After I’ve had my fill, two or three teaspoons at most, I very carefully rewrap what’s left and take it upstairs to the kitchen where my children are at the table doing homework and my husband is making tea. He kisses me and uses a paper napkin to dab a smudge from my chin. When I go into the bathroom to wash myself properly, I see in the mirror that my lips are outlined in Gothic midnight jade. But my skin, normally wan and delicate, has an almost rosy glow. And my eyes shine.

The first time I tasted spirulina, it was by chance.

It was four years ago and I was in New York City visiting literary agents at my own expense. That meant staying in a hotel room the size of a wheelchair-accessible restroom stall and eating on about $20 a day. My first night in town, I stopped at a bodega in the Village to pick up two small bags of popcorn and a bottle of sparkling water. This was an acceptable dinner, I decided, because the popcorn was coated with something its label promised was ultra-nutritious, high in protein and vitamins. I was disturbed when, once back in my room and settled on the bed, I opened the bags to discover that the wonder ingredient was a brilliant, aqueous green. Then I got a whiff of its briny odor — redolent of the slimy, leafy stuff that washes up in tangles on the Eastern Seaboard — and quailed.

But this was all I had to eat until morning and I was hungry after walking the city all day. So I took a tentative taste, and another. A few more bites and I was hooked.

Whatever was on this popcorn tasted much subtler than it smelled: loamy, mossy and salty, with a verdant after note of sex. I ate the entire bag while watching a rerun of “Monk.” Then I opened the second, which was labeled “spicy.” This version smelled better, and it was far more festive looking: a Christmasy blend of sea bottom green and chili pepper red. And it was like nothing I’d ever tasted before: crackling, nutty, oystery and wild. The way a deep-water fish might taste if it were stuffed with sweet corn and fire. I ate until only the dregs remained.

I half expected to be bilious the next day, hung over from my junky, salty meal. But I wasn’t. In fact, I awoke feeling wonderful: inexplicably healthy and strangely “clean.” I didn’t link this directly to the spirulina, not at first. But when I returned to Minneapolis and made my own algae-covered popcorn, I had the same rejuvenating experience. I began craving it, eating spirulina three to four times a week. Over the next few months, I noticed that my hair felt thicker, my clothes fit better, and my chronic allergies seemed to have disappeared. Yet, something about this habit seemed shameful and weird.

A restaurant critic, I’d spent much of my career talking to chefs and gourmands about good food. No one I knew was eating spirulina. This isn’t a delicacy you can bring out to share with your friends, slice up, and enjoy with a nice bottle of wine. Eating algae went counter to all my epicurean instincts.

At one point, I decided to get the green monkey off my back for good. I went cold turkey: no spirulina at all for three months. And though the craving disappeared within a week or two, my nails soon grew brittle, my allergies came back with a vengeance, and I had less stamina during spinning classes. Finally, I capitulated, and the response was swift. After only a few doses of spirulina, I felt as I had in New York: clear, clean and full of energy. Perhaps — I remember thinking — I’m actually some sort of sea creature. Part mermaid.

The truth is less fanciful. It’s likely I simply needed protein, vitamins and minerals such as iron, manganese and zinc.

As a Minneapolis restaurant critic, I was eating spectacularly well. But often my diet was governed by editorial directives rather than hunger; if I were working on a cover story called “50 Best Desserts,” for instance, I might eat five varieties of crème brûlée, when what I really needed was steamed tofu and broccoli. Supplementing with spirulina — which is rich in all of the elements listed above plus Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids, calcium, potassium, copper, folate, beta-carotene and vitamin K — was an ideal way to achieve balance.

“Spirulina is one of the only non-animal sources of complete protein,” says Jessica McNamara, product specialist for Frontier Natural Products Co-op, which supplies spirulina to natural food stores and cooperatives throughout the country. “It has all eight of the essential amino acids in the correct proportion, plus 10 of the 12 nonessential ones. So one serving all by itself translates into 5 grams of complete protein for the body. And for that reason, it’s become really popular with strict vegans and people in the raw foods movement.”

