned hypocrite") and almost all Northerners ("they pretend righteousness because it suits them"); he liked his horse better than most of the men he commanded, and yet seemed to feel their hardship more than his own.

Isn 't there a better way to settle our differences, he wrote, than to put before the bullet and the bayonet common men such as these, who have no true comprehension of what is at issue here, nor in truth care to, but only want to have this bloody business done so that they can return to doing what the Lord made them to do: to plow and drink and die surrounded by their children and their children's children.

When I hear them talking among themselves they don't talk of politics and the greatness of our cause: they talk about clean water and strawberry pie. What is the use of putting such simple souls to death? Better that we chose ten princes of the South, and ten gentlemen of the North, if they could find that number, and set them in a field with swords, to

fight until there was only one remaining. Let the victory go to that side then, and spill only the blood of nineteen men, instead of this wholesale slaughter, which so grievously wounds the body of the nation.