The reading promised to be a huge success. They had sent out the announcements, and one hundred tickets had been ordered already. Frederick Barrow himself, though he wrote turbulent, wrenching books, turned out to be as tranquil a man as Annie had ever met. They went for drinks to discuss the event, drinks somehow became dinner, and dinner led to after-dinner drinks at Bemelman's Bar. They walked together up Fifth Avenue past the closed museums and the dark forest of Central Park at night. They walked and walked in the windy night, quoting Shakespeare like undergraduates and holding hands.

Never, Annie thought, have I regretted an evening as a librarian less. This mood lasted for weeks. Then Frederick Barrow joined the library and began to use it for his research, which led to more lunches, more dinners, and considerably more quotation. Indeed, on the day that Annie and Miranda left their stepfather in tears and retreated to a cafe to drink tea, Annie was planning to have dinner with Frederick.

"He's so handsome in his author photos," Miranda said.

"They're not terribly recent. His hair is almost white now. I think writers should keep their photos up-to-date. When he does finally use a new one, it will be a terrible shock to his readers. They'll think he's been ill."

"Good God, Annie."

Miranda's cell phone gave a plaintive cry, and she checked a text message, frowned, and swore beneath her breath. "Where does he live, anyway?" she said as she typed into the cell phone. "These fuckers." She put the phone away. "So? Where?" It was important to Miranda that Frederick Barrow be a New Yorker. It would not do anyone any good if he lived in San Francisco or taught at the University of Iowa.

"He's been in Berlin for the past year — that's where I first got in touch with him."

"Oh, Berlin!" Miranda, in her enthusiasm for a city she found endlessly fascinating, forgot for a moment that she wanted Frederick to live nearby. "Wonderful."

"But I think he actually lives in Massachusetts. Cape Cod? He's been staying with his kids in the city."

Massachusetts was not bad. Miranda nodded in approval. She'd had a boyfriend in college who went to Harvard while she went to Barnard. There was a good train, and Miranda liked trains. A train felt fast, faster than a car, faster even than a plane, and the illusion of speed was almost as important to Miranda as was speed itself. She became bored and impatient easily, but had found that anything framed by a train window could hold her attention, as if the undersides and back ends and rusty corners of dying cities were episodes of a rough, rousing life flashing by. She had ended up detesting the Harvard boyfriend, Scarsdale Nick, as she used to call him, but the train had never disappointed her. No, Frederick Barrow in Massachusetts was not bad at all.

"He is still pretty good-looking," Annie said. "He wears nice old tweed jackets."

Annie's tone was serious and full of warmth. Miranda gave a snort.

"What?" Annie said.

"Ha!"

"You're crazy."

"I know what I know," Miranda said.

As the weeks wore on, the marriage mediation sessions began. Betty and Joseph went to an office oddly situated in Chelsea.

"Where did you find out about this woman?" Betty asked.

"Referral."

"This is a very dumpy office," Betty whispered. They had walked down the narrow stairs of a decrepit brownstone to what was the basement level. "This was called the English basement when they first started doing them in New York. Nineteenth century. Very Upstairs, Downstairs, don't you think? Do you remember when Annie hired a carpenter she found in the Village Voice classifieds? Did you find this woman in the Village Voice classifieds, honey? Those bookcases tilted terribly."

A small dumpy woman appeared at the door to an inner dumpy office. She had full, poorly cut salt-and-pepper hair. She was, Betty noticed, wearing space shoes.

"Are those back?" she asked the woman. "They were very popular in the fifties. Our dentist wore them."

The mediator did not smile. But she did hold out her hand and introduce herself. Her name was Nina Britsky. A matzoh-punim, Betty thought, feeling sad for her.

The office was small and crowded with piles of bulging folders. It resembled a closet, really — the bulging file closet. The mediator sat on a complicated ergonomic chair and placed her feet on a small stool that was on rockers. So much specialized equipment, Betty thought, just to listen to Joseph and me disagree.

Nina Britsky opened her laptop and began to type and speak.