It’s also extremely low in calories (26 per tablespoon), carbohydrates and fat. And because the carbs it does contain are complex, married to a protein- and mineral-rich base, McNamara says it’s possible spirulina also stabilizes blood glucose levels by slowing the body’s process for metabolizing sugars and simple starches. But she’s reluctant to make any overt health claims.

Others are less reticent.

A 2001 study in Journal of Medicinal Food, conducted by three medical researchers in India and titled “Role of Spirulina in the Control of Glycemia and Lipidemia in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus,” showed that a two-gram dose of spirulina daily over a period of just two months lowered blood glucose levels “appreciably” in 25 patients with diabetes. It also uniformly improved their lipid profiles, lowering both LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, while raising HDL cholesterol just a tick.

And a 20-page article in the spring 2002 edition of Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association went much further. It claims spirulina, or “dihe” — a natural food that’s been consumed for more than 400 years, originally by the Aztecs in Mexico and currently by the Kanembu tribe in the Republic of Chad — has anti-inflammatory, antihistamine, antioxidant, anti-cancer and anti-viral properties. Most of the studies it cites were conducted with rats, hamsters, mice, chickens and prawns — but the article also refers to a handful of human studies, including one in Kerala, India, where pan tobacco chewers with precancerous mouth lesions were given either one gram of spirulina per day or one gram of a placebo; after a year, researchers observed a complete regression of mouth ulcers in 45 percent of patients taking spirulina, but only 7 percent of those in the control group. And in another study, aimed at reducing the fasting blood sugar of participants, it was determined that 2.8 grams of spirulina three times a day not only improved glucose levels, it also led to statistically significant weight loss.

This document goes so far as to recommend that spirulina be used for patients with HIV — not to cure them, per se, but to bolster their flagging immune systems and protect them from opportunistic infections. It concludes: “Despite the few human studies done so far on the health benefits of spirulina, the evidence for its potential therapeutic application is overwhelming in the areas of immunomodulation, anti-cancer, anti-viral, and cholesterol-reduction effects.”

It’s worth noting that the article’s author, Amha Belay, is vice president and scientific director for Earthrise Nutritionals Inc., a California company that calls itself a “pioneer and innovator of premium quality Spirulina.” Personally, I assume Belay’s work to be mostly a self-serving manifesto. And yet…

There’s my own anecdotal data: the fact that my lifelong allergy symptoms have virtually disappeared. There’s also the much more compelling evidence that a few real, unbiased, academic researchers have been won over.

Jane Teas, a research assistant at the South Carolina Cancer Center, has been studying the health effects of seaweeds and algae for more than 20 years. Back in 1984, when she was a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, Teas discovered that brown seaweeds — primarily kombu and wakame — helped prevent breast tumors in rats. Today, she continues to recommend seaweed for women (especially those prone to breast cancer); but she warns that too much can cause an iodine overdose, and ultimately thyroid disorders.

Spirulina, she says, poses no such risks.

“We know that spirulina stimulates the immune system, keeping envelope viruses, such as HIV and Ebola, from attaching,” Teas says. “And it has some role to play in stabilizing blood sugar, controlling arthritis and fighting cancer. It even helps prevent skeletal muscle damage, which is why the Chinese and Cuban Olympic teams eat it daily.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

I just like it, and I like the way it makes me feel.

If, in addition to giving me a daily jolt of iron, spirulina also makes me less prone to develop diabetes, cancer and high cholesterol, that’s a huge and unexpected benefit. And if it protects me from ligament strains when I’m hiking, that’s cool, too.

But I wish it were more accessible, and less expensive. According to McNamara, the high price of spirulina is due to a combination of factors: first, the environment it requires to grow — a precisely formulated high-saline, high-pH bog — and second, the stricter National Organic Program standards set in April 2005, which eliminated many sources previously cultivating spirulina. (Because most American consumers of spirulina and seaweed also adhere to organic or raw foods diets, it just doesn’t pay to grow commercial-grade products.) Farmers don’t stumble into cultivating spirulina the way they might, say, soybeans; it takes a dedicated production facility like the one at Earthrise, which has partnered with a Japanese company, Dainippon Ink and Chemicals, to corner the world market on micro-algae products.

