Avery hasn’t come alone, he’s brought a girl with him, the two of them driving south from a month-long visit to New Hampshire, “to see the leaves turn color,” Avery explains, an annual phenomenon that in Avery’s three-year absence from New England has taken on mystical significance, like a total eclipse of the sun or the return of a long-gone comet, a significance reinforced by the reaction of the girl, who, as a native Floridian, has never seen the leaves go from green almost overnight to scarlet, gold, purple and orange and then for weeks hold their color crisply, cleanly, as if at the peak of health instead of the verge of death, and who, as a young woman in her early twenties with a somewhat mystical turn of mind anyhow, believes that in the 1840s in a previous incarnation she lived in Concord, New Hampshire, where she was the mistress of Franklin Pierce, U.S. senator, general in the Mexican War and fourteenth President of the United States. She first learned this from a Ouija board, but many events and signs have confirmed it since. Her belief regarding her previous existence has lent enormous significance to this trip with her “lover,” as she calls Avery, to his home town and state and has caused her to elicit from her lover any information regarding his present existence and actual past that he is willing to give, for she is convinced that an apparently coincidental connection with a man from New Hampshire, from a town not twenty-five miles from where Franklin Pierce was born and first practiced law, is no coincidence at all, but is in fact part of a cosmic plan intended to connect her past and future selves through the agency of this present self, if only she allows herself to read the signs properly. Avery Boone, she now realizes, is the most important sign, as well as the vehicle for her actual, physical return to New Hampshire, where there was, she reports to Bob, a “rush of signs,” including Bob Dubois himself, whose name came up often in this visit as she and Avery drove along in the van late at night, and Avery rambled on about his childhood and adolescence and young manhood, all shared with a person named Bob Dubois. When, after much prodding, Avery confessed to having had a falling out with Bob, the girl, whose name is Honduras (not her real name, of course, which is Joan Greenberg — the name Honduras, she says, was given to her when she was sixteen by her first lover, who happened to be a full-blooded Arawak Indian from the hills of Jamaica), convinced Avery that he should take this occasion to visit his old friend Bob Dubois in Catamount, to reestablish their bond, which would be good for their karma, she pointed out, and when they learned that Bob and his family had moved to
“Knew what?” Bob asks, because what the hell could she know from that piece of information, except the facts, and why does she keep calling him “man,” and where does she get off talking all the time in front of Ave and him when they haven’t seen each other for over three years and obviously have a lot to talk about, and why does Ave just kind of smile and lean back with his hands folded behind his head and watch the girl rattle on, as if he thought she was the most interesting person he’s ever met, although Bob does have to admit that she is sexy, with that huge pile of orange curly hair bushing out from a tiny face, and high cheekbones and tight wide mouth, flared nostrils and pale green eyes and shapely breasts, braless and pointing good-naturedly from behind a tie-dyed tee shirt, and tanned, muscular legs, tight and smooth, practically leaping out at him from dark green gym shorts, which she wears without underpants, so that when she sits cross-legged on the sofa, as she is now, Bob can see light brown pubic hairs and a neat little vertical roll of vaginal fat, which of course excites him sexually and makes him pay much closer attention to what she is saying than he might otherwise pay.
