Other people got sick. They had accidents, Rutledge muttered.

Rutledge was trying to be calm, but the crab overall was almost the size of a dinner plate and the tapering wedge of bone that was its tail extended backward like a dagger into the gloom of the toilet trap.

Though in a way this was fortunate, Rutledge explained, for otherwise its frantic scuttlings would have spun it in circles.

Irene Rutledge nodded at this, encouraged that the situation seemed to have its redeeming aspects, and that her husband in the circumstances was capable of recognizing them, but as for the larger question, all Rutledge seemed to know for certain was that the crab had not been there a moment ago when he'd sat down.

"Look, I'll stay here," Rutledge said.

Irene looked at him and Rutledge made vague grasping and tossing motions.

"You'd better be careful," she warned him.

"Irene, I don't need you for that, okay? Why can't you just cooperate a little?"

Irene brought her husband the tongs from the fireplace.

The crab proved elusive but after a short tussle Rutledge juggled it into the bathtub.

"It doesn't look so good," Irene said.

Rutledge handed back the tongs, then washed his hands.

"Well, you didn't do anything," she said.

"Irene, please, I've got a lot on my mind."

The crab was dead by the time Rutledge returned from getting the car inspected but to Irene's dismay this was not the relief she had hoped it would be.

"Well what do you think, Irene, that this settles something? I mean look at it," Rutledge said in disgust.

Irene gave Rutledge warm ginger ale for his stomach, put him to bed, and eventually he dozed off, but his sleep was uneven, twice he woke with hiccups that Irene had to relieve by plugging his ears while he drank a glass of water, and toward morning Rutledge was awakened by a gas pain so nightmarishly incorporeal that for a long moment he wondered what he was doing in the bathroom.

There was another horseshoe crab in the bowl, a glistening specimen perhaps a foot across the back. Transferred to the bathtub it dwarfed the first by half and the desperation of its vitality filled Rutledge with resentment.

"I'm calling Dr. Innerfeld," Irene decided.

The doctor could not come to the phone but Mrs. Innerfeld offered to take a message. "What's the matter," she asked.

"I don't think you'll believe it," Irene Rutledge said.

"Try me," Mrs. Innerfeld said tiredly.

"I'll call back," Irene promised, then hurriedly returned to the bathroom where Rutledge, parchment colored, leaned against a wall. Irene moved to comfort him but Rutledge shrank and with a dismal sluing of his head directed her attention to the commode, where a baby tortoise and a pair of shrimp wreathed in a glass-like tentacular floss were caroming softly off the porcelain.

"They look like prawns," Irene said.

"They were under the crab."

"I think we ought to call the city."

"What, like the snow, Irene? I don't know if you're absorbing this."

Nevertheless, two days later Irene Rutledge called the city.

"It'll be hard to keep this quiet," the inspector said. Rutledge gave him twenty dollars and then lifting the fireplace tongs made it clear that in his sensitized state he was not to be trifled with.

"Maybe we should have called the aquarium," Irene said. She handed the inspector a dustpan and a plastic garbage bag, then followed Rutledge into the kitchen. "It's kind of a shame really. Those whiting didn't look too bad."

"You're just determined to be equal to all this, aren't you," Rutledge said. And yet later that night, soothed by the rhythm of Irene's breathing, Rutledge had to admit that he probably should have expected something like this, for the more he thought about it the more clearly he saw a pattern emerging.

