The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all. Love pangs, a favorite subject of the author, take on a new urgency as earthquakes, illnesses, lost wallets, and deaths of distant friends besiege his aging heroes and heroines. One man loves his wifeтАЩs twin, and several men love the imagined bliss of their pasts; one woman takes an impotent lover, and another must administer her fatherтАЩs death. Bourgeois comforts and youthful convictions are tenderly seen as certain to erode: тАЬMan,тАЭ as one of these stories concludes, тАЬwas not meant to abide in paradise.тАЭ