If companies are paying attention to the cycles of supply and demand (and I’m certain they are) all their efforts will go into producing pricey pre-made supplements, rather than affordable food-quality spirulina. Because more than half the people who take algae for health reasons prefer to swallow it in caps. But as with any vegetable — sea, field or root — eating spirulina in its real, unprocessed form probably offers the greatest potential benefit. Those who want to mask the flavor sometimes add a small amount to smoothies containing vibrant-tasting fruit, such as blueberries, or sprinkle it on salads and use a pungent dressing.

“Honestly, there are a lot of people who just choke it down,” McNamara says. “But then there are those who become acquainted with it and learn to think it tastes great.”

Me? I take my spirulina the way I learned to that first night in New York: sprinkled on organic white popcorn that’s been cooked in olive oil and tossed with fresh-squeezed lemon juice and cayenne. And if I can get the timing just right, I still eat it while watching reruns of “Monk.” Only these days, instead of fretting, I feel virtuous. Green lips and all.

I was a parent like this.

Until he was 17, my son was unique and funny and odd. He was difficult in some ways but incredibly easy in others. He washed the family’s dishes precisely, went to bed at exactly the same time each night, and sorted our mail into careful piles. He did fairly well in school — above average in math, a little below in social studies — and spent his weekends playing tournament-level chess. He was a loner, but sweet and articulate and very close to his only brother.

Then junior year came. He met a girl, he went to a dance, he thought life was better. And for a night it was. Then the dance ended, the girl decided she was interested in someone else, and the boy became depressed.

Was this cause for alarm? I thought not. Teenage boys routinely get depressed over girls and fickle friends and school dances. It was painful, but I assumed it would blow over. When it didn’t, after six months, I took him to a psychologist who recommended a psychiatrist who put him on a newfangled antidepressant she said would have the added benefit of controlling some of his obsessive tendencies, like stacking the dishes and sorting the mail.

I didn’t want to control those things — to me, these weren’t symptoms, they were characteristics of my son. And I’d fought for 17 years to keep him drug-free. But the psychiatrist and the psychologist and several family members insisted: He’d become unhappy, his routines were getting in the way of his developing a social life. This pill, they said, would help him.

Instead, he gained 30 pounds and began to lose his mind.

It happened slowly, over a period of months. First his grades began to fall. There were some random episodes of violence — nothing major, just an out-of-control moment here or there. A tendency to stand up from the dinner table, after a full meal, and walk to Arby’s for a snack. Eerie giggles that seemed involuntary. A flat expression on his once-curious face.

Senior year, he started an after-school job at an auto parts factory but lost it when he couldn’t keep up with even the elderly workers. He stopped speaking to his brother entirely and even hit him several times. He lost interest in music, computers and chess.

I talked all this over with his father, my ex-husband, who said, “Maybe he needs a man’s attention. Let me give it a try.”

So our now 18-year-old, autistic, depressed and quickly losing ground, moved across town, to live with his father in a small, quiet apartment. My ex worked odd shifts, so our son began wandering the city on foot, early in the morning and late into the night. He told his dad about how he had to fight the bad thoughts that were crowding in his head. And when he wasn’t out walking, he slept a lot — around two-thirds of his life, in fact — despite the fact that he drank 12 to 15 cups of coffee a day.

Together, my ex-husband and I took our son to a highly respected neuropsychology clinic housed in a suburban office building. The doctors there even looked like bankers; they wore regular clothes and carried clipboards and fancy pens embossed with the names of drug companies, rather than stethoscopes.

After meeting our son twice, they conferred with the original psychiatrist (who, we discovered later, was employed by the same large healthcare conglomerate) and came up with an altogether new diagnosis. This wasn’t autism at all, they told us, but “psychomotor slowing” — a form of schizophrenia. Our son was just unlucky, they said sadly, the victim of two devastating neuro-behavioral disorders. Completely unrelated.

It was critical that we begin treating him immediately; they couldn’t stress this strongly enough. We were given a prescription for a brand-new antipsychotic medication with the inspiring name Abilify that was direct-to-consumer advertised in Newsweek and Time magazine. It featured a woman gazing into an azure sky and copy promising the drug would work on the brain “like a thermostat to restore balance.”