Rutledge was the senior buyer for M. Diamant & Sons of New York City, purchasing agents for almost two hundred small retail furniture outlets in the Greater New York area, and while it was not a bad job and Rutledge had always maintained a decent confidence in his capacity to rise, much of that he realized now had stemmed from the fact that his ambitions had always been conveniently inexplicit. Across time his earnings had increased steadily and after eighteen years of sterling predictability Morris Diamant relied on him implicitly, but under the current conditions of his employment, consisting essentially of Diamont's two sons, Marty and Lenny, it was unlikely that issues of policy would ever be delegated to Rutledge and as a consequence he had been finding it increasingly difficult of late to distinguish professional challenges from personal impositions. Instead he had taken to daydreaming and buying lottery tickets, flirting with waitresses, toll collectors, chambermaids and receptionists, and choosing at length between the models that were offered to him by the clerks at airport car-rental counters. On the train each morning he found himself listening to people talking about the accomplishments of their children, the cleverness of their accountants, the extravagance of their vacations and the appreciating value of their homes, time-shares, investment portfolios and profit-sharing plans and did not know whether he coveted these satisfactions or wished merely that he could be interested in such things. It seemed foolish to Rutledge that he worked at a job that offered him neither pleasure nor a future, but on the other hand he doubted seriously that a man his age could find work that would amount in any meaningful way to an improvement on the situation, and in the meantime he needed the stupid money. He could not number the instances when, looking at his reflection in his bathroom mirror, Rutledge simply would not know what to make of himself. "Look at this," he would sigh.

And then that business in High Point?

For a moment Rutledge flashed miserably on snapshot-like images of safety-pinned seams and matted velour, a waitress past fatigue in laddered hose.

Those foolish boys. If only they had let him rent a decent car. For suddenly it seemed to Rutledge that none of this would have happened had they permitted him to make his buying trip in a respectable vehicle.

Yes, it was trite, of course it was. But professionals understood these things. And nevertheless he had gone along with it? What did he carry plastic for? Whose permission did he need? Was he mute, was he paralyzed?

Yes, well, he was hurt. Their condescension had offended him and in his petulance he had let it happen. Something was owed. Someone had to make it up to him.

Yes, that was him. He recognized himself immediately. Rutledge had not even wanted to dine with those louts, but knowing they would have to be at work the next morning, there was Rutledge playing kiss-me with his vendors, complaining of his boredom, ordering steaks and shrimp cocktails, Caesar salads, the wine list. The wine list no less, in High Point, North Carolina. The next thing he knew they had pulled into the graveled parking area of an emporium near Greensboro where Rutledge was delivered like a pair of shoes to be repaired. "Now y'all take care this man," someone said, their laughter following him to a curtained bay like a treatment area in a hospital emergency room, and the next time Rutledge opened his eyes he discovered that the girl for some unfathomable reason had removed her halter and while with one hand she held his left arm aloft with the other she kneaded his shoulder. Rutledge watched the jiggling of her breasts and tried to remember being undressed. His torso was bare, his shoes and trousers had been removed, and Mr. Happy, perhaps out of a flaccid curiosity of its own, had worked its way out of his shorts. Further down the table his shins glistened bluely in the glare of an unshaded pink light bulb. The girl had left his socks on. "Christ," Rutledge muttered. The girl paused and cocked her ear. "What, honey?" But Rutledge only shook his head. Maybe I'll just go with it, he decided. A crude comet, a five-pointed blue star trailing streamers of red and blue ink, had been tattooed below her right clavicle. "You sure know how to relax," she assured him. "You got the right bones for it, too."

"I could put you on a low-salt diet," Dr. Innerfeld said, "but what would be the point? Have you tried sleeping with a light on?"

Rutledge could not believe that an internist of Dr. Innerfeld's eminence had actually suggested such a thing.

"Why? You like grunion?"

"You're right," Innerfeld said. "I wasn't thinking."

"A spawning run, that's all I need."

"It's a miracle you're not constipated," the doctor observed. "Can you bring me a specimen?"

"I can cater a clambake," Rutledge told him. "You like bluepoints?"

"Oysters?" Dr. Innerfeld asked.

"There's an R in Rutledge."

"Well, at least you haven't lost your sense of humor. And it's not painful?" The doctor shook his head. "This is for the ages. What did you say, you could cater a clambake?" If he laughs I'll kill him, Rutledge decided.

"Well, what can I tell you," Innerfeld said at last. "It's a curiosity. There are specialists I could send you to but you'd be a specimen yourself. Maybe you want someone to go through it with you. A counselor, a psychologist? Are you religious?"

