"Moveless,"Polly Chancellor says. The trees beyond the porch where she sits, on this late Cape Cod afternoon in September, are as still as trees in a photograph. "William put that word into one poem three times, and Dorothy made him take it out. Too bad."

        "Only twice," her husband says, not looking up from the proofs in his lap.

        "No, three times."

        "He left one of them in. And Dorothy was right."

        Austin must be right too, but Polly hopes he won't pursue it, since she can't now recall which of Wordsworth's poems she was talking about. She leans back in the blue canvas chair and focuses on the trees, locust and pine. Balancing her glass on the palm of her hand, she feels suspended between the silver-gray siding of the house and the empty green marsh beyond. There are no motor bikes today, only the burr of chickadees and the rush of traffic on Route 6 across the bay.

        "I wonder if they loved this deck as much as we do," she says; she doesn't have to say who she's talking about. Austin doesn't care for her speculations about the previous owners of the house -- he doesn't care for speculations in general--but she can't let the subject alone.

        "Probably not," he says. "Probably they were too busy building it." He draws a vengeful arrow in a margin and reaches for the glass beside his chair. The review he is correcting will demolish somebody's reputation.

        "Or Tony was. She mostly hovered, don't you think?" Polly has a vivid picture of Nicola Ford, whom she has never met. Anyone who could surrender this house after laboring on it for nine years--anyone who wouldn't demand it as part of her settlement--must be weak-willed at the very least. Polly has survived two divorces herself, and she knows it's hard, but she would surely have managed to get the house. She sees Nicola--in spite of her classy name--as wishy-washy and finicky about dust, wearing a droopy housedress made from the same green paisley as the cover of the couch. Such a person couldn't have loved this particular time of day and year as passionately as Polly does, with the air lying motionless around them and the lowering sun turning the tree-trunks an iridescent rose-color. She and Austin have owned the house for almost a year, and have seen all the seasons.

        Polly takes a sip of her vodka and tonic. She feels her head floating away from her, past the railing and into the lighted stillness beyond. "How could they give this up?" she wonders.

        "Maybe they couldn't see it anymore." Austin makes a final slash and drops the last page onto the pile beside his chair.

        "Why, though?" She picks up her clipboard and pen. She is supposedly working too, drafting a report on a recent Connecticut conference on Romanticism, at which a last-ditch New Critic behaved unbecomingly. The title, 'Pique in Darien,' is as yet her article's only excuse for being. Still, Polly has pulled off such things before; the rest of the piece is bound to come. She takes two barbecue-flavored potato chips from a bag by her foot, puts them back, and takes them out again. If she doesn't put dressing on her salad, it will be all right.

        Austin drains his glass. "Why do you care about the Fords? It's our house now. We barely know them." He gathers his papers and goes inside, pulling the screen sharply shut.

        "True," she says, though it isn't; they have met Tony, and she has that mental image of Nicola.

        On Polly's arrival in New England three years before as Austin's new wife, she felt out of place. It wasn't because she was midwestern, though being from Cleveland didn't help. And it probably wasn't because she was replacing Nadya--who had been impossible, everyone said so. People liked Polly, they always had, but the people she met in Cambridge were different. Not that they were unfriendly, but they were always judging. They seemed to feel a responsibility to rate every book that was published, every play or movie that opened, and every concert that took place; they knew what was being exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art and performed at the Boston Ballet, and they knew in advance whether to attend an event or ignore it. They rated people too, though they didn't quite say so: Very few of Austin's acquaintances would give Polly as many as three-and-a-half stars out of a possible four, she thought. Even if she had published ten books and her family had lived on Brattle Street for two hundred years, she wouldn't meet their standards.

        The Cape was even more forbidding, with its New York critics and Newton psychoanalysts, entrenched in out-of-the-way cottages they had cleverly bought before inflation. Austin and Nadya had owned one of these places, but it had been liquidated during their breakup, and he claimed to be glad. Renting was simpler, he said, with no worries about upkeep and vandals and taxes. And it was cheaper, though not of course cheap. And so the Chancellors rented a house in Wellfleet during their first two summers together.