We were skeptical. But the experts were firm: He would continue to deteriorate if we didn’t catch this now. Did we want our son to end up institutionalized? In jail? Sick to our stomachs and desperate, we gave him the drugs. Then he got much, much worse.

He stayed with me on weekends, and twice during the workweek he would come to my house for dinner. We would sit at the table — my husband (his stepfather), his brother and sister and I — but my once-reserved older son would only stand over us acting crazy. Humming, shifting foot to foot, screaming if anyone touched him or tried to move him to the side. Often, he would talk back to the people who were speaking to him inside his head, telling him to do things. He would not, however, say a word to us.

He wasn’t eating meals. But he was eating — constantly. After graduating from high school, during the period when he was still holding the voices at bay, he’d started a government job through a disability work program. I’d given him a car and helped him open a checking account during this period of lucidity. Now, he began stopping at fast food restaurants on his way home from work to consume nachos, burgers, brownies and lattes. He ate with his hands and wiped them on his clothes, which he’d quit washing. He stopped bathing altogether.

We discontinued the Abilify, tapering it off as directed. Two days after taking the final pill, he got out of bed at 2 p.m. and stood in one place for a solid hour. My husband had taken our daughter roller-skating; our younger son was at work. It was just me, alone with this 6-foot-3-inch man I’d given birth to but no longer knew. I put my hand on his back and tried to push him forward, toward his shoes. And he turned to look at me — his eyes empty and cold — then grabbed me by both arms and beat me until the neighbors heard me screaming and called 911.

You think you know what crazy is, but you don’t. Not unless you’ve been there.

In the movies, it might be depicted as quaint or flat-out violent. But whichever way it goes — Hannibal Lecter or the wacky old ladies of “Arsenic and Old Lace” — crazy is portrayed as consistent, interesting, narratively coherent. Not so in life.

In reality, crazy is like war. It’s tedious for long periods of time, until it turns around and is devastating. It’s random, senseless, all-consuming, financially draining, destructive, ugly, sickening and gross.

It’s standing in the front yard wearing nothing but torn underwear and trying to control the thoughts of people who drive by. It’s saying yes to every question, no matter what the real answer. It’s drinking compulsively, straight from the faucet, then spewing a stream of clear-water vomit like a geyser.

It’s needing to be tracked down at 5 a.m. and being found, more often than not, at a 24-hour convenience store drinking free coffee and eating package after package of mini-doughnuts. It’s getting escorted out by security guards after hanging out at Target for nine hours. It’s standing directly in front of a childhood home and swaying until the people inside, the ones who now live in the house, call the cops.

For the people who live with crazy — who love crazy — it means answering the phone over and over to say, “Yes, I’m so sorry, where is he? Please don’t do anything yet. I’m coming.” It means never finishing a movie or a book or a television show. Never eating a meal in peace. Suggesting showers that won’t be taken and changing shit-stained sheets and throwing away clothes that have become too soiled to wash clean. And it means going to bed each night with a queasy feeling that something is looming over you, left undone.

It’s paying over and over: for the library books that were lost, the iPod that was worn in the shower, the high-priced vitamins and health foods, the therapies and lessons and groups that are supposed to help but never do. It’s including crazy on every family outing even though you know how it’s going to end because it’s the least wrong thing to do in an equation that contains no right.

It’s also watching people you once loved fade away. Answering their periodic phone calls, full of concern, all their questions about what you’ve done already and what you’re planning to do now, which medications you’ve tried, why you haven’t called the doctor they recommended, whether you’ve read “Dear Abby” today where a letter about something remotely similar appeared.

But it’s knowing, too, that after the phone call, they’ll be gone. You won’t be asked to the next neighborhood get-together or family event. They’re worried, yes, but they can’t let their lives be interrupted by crazy. They have to maintain their own sanity and keep the chaos from mucking up their lives, even if that means letting you go, too.

And you understand, only you don’t. Because you’d like to be done with crazy yourself. In fact, you hunger for it. A full night’s sleep, a meal by candlelight, a midnight drive across town that doesn’t include peering out windows, scanning the dark streets for a mammoth, curly-haired young man in a green sweat shirt carrying a Styrofoam cup of coffee who sways back and forth as he mutters strings of remembered conversations under his breath.