Rutledge had been shaking his head steadily, but paused now to consider this question. Well then was he? For if it were an issue of belief, how could he doubt? And yet all things considered, could anything be believed to the exclusion of anything else? Even to Rutledge it seemed senseless.

Religion then was a political decision? He turned to Innerfeld and once again shook his head in the negative. He was not political. Politics did not interest him. "I probably knew it wasn't medical from the beginning," Rutledge said, an admission Innerfeld considered provocative for some reason.

"Elliott, listen to me. You're sounding resigned. Don't be a patsy."

Rutledge shrugged. It's what he got for being desperate. He shouldn't have confided, he realized now.

"Listen, I appreciate your concern."

"And of that," said Innerfeld, "I don't like the sound at all."

At home Irene had been keeping a pot of water hot for tea. "Did you see Dr. Innerfeld? What did he say?"

"You know how they are. When they don't have answers they send you on vacation." He regretted his tone, though, and sighing deeply he tried to make it up.

"I don't know, Irene, lately I seem to have become very cynical about things." He looked questioningly at her. "Is there any lemon?"

Irene brought a lemon from the refrigerator and cut it into wedges. "Would you like some cookies?"

"Cookies," Rutledge repeated. "Irene, let me ask you something. Do you ever get the feeling that someone is watching you?"

Irene looked at him.

"See? That's what I mean," Rutledge explained.

He had always seen the lamentable dullness of his life as a kind of reliability, his tolerance of mistreatment a virtuous forbearance. But if he were wise, Rutledge asked, then why didn't he know anything? Or was this his knowing, that the void was not outside at all, but right there with the rubber nose?

It didn't answer, Rutledge decided, and as futile as he knew it to be, he found himself yearning for the blissful past when life had seemed a rather serious matter for him, when his ambitions had seemed worthwhile however misinformed and experience grave in proportion to the pain it exacted.

Soon, though, even nostalgia failed. His memories now were as odious as his fantasies, a roiling turbulence whose resemblance to the primeval sea seemed no coincidence to him. Anchored yet adrift, Rutledge rocked like a buoy, lurching.

Still, the situation was not without its satisfactions. Convinced that something irrevocable was imminent, Rutledge formally deeded the house to Irene and obliged their attorney to review his will to make certain she would suffer no avoidable inconveniences. These were modest chores, homely and in their way rather fussy, yet his devotion to their tidy execution filled Rutledge with a moist and fragrant tenderness for himself. In the fullness of his sorrow there seemed a texture of elevation, as though he might be transfiguring his death in defiance of nature from something graceless and inexplicable to an act of generosity, of kindness and quiet dignity. So it was something of a letdown for Rutledge when, after attending to these matters, his health neither declined nor improved, and except for a run of bluefish that October nothing particularly notable occurred. For that matter, Rutledge discovered, mullet were almost always followed by bluefish.

"I don't get it," he finally admitted.

But what was there to get, Rutledge realized at length. Life wasn't about getting, it was about accepting. Indeed, if experience were any guide, accepting this sort of nonsense might have been the only thing he was truly good at.

Each morning, then, as casually as he could manage it, Rutledge would pause at the local greenbox on his way to the commuter station, and afterward sitting quietly in the train, his newspaper folded on his lap, Rutledge would think of his cousin Ira, who had sustained an ileostomy and yet managed after a period of adjustment to gain a perspective. Did he have, after all, any choice in the matter? His determination to get to the bottom of things had evaporated weeks ago. The bottom of what, he had wondered helplessly. No, Rutledge decided, I think this is one of those things that are yours, like that copy of the lab report.

Yet even here a modest consolation was denied him. He seemed to have been passively inducted into that fraternity of the trivially afflicted, those masters of pain with the brave little smiles you saw in arthritis commercials. The ruptured disks, the restricted diets, for some reason these had taken to confiding in him. Perhaps an aura of iodine he carried? You might have thought they shared an enthusiasm. This would interest him, a neighbor had assured him on the train one evening, "They thought it was an aneurysm."