        But renting--even if it entitled them to a parking sticker--wasn't enough to give Polly a feeling of truly belonging. She and Austin were included--grudgingly, she felt--in a few intimidating cocktail parties; at the beach they could wave to biographers and tenured professors, but these people didn't always wave back.

        It would be different, Polly was convinced, if she and Austin had their own place, on a bumpy road with their own hand-painted No Trespassing signs. She saw herself, in a shady hat and weathered denim skirt, in the salt wind of the Stop & Shop parking lot, hefting grocery bags and exchanging greetings with a movie critic from Truro. "See you at the pond," they would call, without having to specify which pond.

        This vision continued during those two rental summers until, at just the kind of party that daunted Polly most, in the Banburys' remodeled windmill overlooking an exclusive rocky beach, the Chancellors heard about the Fords' house. "The Fords are splitting up, did you hear?" Alice Banbury was saying in excited tones. "The perfect couple. I always say it's a mistake to build a house together."

        "Very few marriages can stand it," her husband the poet drawled.

        Alice, to whom Polly had confided her fantasies, turned to her with a matchmaking gleam behind her red-rimmed glasses. "Are you interested?"

        "No," Austin said, tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. "Definitely not."

        "But you'd love it," Alice said. "It's right on the marsh, with decks and mysterious pine trees. Why don't I take you over to meet Tony?"

        Polly, along with fleeting sympathy for the unknown Fords, felt a thrill. "Are they still in the house?" she asked. "I wouldn't want to ..."

        "Well, Tony is, but I can't see him living there forever. You might get a really good deal." Alice, a minor essayist, was known for making instant friends and snubbing them later. However, Polly was intrigued. "Let me take you over there," Alice said, and went to telephone. Tony Ford, it seemed, had already moved out, but Alice and Polly could pick up the key at the realtor's the next morning.

        Although Polly had planned to like the house, she wasn't prepared for the feeling of recognition that struck her as soon as she glimpsed the irregular post-and-beam building at the end of the nearly impassable road. It made her think of an abandoned cottage in a storybook--just waiting. The house wasn't quite built yet: The decks lacked railings; lumber and stray cement blocks cluttered the ground as if in the wake of some disaster; brightly insulated wires sprouted from posts along the driveway and the outside stairs, next to a series of unconnected carriage lamps.

        "Isn't it terrific?" Alice asked as they climbed the steps. She unlocked a blue door with an antique lion-head knocker and led the way into the second-story living room. Inside, a table-saw held an assortment of tools, and the air smelled of Cuprinol and sawdust. And yet there were curtains at the windows, willow-pattern china in the cupboards, cartoons and postcards decorating the refrigerator, shells from horseshoe crabs and quahogs scattered on the decks, a pink plastic dog dish on the floor.

        The Three Bears' house, Polly thought, or the Mary Celeste. An interrupted scene.

        "He hasn't finished it yet," Alice said in an indulgent tone. "But then, you know Tony. Or rather, you don't."

        "No," said Polly, rotating her gaze toward pine and oak branches touching the windows. She was in the process of falling in love, not with the house itself, but with the idea of it--so full of ambition and possibility, poised on the edge of the marsh as if it owned the bay. All right, so she was romantic, but she was supposed to be; it was her profession.

        The Chancellors didn't meet Tony Ford until after they had closed the deal, called in workmen to finish up the details, and moved in. Tony was a partner now in a law firm in Barnstable, maybe thirty miles away. Before the separation, when he had worked in Boston, the Fords had lived in Cambridge and constructed the house on weekends. He still owned a half-acre of the property, down by the marsh past a patch of poison ivy, with a cabin where he sometimes stayed. He had drilled a well there and put in a hand pump. An outhouse still stood, from the time when he and his family were beginning construction. (When the Fords said they had built a house, that was what they meant; they had laid the foundation and sawed the lumber and hammered the nails.)

