So many nights after Nick left I’d just get into the Bonneville and drive. I’d drive up the coast and down the coast and I was always looking for that gray Honda. Most of the time I knew he was far away, though sometimes I pictured him living in a neighborhood less than ten miles from Bisgrove Street, playing bass in a band maybe, living alone or with a twenty-year-old girl who had no intention of saddling him with kids, saddling him with anything. I’d still feel a little sick whenever I thought of him with somebody else, but I was sure if he was with anybody, she had to be young enough he could mold her into what he wanted. He was such a chickenshit. And I didn’t even know this until he’d been gone almost two months. I got the insight while I watched a rented movie. That’s what I did almost every night, right up until Deputy Lester Burdon showed up to evict me. I’d rent two or three movies and watch them back to back. Sometimes I’d even start in the late afternoon. Including weekends I averaged close to twenty a week. I knew how addictive this might look to anyone back in the program, or in RR, but I wasn’t putting anything into my body, not even cigarettes then, so I rationalized there was no real Enemy Voice to accuse of malice, was there?

It was a porno I grabbed from the adult section and slipped in with two PG-13s. I read once that over ninety-five percent of men masturbate while only forty-six percent of women do, and I’d always thought I was somewhere on the borderline; I did it once every few months, not enough to ever miss. But when I put in the videocassette and heard the electric moan of the recorder pulling the tape along I was already wet and there was still daylight outside, so I went around and pulled all the shades, turned off the light in the kitchen, then sat on the floor as the credits came up yellow with names like Fiona Lace and John Rod and before they were over a young blond girl was on her knees sucking off a tanned Italian in a shirt, tie, and suspenders. I had seen skin flicks before, but not many, usually at parties where I was too loaded to see, so I was a little surprised when they started to fuck and I didn’t feel like unzipping my jeans. Instead I sat back against the couch with my ankles and arms crossed and watched as the man directed the blonde to do this and to do that, to bend over his desk so he could spread her cheeks and enter her from behind. Then I pictured my husband jerking off to this and I felt my stomach and insides get pulled down a second, and I jabbed the eject button and flung the tape behind me without looking.

I went outside to my backyard. It was March then, and chilly. The ground was hard and I stared at it. Nicky was a good lover. He didn’t fuck like those men. He didn’t direct me like a rag doll to probe. It had always seemed mutual to me. But what was so clear to me for the first time was this: when all was said and done, Nick Lazaro had to have total control.

It was close to noon and the sun was getting too hot on my legs and face. I stood and brushed the sand off, and after a fast-food lunch of a fish sandwich and Diet Coke, I drove back to the storage lot to look for that signed tax statement again. But there were no air vents in the shed, and even with the doors swung wide open, it was so hot in there my tank top and shorts were stuck to my skin in just a few minutes and my throat needed another cold drink. I padlocked the door, put the air conditioner on in the car, and just started driving. I was kicking myself for not taking a shower before checking out of the El Rancho. I turned into a gas station, filled the tank on my gas card, and gave myself a cat bath from the sink in the ladies’ room. Then I changed into a clean cotton pullover, bought more cigarettes, and drove twelve miles south on 101 to the mall Cineplex. There were ten movie theaters there and I was planning to sit the afternoon away in at least three of them.

I DO NOT KNOW IF IT WAS THE GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE MY NADI DRANK, or if it was because Esmail had fallen asleep early before his television in his room, or if it was simply the joyful news of the real estate appraiser who I hired to come here yesterday, the news I thank God for and cannot yet believe, that this bungalow is worth four times what I paid for it and the appraiser sees no difficulty in our finding a buyer for it, especially with the new widow’s walk that will overlook the sea. Perhaps it was that, or the new cassette player I purchased for her at Japantown in San Francisco late yesterday afternoon, I do not know. Man nehmee doonam. All I can be certain of is yesterday God kissed our eyes, and last evening my wife invited me to her room for only the third time in the years we have lived in America.

We lay together in the darkness listening to a new cassette of a singer reciting the rubaiyats of Fayez Dashtestani. Behind this a man softly played the ney, a shepherd’s flute, and soon she pulled me to her and it was almost too much; I felt I was a young man again, lying with my new bride. Nadi held my back so tightly and I saw again my father on our wedding day carrying the fat sheep to the doorway of our new home. It was summer and very hot and because of the west wind there was dust upon our fine clothes. My father wore a suit of black, and his forehead and cheeks were shining with sweat as he carried the sheep under his left arm, the long knife in his right hand, and he knelt and held the sheep at the open doorway, the sheep beginning to bleat, struggling and kicking beneath my father’s weight, Nadi squeezing my hand in both of hers as my father pushed the blade deep into the sheep’s throat, pulling it free, letting the blood fall onto the threshold of our new home, Nadi’s father squatting and rubbing the blood into the wood with his fingers, behind us the women and men clapping and a hot wind blowing over us all, Nadi’s breath upon my neck, the crowd pushing us into the dark house past the dying sheep, its rear legs twitching and jerking in the dust.

The shepherd’s flute continued. My wife moved to rest my face upon her shoulder and she rubbed her fingers gently on the skin of my head as if I were her own child.

Soon the music ended and she was asleep, but I could not sleep. I went to Esmail’s room and turned off the television, then I covered him with his sheet. Even curled there, his body took up nearly all the bed. He is growing so quickly, faster than did his sister Soraya, that standing before him in my robe, I felt proud and frightened all at the same moment.

And now I wake upon the living-room sofa just before the sun and I feel a sadness that I did not stay in bed with Nadereh, for I do not know if last evening will come again anytime soon. And I remember Soraya when she was a girl. Her legs were long and thin and brown, and her mother forever had her wearing a pretty dress of some kind. One evening upon my return home, when she had no more than seven or eight years, I remember my daughter stepping out onto the rear veranda to greet me. I heard her laughing and I looked up from the auto and saw her standing at attention in her yellow dress, her tiny knees barely touching one another, wearing the visored hat from my old sarvan’s uniform. The captain’s hat was of course so large it fell forward and covered her eyes and I remember that lovely gap between her two front teeth as she laughed and saluted, even though she could not see me or anything else.

She is now a man’s wife. At this thought I rise from the couch, dress, and take my tea outside to the rear lawn. The tall grass is slightly wet and it begins to itch my bare feet as I walk around the bungalow with my hot cup. It is still quite early. Stars are visible in the sky. Today the young najar begins construction of the widow’s walk, and I do not know if it was perhaps a mistake to begin advertising the sale of the home before the job is complete. I lower my eyes to the dark woodland across the road and I stop still, for parked there beside the trees is the appraiser’s red automobile. I feel a sudden lightness in my chest and a heaviness in my legs; I am certain he has driven here to inform me it is all a mistake, this bungalow is not worth anything. But as I step over the hard cool road I am embarrassed at my fear, at my doubt; the car is quite new-looking and not the appraiser’s at all, and of course he would not drive out for business at so very early in the morning. Pourat many times told to me I was not a man of faith and of course I was forced to agree with him. It is why I am forever expecting disaster around the corner from God’s smile.