Boring my God. Otherwise it would have been laughable. For here, too, they competed, Rutledge sighed. Disease was another vanity for these people. Not a test of strength but of character, they would have him know, of irony's limits, of moral stamina. Though confused they were steadfast, puzzled maybe, but they could take the hit. They were vigilant now, they watched themselves—their fats, their fibers, their lactose intake. Purines too were monitored with care. They solicited commendation for this self-absorption. Once warned, they were guarded, they were onto it now. Nobody's fools?

Rutledge, blessed with nothing of this earth, offered murmurings of respect he didn't feel. Compared to eels? A peptic ulcer would have been a picnic for Rutledge. "You're lucky," a seatmate has the nerve to tell him one evening. Flicking significance into his jaws, "Advanced gum disease, four hours in the chair."

What were they trying to do, insult him? He couldn't help it, he felt affronted. Triviality without end, a hole without a bottom?

Give him enemies, Rutledge brooded, evil with dignity. Instead, look at this, death by microns, and in lieu of drama a cascade of the third-rate emotions — annoyance, resentment, impatience, disappointment.

And there was something else on Rutledge's mind: why all that seafood? The situation was not without its hazards after all.

And even if there were no answers to these questions, wasn't there still the matter of what on earth was going on? It made you feel crazy, a thing like this. Where did it come from? How could one account for it?

And what about those shell fragments, Rutledge wanted to know.

"You'll be fine," Irene assured him, but Rutledge was not so confident. He had known something was up the moment he saw them. Two weeks, then three weeks, and nothing but shell fragments? Things did not look promising.

"I don't know, Irene, I feel pretty bad."

"You're just a little blue."

"I'm just something, Irene, but this is different."

Then even the shell fragments ceased? "Oh come on," Rutledge sighed.

True, there had been problems, the barnacles had nearly cost them a renovation. But it wasn't as if they'd had to call the plumber, and yet at work now they were telling him he needed a vacation.

That night the telephone rang. Irene answered it but the call was for Rutledge. A woman named Lauren Lister wanted to know if Mr. Rutledge would care to join one of the bowling leagues being formed at the Triangle Lanes.

"Who put you up to this," Rutledge asked.

So fine, then, he would take a vacation. Look, I'm relaxing, Rutledge announced. He parted the window curtains and looked down three floors to the illuminated blue oblong of the motel pool, then stretched out on the bed, confident that things probably made as much sense as possible. Maybe in a little while he would call Irene. He had nothing to say whatsoever to Irene but probably she would like to know that he was thinking of her. Not that he was thinking of her. I'm not thinking of anything, Rutledge thought.

He decided not to call. He was in a funny mood and it would leave a bad impression. He was supposed to be on vacation, recovering from things like that. Presently he would calm down, then go to bed. Maybe he would even sleep.

After that, however, Rutledge didn't know. Intelligence in matters like these was not enough apparently. Something simpler and more dignified was needed, a kind of idiocy or something.

A tentcard standing on the night table advertised that the motel had a cocktail lounge, and now Rutledge remembered the awninged entranceway opposite the parking area at the rear of the building. He washed his hands and face, then slipped into his coat, making sure his room key was still in his pocket.

Outside he followed the concrete path to the motel office. He didn't want a drink, he didn't know what he wanted, but he could not do nothing. A new panic had come upon him, Rutledge saw. Maybe it would all be over soon with luck— a great whirl of lights, perhaps a single sharp exquisite pain — but then focusing obliquely on the pavement beneath him, passing like a great abrasive wheel, Rutledge remembered that pain of the exquisite sort was not in him. No, more likely one of those surgical retirements, a sequence of routine but disgusting operations, each with its own ghastly convalescence, and the whole regime restoring him to perfect health with every faculty intact but the capacities to distinguish color and swallow his spit. Yes, now that was on the money. People asking him how he felt, as though his comfort or discomfort mattered in this world, and Rutledge answering as if an exchange were transpiring. He should have died young, Rutledge brooded, violently, in the first brilliant flush of things. Maybe he would have had something then.