        On the evening of the day Austin and Polly took possession, they saw a light glimmering through the trees and went to investigate. As they had suspected, it came from Tony's cabin--a shack about ten by twelve feet, with a blue door, curtained windows, and a small porch on the front. A crimson Toyota Camry was parked nearby. "Let's go," Austin said, retreating. "Let's not disturb him."

        But Polly was curious. Before Austin could stop her, she went up to the cabin and knocked. "Hello?" she called.

        The door opened partway, and a tall man in a red chamois shirt peered out at them with sardonic eyes. He was about Polly's age, she thought--in his late forties, maybe. "Yes?" he said, looking both of them up and down. "Can I help you?"

        Polly wished she had followed Austin's instinct and put off the call till the next day. Tony Ford--if that was who it was--didn't look at all pleased to see them. "We're the Chancellors," she said, stumbling over the words. "Austin and Polly. We wondered ... The light ..." She backed away. "I guess ..." She turned to Austin, who was standing behind her like a rock.

        But then Tony Ford gave them an irresistible smile: "Austin. Polly. Come in." He had wanted to introduce himself, he said, and he was glad they had taken the initiative. He cleared a path across the room through piles of building materials, crumpled clothes, groceries, and magazines, and seated them on a worn studio couch. Then he made coffee for them on a small wood-burning stove.

        Since then, Polly has looked out for Tony in her daily wanderings along the marsh and down to the bay, but she hasn't seen him. He's unobtrusive altogether, in fact. She and Austin never know he's in the cabin until they see his light. Several times they have invited him to dinner, and he has brought wine and told stories about the building of the house.

        "Sometimes it feels haunted," Polly said to him at their first meal together, after boeuf Bourguignon and a little too much of the wine. "As if you were all still here."

        "Really?" Tony seemed charmed, as she meant him to be.

        "Well, no. Not really." This was true; she had only been making conversation. "But it's such an individual house. So personal."

        "I'm afraid it is." He had placed each window to accommodate a view, he said--with the result that none of the lengths of siding were standard size. "Which made it pure hell to build."

        She, in turn, was charmed: "But different from any other house." She saw Tony holding a window frame up to a Norway pine, asking Nicola's opinion.

        Polly has thought about the Fords quite a lot since then. At times, polishing the brass knocker or watching the play of sunlight on the high white wall behind the copper stovepipe, she imagines their marriage crumbling as the house approaches completion. How could they abandon a place they had built with their own hands? (Although most of the actual construction was his, Tony has explained, because Nicola did have the cooking and so forth to do. Polly sees her in that paisley housedress, trailing her busy family with a broom and dustpan, sweeping up sawdust.)

        Polly has invented a history for almost everything in the house. That door knocker, for instance. She can see the Fords buying it in Palermo, arguing about whether it's too heavy to carry back. ("Too heavy" are Nicola's words.) Sometimes Polly thinks four people live there instead of two.

        She starts to reach into the potato-chip bag but checks herself and rolls the top closed. It's time to pacify Austin with one of her dinners.

        At sunset Polly walks along the bay, pondering her Keats article. In spite of the provocative subject, with its opportunities for humor, she can't generate much enthusiasm. However, if she wants to stay at the college where she teaches now, she ought to keep her name in the quarterlies. She's doing well: Throughout her first two marriages, even with two batches of children, she managed part-time teaching and occasional publication, but she never approached the success she's had lately. Her alliance with Austin hasn't done any harm, she does realize. Still, she likes to think that his main role is as a stimulus.

        The red ball of the sun slides into the sea, leaving bright streaks on the water and dimming the colors of marsh grass and beach plums. Polly's white Reeboks shine unnaturally against the wet sand, making phosphorescent halos where she steps.

        She has always enjoyed trading ideas with colleagues--originating her own or catching theirs and tossing them back enhanced--but she isn't used to combining this with her domestic life. Both of her other husbands were engineers--competent at their jobs, not really interested in hers. Marriage with them meant pretending and subordinating herself and sometimes, invisibly, taking the lead. She acted the part of the perfect wife, without knowing she was acting until she stood back and looked at herself. But at that point, both times, she was unable to pretend any longer and the whole structure of her shared life fell apart. She didn't blame either of her husbands (Well, she doesn't blame them now), but they simply hadn't earned the smiling, compliant helpmeet that Polly was so beautifully impersonating.