Sometimes you wish for these things so hard that you ask yourself, “How badly do you want this to be over? And what, exactly, are you willing to do to end it?” You hate crazy with all your heart. But the person underneath, you love. You still remember him as a tiny, big-eyed baby who liked to be wrapped tightly in a blanket, a cheerful toddler sitting high in the seat of a grocery cart chanting the word “asparagus.” And you’ll stop at nothing to find him and bring him back.

The thing is: You have no idea how.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

We lived like this for as long as we could, then went back to the team of specialists with our story. Our son wasn’t schizophrenic, we insisted. The medication they’d prescribed seemed to be harming him and our son was getting worse. But they told us we were wrong.

A second psychiatrist was called in. “Your son is definitely psychotic,” she said, using the violence as evidence that we were wrong to have stopped giving him the drug. It was possible, however, that he needed something stronger. So this time, she prescribed Abilify’s big, hulking chemical cousin: a pill with a no-nonsense name that makes it sound like a building material of some kind. Geodon.

“I’m sure you thought you were doing the right thing,” the psychiatrist said in a stern voice. “But your son is very sick, he needs treatment. You absolutely must give him this medication. It would be cruel not to.” And then she left.

That’s the day I decided I was a terrible mother who deserved to be beaten. Out of fear and shame and denial, I’d withheld a medication my child needed as he would have needed penicillin were he suffering from an infection. “Go ahead,” I told my ex-husband, “give him the drug. Let’s hope this one works.”

That’s when things got really bad.

Our son went from unpredictable to entirely random. He would arise to brew and drink an entire pot of coffee at 3 a.m. He would call us, but be able to say nothing for 15 minutes except, “Uh, please…” He began stalking the girl from the dance, going to her workplace, standing in one place for hours, and staring at her. Ultimately, every officer in our town’s small police department learned his name.

After two weeks, psychiatrist be damned, we discontinued the Geodon, too. Things couldn’t get worse, we told ourselves. But we were wrong.

Our son, the former chess champion and 1980s music buff, stopped responding to language altogether. He could not follow directions such as: “Put on some pants” or “Get in the car.” And he began walking away from everywhere. From home, from work. Often in the middle of the night.

My ex-husband — newly married to a very understanding woman and blissful for all of about seven minutes — never slept because he was working day and night to keep track of our son. I didn’t sleep out of solidarity. Also due to worry and grief.

This turned out to be a good thing, however, because I was up all night, for many nights in a row, with nothing better to do than search online.

The first thing I found was a list of “infrequent” side effects of the very first drug, the antidepressant he’d been given nearly two years before. Among these: auditory hallucinations, narcolepsy and obesity.

The second was an obscure article about a boy who sounded exactly like my son: a high-functioning young man with Asperger’s syndrome who’d suddenly become nonfunctional at the age of 17 and was diagnosed with something called autistic catatonia.

It was 3 a.m. and I was on the couch under a blanket with my dying laptop, alone in the silence of a sleeping house. That’s when I Googled “autistic catatonia” and hit the mother lode. There were dozens of stories, coming from countries all over the world, and each one described in wretched detail the previous year of my son’s life: the slowing, the disintegration, the delusions and insomnia and explosive anger.

In addition, they all warned — each and every journal article, white paper and scientific treatise — that the one thing practitioners should never do is prescribe antipsychotic medications, such as Abilify and Geodon, because they will make the symptoms of autistic catatonia much worse. And it might cause permanent damage.

The third thing I found was a Web site that described neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a slow poisoning by prescription that lasts (and this is the part that caught my attention) even after the drug is stopped.

Finally, believe it or not, we’ve reached the hopeful, lucky part. Only I didn’t know that yet.

I was crazed. Throughout the early morning hours, I e-mailed people. The retired doctor from Stony Brook, N.Y., who had authored original work on autistic catatonia; a therapist from the Netherlands who claimed to have a new method for treating it; researchers at our local university. Then I went to bed and slept fitfully for exactly one hour and 40 minutes.