Under the awning Rutledge pulled open a gumwood door and found himself in a small vestibule where a cigarette machine stood flanked by stacks of cheaply printed folders describing the local real estate offerings. Behind a second set of doors the motel lounge glowed dully like a glass gem and along with a murmuration of many voices an aroma of carpeting marinated in beer leaked from a fault in the weather stripping. A popular place, Rutledge saw. Inside he took the only table that appeared to be free and waited for someone to take his order. The table was mopped clean but the waiter had neglected to empty the ashtray and in the sputtering light of a candle set in a faceted plastic globe Rutledge counted two cigarette butts and a gray knot of chewing gum dusted with ashes.

"Well," Rutledge nodded, "so far so good." He ordered a drink and went to the restroom and when he returned a woman in a felt hat and an elaborately layered ensemble of bloused and ruffled surfaces was sitting at his table. "I was wondering whose drink this was," she said. Rutledge nodded and picked up his glass. Scarcely met and already the situation roiled with banal complexities.

"Let me find another table."

"Don't be foolish," she said. "There aren't any other tables. Sit," she said. "Be comfortable."

Oh sure, Rutledge thought. He finished his drink quickly and looked around for the waiter.

Still the physical proximity of this overdressed woman was strangely stirring to Rutledge. When he turned back to face her he found her examining him. Another convalescent? As a rule, people did not look at one another that way.

"Elliott Rutledge," Rutledge said.

"See that?" she said.

Rutledge didn't know what she was talking about, and ten minutes later, with the situation substantially unchanged, Rutledge was growing increasingly irritated. This woman, Muriel Yoder, had no discernible basis for her optimism but nevertheless insisted that her life was before her. In a woman old enough to sit alone in a motel lounge Rutledge found ingenuousness this obdurate embarrassing. She seemed in fact to have inherited many of his old illusions, including the belief that somehow, who knew how, things would eventually work out for her. She was convinced of this, she insisted. Either she was convinced, Rutledge surmised, or she presumed him shallow enough to believe she truly felt that way. Rutledge, who had learned only recently that anything was possible, could not believe this. But what was she up to then, Rutledge wondered. Not him surely.

"I wish I could agree with you," Rutledge said as diplomatically as he could. "I used to believe stuff like that myself. But then you get up one morning and there's crabs in the toilet." Ms. Yoder smiled sympathetically.

"Alewives, zebra mussels," Rutledge chuckled, shaking his head. "That wasn't funny," he assured her with an abrupt sobriety.

Ms. Yoder was nodding wryly now. "You're being interesting I take it. It's all right. Actually you get used to it. I'm a little crazy myself."

Rutledge shrugged. He was not impressed.

"No, really, they had to watch me. There was almost an article."

Rutledge opened and closed his mouth several times but only succeeded at becoming increasingly dejected.

He saw now that the whole idea that things had to make sense was only a sort of epic misunderstanding. Often sense was made of things but if life itself were preposterous, then what difference was made by the making?

And he had always felt such a misfit.

Still, it seemed puzzling to Rutledge that having used himself so acutely he should feel so degraded. It was like that abrupt shrinkage he felt on expression of thoughts which seemed to occupy in their inchoate state such unutterably vast tracts of mind. He would have expected something finer than this.

But there was no mistaking the deflation he felt. As usual humiliated and as usual not surprised.

He had certainly felt worse however. He was startled when Ms. Yoder asked if were sick. "You look pretty pale," she said. "Are you depressed?"

Rutledge shook his head. A moment earlier he would have been annoyed but shrugging seemed to have become his signature gesture. "It's nothing serious. I'm just degraded."

"You're probably tired."

Rutledge gestured agreeably. He was probably a lot of things. That he was degraded, however, was indisputable.

He looked carefully at Ms. Yoder and held his breath until her face resolved. "You're degraded, too, aren't you," Rutledge offered.

"Not me," Ms. Yoder said.

