His house, once he had screamed "Let's sell," became a dirty and infected place to Stern, and nights, returning home at a desperate clip, he could remember running lightly across the lawn, as though he did not want to make contact with the grass; lowering his head, so that he would not have to see the outside walls; and failing to touch the alien banister as he flew up to his bed, which was safe and clean and would go with him to the new place. He spent evenings on his bed, the cold sheets pacifying him, and he could remember a phone call after dark in which a man's voice had moaned out at him, "I saw your ad about the house. I don't want to know about anything but this: what kind of a neighborhood is it? I mean, is it mixed? Oh, I don't want it to be all my kind, but it's got to be half and half, a little of everything. I can't tell you how important that part is." And Stern had moaned back, "Oh, I know; I really know," joining the man in tears. There was a time when the house seemed the key to it all, an enemy that sucked oil and money and posted a kike-hating sentry down the street to await Stern's doom. But then Stern imagined himself on the twelfth story of a city apartment building, his house sold, sealed in now by new kike men, with different faces, occupying the three other apartments on his floor. He pictured himself high above the city at night, clawing at the windows. And during what must have been a weekend he told a solemn Swede who'd come to look the house over, "We have to stay here and have changed our mind." The Swede, his head among a forest of basement pipes, hollered down, "Is it because I'm looking at the pipes?" And Stern said, "No, I'm too sick to move," and gave his wife the job of evicting the man. Late at night, as he clutched his sheets in the darkness, ideas seemed to seize him by the throat, making him rock and cry and pray for sleep. The deep hot valleys of his wife's body frightened him now, and he could remember pulling her awake one night and saying, "You've got to get out of that dance thing. I know you don't go to bed with people, but the thought that you might is driving me crazy. I don't like to do this to you, but it'll just be for now, while I'm going through this thing." "All right, I won't go to it any more." "But that's not enough," he said. "What about every second I'm not with you? It would be easy for you to just pull up your skirt for someone. The second I leave the house. Or when you're just going alone somewhere. I'd never know." "I'm not going to do anything," she said. "I know, but you could. You could just flip up your skirt and open your legs and that would be it. It wouldn't take two minutes. And I don't want any man's thing in you. What would I do if that happened?" "Well, then, what do you want me to do?"