"Yes we do. We absolutely have to be totally adult. We have to walk around as if everything is normal. This is not normal. I mean, it isn't like I'm saying it's abnormal in the sense of-you know."

"Like making it with a goat."

Kirsten said, "I wonder if there's a word for it ... making it with an Episcopal bishop. Bishopric. Tim told me that word."

"Bishop prick?"

"No, bishop ric. You're not pronouncing it right." We had to hold onto each other to keep from falling; neither of us could stop laughing. "It's the place he lives or something. Oh, God." She wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes. "Always be sure you pronounce it bishop ric. This is terrible. We really are going to go to hell, straight to hell. You know what he let me do?" Kirsten leaned close to me to whisper in my ear. "I tried on some of his robes and his miter; you know, the shovel hat. The first lady bishop."

"You may not be the first."

"I looked great. I looked better than he does. I want you to see. We're getting an apartment. For Christ's sake, don't say anything about this part especially, but he's paying for it out of his Discretionary Fund."

"Church money?" I stared at her.

"Listen." Kirsten looked solemn again, but she could not maintain her expression; she hid her face in her hands.

"Isn't that illegal?" I said.

"No, it's not illegal. That's why it's called the Bishop's Discretionary Fund; he gets to do with it what he wants. I'm going to go to work for him as-we haven't decided, but some kind of general secretary, like a booking agent or something, to handle all the speeches and traveling he does. His business affairs. I can still stay on with the organization ... FEM, I mean." She was silent a moment and then she said, "The problem is going to be Bill. I can't tell him because he's nuts again. I shouldn't say that. Deep autistic fugal withdrawal with impaired ideation compounded with delusions of reference, plus alternating catatonic stupor and excitement. He's down at Hoover Pavilion, at Stanford. Mostly for diagnosis. In terms of diagnosis, they're the best on the West Coast. They use something like four psychiatrists for diagnosis, three from the hospital itself and one from outside."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"The Army thing did it. Anxiety about being drafted. They accused him of malingering. Well, I guess it's part of life. He had to drop out of school anyhow. He would have had to drop school anyhow, is what I'm trying to say. His episodes always begin the same way-he starts crying and he doesn't take out the trash. The crying part doesn't bother me; it's the goddamn trash. It just piles up, trash and garbage. And he doesn't bathe. And he stays in his apartment. And he doesn't pay his utility bills, so they cut off his gas and electricity. And he starts writing letters to the White House. This is one area Tim and I haven't discussed. I really don't discuss it with very many people. So I would estimate that I can keep our affair-my affair with Tim-secret because I've had practice keeping things secret. No, pardon me; it doesn't begin with him crying-it begins with him not being able to drive his car. Driving phobia; he's afraid he'll veer off the road. First it has to do with the Eastshore Freeway and then it spreads to all the other streets, and then he winds up afraid to walk to the store, so as a result he can't shop for food. But that doesn't matter because by that time he isn't eating anything anyhow." She lapsed into silence. "There's a Bach cantata about it," she said finally, and I saw her try to smile. "A line in the 'Coffee Cantata.' About having trouble with your children. They're a hundred thousand miseries, something like that. Bill used to play the goddamn thing. Few people know Bach wrote a cantata about coffee, but he did."

We walked in silence.

"It sounds as if-" I said.

"It's schizophrenia. They use him to try out every new phenothiazine that comes along. He goes in cycles, but the cycles get worse. He's sick longer and he's more sick. I shouldn't have brought it up; it's not your problem."

"I don't mind."

Kirsten said, "Maybe Tim can effect a deep spiritual cure. Didn't Jesus cure mentally ill people?"

"He sent the evil spirits into a bunch of pigs," I said. "And they all rushed over a cliff."

"That seems like a waste," Kirsten said.

"They may have eaten them anyhow."

"Not if they were Jews. Anyhow, who would want to eat a pork chop that had an evil spirit in it? I shouldn't joke about this, but-I will talk to Tim about it. But not for a while. I think Bill got it from me. I'm screwed up, God knows. I'm screwed up and I screwed him up. I keep looking at Jeff and noticing the difference between them; they're about the same age and Jeff has such a good grip on reality."

"Don't bet on it," I said.

Kirsten said, "When Bill gets out of the hospital, I'd like him to meet Tim. I'd like him to meet your husband, in fact; they never have met, have they?"

"No," I said. "But if you think Jeff can serve as a role model, I'm really not-"

"Bill has very few friends. He's not outgoing. I've talked about you and your husband; you're both his age."

Thinking about it, I perceived down the pipe of time Kirsten's lunatic son messing up our lives. That thought surprised me. It was utterly devoid of charity and it had in it an essence of fear. I knew my husband and I knew myself. Neither of us was ready to take on the job of amateur therapy. Kirsten, however, was an organizer. She organized people into doing things, good things but things not necessarily to their own benefit.

I had, at that instant, a keen intuition that I was being hustled. At the Bad Luck, I had essentially witnessed Bishop Archer and Kirsten Lundborg hustle each other in an intricate transaction, but it was, apparently, a transaction that benefited them both, or anyhow they both thought so. This, with her son Bill, looked to me like a purely one-way matter. I didn't see what we had to gain.

"Let me know when he's out," I said. "But I think that Tim, because of his professional training, would be a better-"

"But there's the age difference. And you get the element of the father-figure."

"Maybe that would be good. Maybe that's what your son needs."

Glaring at me, Kirsten said, "I've done an excellent job of raising Bill. His father walked out of our lives and never looked back."

"I didn't mean-"

"I know what you meant." Kirsten stared at me, and now, really, she had changed; she was angry and I could see hatred on her face. It made her look older. It made her look, in fact, physically ill. She had a bloated quality and I felt uncomfortable. I thought, then, of the pigs that Jesus had cast the evil spirits into, the pigs that rushed over the cliff. This is what you do when an evil spirit inhabits you, I thought. This is the sign, this look: the stigma. Maybe your son did inherit it from you.

But now we had an altered situation. Now she was my father-in-law's pro tern lover, potentially his mistress. I couldn't tell Kirsten to go fuck herself. She was family-in an illegal and unethical way. I was stuck with her. All of the curses of family, I thought, and none of the blessings. And I arranged it. The idea of introducing her and Tim had been mine. Bad karma, I thought, come back from the other side of the barn. As my father used to say.

Standing there in the grass near the San Francisco Bay, in the midafternoon sunlight, I felt uncomfortable. This is really in some respects a reckless and savage person, I said to myself. She dabbles in the life of a famous and respected man; she has a psychotic son; pins bristle from her as from an animal. Bishop Archer's future depends on Kirsten not flying into a rage one day and phoning up the Chronicle-his future depends on her unending goodwill.