Animal acts

by Rhoda Lerman

Steven and Linda Morris have an ideal marriage: intimate, open, collegial, comfortable. They have known each other as lovers and friends long enough to raise three children, to settle boundaries, to accumulate things. Steven has fallen asleep with The New Yorker rising and falling on the shores of his chest. It is our marriage, that magazine, with all its richness of things, its collections of culture, fur coats, pearls, four-star hotels, and the stories, mostly the stories, in which, as in our marriage, nothing happens. . . . We've talked about the magazine, almost talking about our lives. "Why would you want anything to happen in a story? Why would you want change?" he'd ask. Change was the enemy. . . . But something disturbed. Something out there rattled in the cornstalks, something I feared so deeply I was afraid to sleep on my own balcony at night. . . . And I was well aware that that something was, somehow, my self. Linda Morris is about to make a major change in her life. She is