When I awoke, at 7:30, my e-mail box was full. The most helpful response came from the gentleman once of Stony Brook, now professor emeritus of both psychiatry and neurology, a genuine mensch, living on Long Island with his wife. “Dear Mrs. Bauer,” he’d written at 6:48 a.m., “I know of no one in Minneapolis who understands the connection between autism and catatonia. But the clinicians at Mayo are very knowledgeable. Would you like me to make a referral?” Other messages simply advised me to seek medical attention for my son immediately, to flush the medications from his system. “It sounds as if your son is, indeed, suffering from autistic catatonia,” one doctor wrote. “But I believe most of the symptoms you describe are related to the inappropriate use of neuroleptics.”

How lucky can you get? Not only did the world’s top expert reach across electronic airspace to help diagnose and refer a stranger, but we happen to live just one hour and 15 minutes from Mayo Clinic, one of three places on earth where autistic catatonia is truly understood. And it’s that rare healthcare organization where doctors are not allowed to take kickbacks from the drug companies. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On April 30, my ex-husband and his wife put our son in the back seat of their car and drove like hell the 72 miles to Rochester, Minn. Exhausted after the 90-minute trip, the three-hour wait to check in, the half-year of tracking a drug-addled boy, they walked across the street to a hotel room after checking him into the hospital and had their first uninterrupted night’s sleep in weeks.

We all did. Secure in the knowledge that the boy who’d been wandering for nearly two years was finally locked up and safe, my husband and I, too, slept the way starving people eat.

Then we drove to Rochester to meet with the nine practitioners who’d been called in to assess our son. It was an interesting case, they told us — and instructive. Within three days, they’d performed a series of medical tests and evaluations, determining that our son was neither schizophrenic nor psychotic. He was autistic, exhausted, improperly medicated, borderline diabetic, and simply stuck. It would take them perhaps a month to detox his body of all the drugs and treat the underlying catatonia that had dogged him for more than a year.

“This occurs in about 15 percent of all young people with autism,” the team lead told us. “We don’t know yet why it happens, but we can treat it.”

And then they did. Magically, it seemed. On the morning after they began their regimen — a combination of therapies that they orchestrated like a carefully choreographed dance — our son awoke and stretched, clear-eyed, to ask us if we’d like to play a game of hearts. And after a slightly shaky start, he shot the moon, gathering all the tricks with controlled sweeps of his right hand, flashing us a shy but satisfied smile.

Five days later, the New York Times ran a front-page story about psychiatrists in Minnesota who were collecting money from drug manufacturers for prescribing atypical antipsychotics, including Abilify and Geodon. According to the Times, “Atypicals have side effects that are not easy to predict in any one patient. These include rapid weight gain and blood sugar problems, both risk factors for diabetes; disfiguring tics, dystonia and in rare cases heart attacks and sudden death in the elderly.”

Side effects like our son’s — almost certainly caused by a unique combination of the drugs and autistic catatonia — were not explicitly cited. These facts, however, were:

“In Minnesota, psychiatrists collected more money from drug makers from 2000 to 2005 than doctors in any other specialty,” the Times reported. “Total payments to individual psychiatrists ranged from $51 to more than $689,000, with a median of $1,750. Since the records are incomplete, these figures probably underestimate doctors’ actual incomes.”

By this time, we four parents had resumed our life in Minneapolis and were trading visiting days.

After work on the night the Times article came out, my husband and I got on his motorcycle, puttered through rush hour traffic, then sped down Highway 52, arriving after the dinner hour to find our son sitting at a table, playing chess with a nurse. She was hunched over the board, muttering; he was lounging in his chair, leaning back to watch television while he waited for her to make her move. There was a small crowd gathered around watching.

“He’s killing her!” a patient named Richard crowed. “He beat her the first time in seven moves and the second time in four.”

The nurse raised her head and grimaced.

“Did you tell her you used to be a tournament player?” I asked, bending to kiss my son’s woolly hair.

“Oh no, I guess I forgot,” he said vaguely and slid his eyes at me in a way I recognized from years ago, that quirky boy from long ago.

After the visit, riding home through rolling farmland and a scarlet sunset that was cracked with gold, I counted the ways we were lucky. The doctors at Mayo had assured us that our son’s prognosis was very good: Even after the treatment was done, he probably would continue to improve and regain most of the ground he’d lost by summer’s end. My son’s supervisor — a wise and gentle woman who’d never flinched, even when he was at his craziest — had called to say she was holding his job for him, maintaining his health insurance, and hoping for his swift recovery. My husband and my former husband’s new wife had parented stalwartly through the very worst of times.