        This marriage is surely different. Austin and Polly, for one thing, work in related fields--he a critic and she a teacher of literature. And Austin is enough older than Polly, and far enough ahead of her, to retain her respect for the rest of their lives. He's in Who's Who, and he's witty (the title of her article comes from a remark of his), and when he speaks harshly, she knows better than to take it personally.

        She reaches the edge of the marsh, and then she sees a light. Tony Ford must be at the cabin. His car isn't there, but he often parks on the firmer ground at the top of the hill. Good. She can grumble to Tony about the Keats article, and he can describe once more how he harvested the bricks for her terrace from every demolition site in Boston. She knocks--long short long--at the blue-painted door.

        The door opens. "Can I help you?"

        Oh, no, Polly thinks when she sees the woman standing above her in the doorway; she should have realized Tony might not be alone. This is some lover of his, maybe even somebody who ought not to be there, and now all three of them will be embarrassed. "I'm sorry." She can't see into the room. "I thought ... Is Tony ...?" She feels short and overweight, in her too-white shoes and the pink skirt that bunches around her hips. Her figure is her figure, she told herself long ago, and she's reconciled to it. Besides, men like it. But right now she would prefer to be longer and leaner, like the woman in front of her.

        "Tony isn't here." The woman's face is in shadow against the light from a kerosene lamp. Polly can't see her expression, but her voice is cool.

        "I'm sorry to have disturbed you." Polly backs away. "Good night."

        "Wait a minute. Are you Polly Chancellor, by any ..."

        Polly stops. "That's right."

        "Do you want to come in for a minute? I'm Nicola Ford."

        No, you can't be, Polly almost says. The woman is dressed wrong, for one thing. Nicola wouldn't wear well-cut, well-worn jeans that have been through at least five summers on the Cape. She wouldn't wear cross-strapped sandals and a faded red polo shirt, and her dark hair wouldn't be cut short and brushed back, with white strands in the most effective places.

        When Nicola steps back into the light, Polly sees her that her face isn't wishy-washy or diffident, or even pretty and perky like her own. Nicola's nose is aquiline, and her eye sockets are long and deep. She looks infinitely sophisticated, the epitome of a Cambridge person, and her calm, nasal voice goes with her looks. "I'm staying here to paint," she says. "Watercolors. I have the place for two weeks a year."

        Polly goes into the cabin, which bears no trace of its former disarray. The floor is cleared, and a table by the couch holds--besides the lamp and a stack of books--a spray of wild asters in a Mason jar. Although Nicola is polite, the conversation falters. Polly forgets the questions she has about the house--where the kitchen tiles and the pot-bellied stove came from, or who occupied the third floor that is now Austin's study. When she brings up anything Tony has told her--about his bricklaying, for instance, or his choice of blue paint for the doors--the response is unsatisfactory. "Is that what he told you?" Nicola says with amusement.

        Walking despondently back through the dark and trying to avoid poison ivy, Polly wonders about herself. Apparently she has thought of the Fords as her property--and now she resents Nicola for taking on a life of her own, like one of those mutinous characters that novelists mention so proudly in interviews. Polly should be above such feelings, especially when they're inspired by someone from whose misfortune she has profited. Because, although she never meant to steal Nicola's house, that's what it comes down to. Maybe what Polly feels is guilt.

        Or is it? Austin would be able to help her to understand her feelings. They used to have really illuminating discussions when they taught that joint course on the Lake Poets, while he was still married to Nadya. "Austin," she calls as she opens the blue door and runs up the stairs to his study. "Guess who I met."

        But, possibly because he hasn't met Nicola himself, Polly can't convey her frustration: In answer to her tentative apology about the house, Nicola only shrugged. "It isn't your fault," she said. "Somebody had to buy it."

        "She hates us," Polly says to Austin, who is slumped on his couch under a high-intensity lamp, frowning into the new biography of Coleridge.