Betty did not hear much of what she said. The initial barrage of New Age pop-psychological platitudes delivered in a hoarse Bronx accent immediately told Betty that daydreaming would be the most polite response. And Nina Britsky looked so much like a chimpanzee curled on her ergonomic chair: her coarse cap of hair; her lips pursed in contemplation, then opening wide to reveal large teeth. Betty imagined herself in a dark chimpanzee cave, though she did not believe, now that she thought of it, that chimpanzees slept in caves. Surely they slept in trees. But the room was almost as dark as a cave. Perhaps there was a divorce mediation lighting theory: if the two people could no longer see each other, they would leave each other more easily. The woman was probably just trying to keep her electricity bills down, and who could blame her? Betty had just begun changing over to the new energy-saving bulbs herself. They were so pretty, twisting and turning, like old-fashioned filaments...

"It's good there's no child custody involved," the woman was saying. She typed importantly on her laptop. "In these cases, that can get pretty ugly."

"These cases?" Betty said. "In all cases, I would think."

"Well, it can be much worse in same-sex cases."

"But Joseph and I are not the same sex," Betty explained gently.

Joseph was squirming a bit, she noticed.

"Are we, Joseph?"

"I was referring to the third party," Nina Britsky said.

"There is no third party," Joseph said hurriedly.

"And if there were, I don't think it would be a man," Betty said.

"Well, I assumed it was a woman," Nina Britsky said, throwing Betty a pointed look. "A same-sex woman," she added, to Betty's further confusion. "Why else would you come to me?"

It was only after they had been handed pamphlets inviting them to a support group — My Spouse's Closet Anonymous or MYSPCL, pronounced like bicycle — and left the office in a dull daze that Betty asked Joseph exactly who it was who had referred the ergonomic chimpanzee.

"Because, Joseph, she seems a rather specialized mediator."

Joseph said, "That was a disaster. Let's go get dinner."

"Look at her card: For couples seeking divorce when women seek women. It could be a classified ad in The Village Voice, couldn't it? Maybe she'll build us a crooked bookcase."

Joseph couldn't help laughing. Betty had always made him laugh.

"You're so funny," he said.

Betty burst into tears. 

2

It was around this time that Miranda made her infamous appearance on Oprah. It was all a blur at the time — being led from a room full of snacks she was far too nervous to eat, stepping over cables, stepping onto a stage, sitting on a sofa, the sound of applause, the radiance and confidence of the woman across from her, some questions, some answers... How could she have let this happen? Didn't she check up on the stories the writers told her? Couldn't she see? Didn't she care?...

She felt like a corrupt politician stonewalling the press, like a criminal, like one of her disgraced writers. But Miranda knew that what she was saying to this woman, who hardly seemed real she was so very Oprah-like, was not only true, it was profound. Why did no one understand when she tried to explain? When she told them that her writers' stories were real-life stories even when they were lies?

"Because in real life people make things up," she said to Oprah.

But Oprah shook her iconic head, and Miranda was overwhelmed with shame.

She stayed in her loft for weeks after that, not answering the phone, not picking up calls from the clients whom she had tried to defend, ignoring the chorus of pleading voices on her answering machine: her mother, her sister, even the lawyer who was trying to defend her, for several publishers were now coming after her for fraud.

She lay in bed, tangled in her sheets, asking herself and her four walls in a loud keening voice: Why?

And then imagining, in the ironic voice with its Yiddish lilt that she had always playfully bestowed on God, a voice that answered by raising its shoulders and helplessly holding out its hands: Why not?

This is Miranda Weissmann, the answering machine said. This is your lawyer, the answering machine answered, and there is a lien on all your property until the lawsuit is settled, so couldn't you please call me back?

In real life, people don't call back, Miranda explained to the pillow. In real life, people have tantrums.

Annie and Betty both tried to visit her, but even they were left standing in the hallway banging on the door, Annie calling in, "Oh, don't be such an ass."

It wasn't until Annie left a message on the answering machine describing their mother's unhappy state in gruesome detail that Miranda felt she actually had to answer the phone.

"She's really suffering," Annie said when Miranda finally picked up. "She needs you."