And now it was Rutledge who nodded wryly. Her breezy intimacy had confused him. She talked and talked, he saw now, but there was no ease or pleasure in it for her. You could tell it was work by the strain it put on her face. She was trying to be charming, Rutledge realized. Well, life certainly was a curious business. He sighed quietly, prepared on one level to accept the situation and yet irritated in a remote and wistful way that things had to be so difficult. I mean look at me for example, Rutledge reflected, I'm tired as hell.

But the sadness relaxed him. In sorrow there was comfort, Rutledge found. His heart felt light, as if it had come to rest upon something. He thought it might be fun to help her do something, to take something down from a high shelf or let her steady herself on his shoulder while she adjusted an ankle strap. If only they could begin fresh for once, or do nothing for a change. Everything she did seemed so laborious, Rutledge felt. He listened to her speak of colleagues and clients, best friends, neighbors, merchants and relatives, and while all of it seemed to have some intrinsic order, at the same time in its irrelevance it all sounded like gibberish to him. The lounge was packed, parties at neighboring tables had long ago commandeered their vacant chairs, and in the murk and noise and stink of the room Rutledge was intensely aware of being suspended in privacy with this woman, of being accompanied by someone. The idea that they had gotten along for so long without one another seemed immensely significant to Rutledge.

She was heavily made up, that was obvious now. But it was like Christmas ornamentation. None of her colors corresponded. And her teeth were absolutely too large, Rutledge observed. Too even, too white. Their surfaces bulged. They had the dull luster of chinaware.

"I assume you're on business," she said.

"Not really. I'm supposed to be thinking. My wife thinks I have thoughts."

Ms. Yoder nodded knowingly and smiled at him now as if he had touched her.

"I don't know where she got that idea," Rutledge continued hurriedly. "I guess she's fond of me. See, something happened to me recently."

"And you can't get her out of your mind now, am I right?"

"No," Rutledge said.

"Listen, that happens to everybody."

"That maybe, not this," Rutledge said.

He sighed then, for a vision of Irene had flared softly in his thoughts. You're a fortunate man, something reminded him. Love without bottom, tenderness without end, acceptance without question. Without answers, too, but who got answers?

He was not bitter about it but a regret had come to him that was almost pleasant. He felt desperate but the sensation lacked its customary urgency.

"You better not pass out on me," Ms. Yoder said. "I can't stand that."

She was trying to be a good sport, Rutledge realized. That's pretty touching, too, Rutledge thought. He would have to stop drifting like that. He felt no desire for her, that was clear, but suddenly he was alert to the idea that Ms. Yoder might have habits of one sort and another, daily routines perhaps tedious and uninteresting, but that verified who she was to herself. Perhaps she, too, was some gift from the sea. It was all so mysterious, Rutledge thought.

"I'm serious," she said. "I don't need this."

Neither of us needs this, he told himself. And yet a fear had come upon him that if anything changed now everything would stop and he wasn't ready for that. His sense of harmony with the moment could not be mistaken, a lift and roll he could not remember feeling before. Look, here it came again, thought Rutledge. "It's all these facts," he heard himself saying. Jesus Christ, he thought, struggle was so foolish.

"What facts? What are you talking about?" Ms. Yoder asked impatiently. Rutledge shook his head. It was all so typical, wasn't it? People said they wanted answers, but did they listen?

Still, since he had only an incidental consciousness of speaking to her, he was rather startled to realize that she had been listening to him. That was interesting, too, he observed. Look what was possible, Rutledge thought. And for what, God Himself couldn't tell you.

"It gets old," Ms Yoder was saying. "It starts getting to you. Every guy I run into is some kind of total screw-up."

"There's no end to it," Rutledge sympathized.

Ms. Yoder rose to leave and Rutledge offered to walk with her.

Getting to his feet was something in itself, Rutledge discovered. He felt all right though. He was a little drunk, Rutledge supposed, but what if her toes were webbed, he wondered excitedly.

Ms. Yoder sat down again. "Look, you're not really such a jerk. Why do you have to be like this?"