        "Don't be silly." He turns a page.

        "So would I, in her place. But I can't stand it."

        He sticks his finger in the book and looks at her. "You thought it was Tony at the cabin, didn't you?"

        "What?" What if she did? "Of course not," she says. Austin, perhaps because of her past, tends to disapprove of her friendships with other men.

        "I could have told you it wasn't." He gazes toward the huge dark windows that frame the marsh in the daytime. "She was out there with an easel this morning. Woman in a red shirt." He turns, light flashing from his half-glasses. "Polly. Why can't you let the Fords alone?"

        "You saw her, and you didn't tell me?"

        "It wasn't important."

        "But it was. I keep telling you, I feel as if we were possessed by them."

        He's still looking at her, a frown stamped on his face. "They're not dead, Polly."

        "Well, I know." She didn't say it was reasonasble.

        "And by the way." He hauls himself to his elbows. "You're not seriously planning to use that title?"

        "What?" Her article, he must mean. "‘Pique in Darien'? Why not? I think it's clever."

        "But not original."

        "No? But you said--"

        "I was quoting," he says impatiently. "Peter De Vries. Surely you knew that."

        No, she didn't. She hardly knows the name, except as one of those obsolescent references that Austin throws into the conversation--to emphasize their age gap, it almost seems.

        "Comfort Me with Apples? Tunnel of Love?" he says. "One of those. If anybody in this benighted culture even gets the Keats reference, they'll think you've stolen it."

        "It's only a working title," she hedges, though without it she might as well drop the whole project.

        "And please, please let the Fords alone, can't you, Polly? You'll never find out what happened to them. You have to make up your own story, like everybody else."

        For the first time ever, she's furious with Austin, with his lined white face and his Maalox and suppositories and his three pairs of smudged glasses and superior manner. "Why do you have to be so pretentious?" she shouts. "Nobody's listening but me." She pounds down the stairs and throws herself face-down onto the couch that Tony said he had built and Nicola had upholstered.

        She shouldn't have expected Austin to sympathize. When they first became friends and then lovers, he seemed to be interested in the same intricate personal relationships that fascinated her. They spent hours dissecting his troubles with Nadya and hers with her husbands. Since their marriage, however, Byron's weight problem and De Quincey's drug habit have meant more to Austin than the trials of anyone still alive; his strongest contemporary passion is a disdain for all Deconstructionists.

        Is he too old for her after all? The eighteen-year difference seemed an advantage when she was an awed adjunct professor and he was a visiting speaker--distinguished and vigorous, editor of a thriving magazine. Now he has left the magazine and only does occasional reviewing. In restaurants Austin likes to pretend, jokingly, to be Polly's father. "Bring a house salad for my daughter here," he says, while she avoids the waiter's eye. Being with him should make her feel young, he insists. He can't see that he's dragging her into a premature old age--forcing her to walk too slowly and turn the volume on the television too high.

        Staring at wavering black amoeba shapes on a green background, Polly wonders whether it was a mistake to devote so much of her life to marriage. Some people might say so, but they would be simplifying too much. After all, she does have her career as well as all those children. What she suspects now is that, before taking any major step, she has never, never consulted her own wishes first. She has behaved, automatically, as if it were in her best interests to flatter men and obey whatever wishes she imagines they might have. In neither of Polly's early marriages did she even try to discover what she herself wanted to do.

        How did she come by that image of Nicola in that green dress, anyway? Women of their generation don't wear such things, much less carry dustpans.

        Polly sits up and looks at the big iron stove a few feet away from her, on the other side of the shoemaker's bench that serves as a coffee table. The stove is labeled Railway King, in raised iron letters across its stomach, and it melted the soles of her boots last fall, before she found out how hot it could get.

        The woman with the dustpan is still in her mind, along with the woman in the cabin doorway. Polly doesn't know the Fords after all, she never did, and yet she doesn't see how she'll ever root them out of her mind, any more than she can get rid of the poison ivy that climbs the trees and chokes the blueberry bushes and overruns her property all the way to the marsh.

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