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clip’n’send?), the uniform order slip that Victoria, by age eleven, was filling out for herself.
    And now Victoria, who had stayed behind in Camden Town, minding the house in Albert Street, was still dealing with the mail. Though unlike in St. Jacques, they never greeted the mailman in London—in fact, they dodged him, the cheerless Korean who drove from house to house and still managed to get the post wet.
    What exactly was being asked of Jean with this affair, and, moreover, how would Victoria cope with this, her mother’s ultimate failure in domestic administration? She must never know. Jean forcibly returned her attention to the spread on the blue tablecloth: the latest batch of expired announcements and last-chance offers seemed to prove that, if you waited long enough, nothing mattered. You wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. Very soon the most ASAP item would cease to exert the remotest tug. The same might be true of a lover’s letter.
    Things losing their force—like this envelope that had lost its stickum and needed tape, Jean thought. Like any envelope on this humid island. Jean had taken to tracking fade-out in many fields. She was a health writer; decay was her turf. But not until now had she considered the field of her marriage.
    Ten more minutes passed, and still Mark did not return. Jean’s fiddling was becoming clipped, agitated. She rose, covered the fruit with a mesh dome, rinsed the breakfast dishes, crumpled and cleared the junk mail. It would take her a good hour to get to the clinic, and she was running out of time.
    “Mark?” she called, fully aware that this was the least opportune moment to consult her husband, let alone confront him. (He was the type who believed the entire square mile around his toilet should be discreetly evacuated every morning, untilhe was done.) She coughed. “I’m going to have to set off now.” No reply. Fine, she’d go down to Toussaint on her own—space and time to think. She swooped through the house, collecting her purse, her hat, and, on impulse, her gym bag, and went out to the car.
    The uniformed nurse at the front desk said her name twice before Jean recognized it.
    “Jhanh OO-bahd?” the nurse said again, and Jean jumped up, catapulting onto the floor the straw shoulder bag she’d wedged beside her on the seat. Mark called these gaping nosebags of hers “beggars’ lucky dip.” Had he meant all along that she was the beggar? Jean wondered, squatting and raking in handfuls at a time of ink-stained lists, ink-stained pens, wads of nearly worthless ink-stained banknotes—basically garbage.
    She was now on her knees, reaching after a rolling ink-stained lip sunblock and wondering how spoiled it would look to ignore the lottery of loose coins that had already bounced and wheeled so far out she’d have to crawl to the four corners to recover it all.
    A glance at the nurse-receptionist told her to forget the coins—how childish the sacklike cut of her white dress suddenly seemed—and concentrate on the additional medical forms she’d been handed. With increasing speed and irritation Jean filled in the facts of her life: Jean Warner Hubbard, forty-five years old, born New York City, August 1957, daughter of…She skimmed over the questions: father, mother, education, driver’s license, nationality, insurance, marital status, first menstruation, number of pregnancies, number of children, age at first pregnancy, age at birth of first child, name(s) of child(ren), name(s) of child(ren)’s father(s)… How impertinent, she thought, to ask the names of “father(s),” about pregnancies and children in separate questions, as if expecting them not to match up, as if it was any of their goddamn business.
    She wondered what Thing 2’s real name was. Was this her business? Maybe she should just open the e-mail herself. Why not—she’d already opened the letter. Surely she had the right, whether or not she had the stomach for what she might find there.