And there was that one moment, as we were leaving, when my son had put his hand on my arm and told me he missed us. He also missed going to Starbucks and walking in the sunshine and he wanted, more than anything, to go outside for just an hour or so. “You could just lead me out of here,” he’d said, his face sober as a Lutheran minister’s. “If I walked past the desk with you, maybe they wouldn’t even see.” I looked straight up at him, this bearded man who, at 250 pounds is exactly twice my size, and started to tell him I thought the nurses probably would notice. But he reached out and touched my arm, gently, wrapping his fingers all the way around. “I would only go out for a little while, you know. And later, I could come back. Don’t worry, Mom. I can find my way.”

Meanwhile, a server in pink Winnie the Pooh pajamas hurries from the kitchen in back, her tray loaded with bison benedict, lemon-ricotta hotcakes, scrambled eggs with shrimp, and foie gras in black truffle sauce, plus a basket of bread and a glass pot of homemade peanut butter. She’s headed for a table by the window. But as she tries to cross the entryway, a bulky guy with a mustache steps out and blocks her way.

“You’re not getting through until I get my table,” he says. Then, turning toward the maitre d’ station. “Just seat me now, and your waitress can go deliver her food.”

The server starts to cry and mascara runs in rivers down her cheeks. But the hostess is unfazed. She’s seen this before: Customers who come to Hell’s Kitchen never give up and go elsewhere; there’s not another restaurant in the world that serves sweet sausage bread stuffed with buffalo meat, pecans, currants and black coffee.

She tells the customer she’ll find the owner, who will see to him personally. The man smirks and steps aside; the server sniffles and delivers her meals. Everything is pacific for a moment.

And then a collossus in a chef coat comes lurching from the back of the restaurant. Six and a half feet tall in steel-toed cowboy boots, with thick white hair and tiny gold spectacles, he moves through the crowd headfirst, like a bullet, apologizing politely as he goes. His voice is loud and reedy, like a bassoon. “Excuse me, excuse me.”

At the front of the restaurant, he stops and his face twists, a Steadman character come to life. “OK, where is this asshole?”

The server, returning with her empty tray, nods in the direction of the mustachioed man. Mitch Omer, Hell’s Kitchen’s owner and chef, pivots, reaches out. “No one fucking treats my people that way,” he says calmly, yanking open the front door. Then, glowering down at the man, his volume rising. “Now get the hell out of my restaurant and do not come back again.”

It’s clear to everyone in the place — including the ones who applaud — that he means it.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

I first met Mitch Omer in late summer of 2004. I was a Minneapolis food editor with pages to fill when a woman called, telling me that her husband had auditioned for a new reality cooking series because his restaurant had the same name as the show: Hell’s Kitchen.

It was a pretty slim hook for a story. But I was desperate and the restaurant was around the corner from my office, so I grabbed a notebook and walked over.

At 11 a.m., Hell’s Kitchen was mostly empty. And the man I’d been sent to interview didn’t seem at all happy to see me: His hair was wild, his face creased. He looked as if he’d been sleeping somewhere in the recesses of this blood-red cave. Still, he sat and offered me something to drink.

“I heard about this TV show called “Hell’s Kitchen,” he began. His voice echoed with energy. “I hate reality TV. And I have proprietary rights over the name Hell’s Kitchen — at least, I do here in Minnesota. So I started making phone calls.” Then he discovered the show would offer a fully equipped high-end Los Angeles restaurant to the winner, and that tryouts were going to be held in Minneapolis. He went to the casting call, completed a videotaped interview, and filled out a 25-page application. But no one from the show “Hell’s Kitchen” ever called.

Dead end, I recall thinking: He tried out, he failed. No story here.

But to be polite, I scribbled some notes and poured my tea. It was an umber Asian blend that tasted of lavender, thunder and earth. Omer leaned back in his chair, peering at me over his little glasses.

“They probably thought I was too old, which is shit,” said Omer, who had just celebrated his 50th birthday. “But I think I had about a dozen other factors working against me, too, not the least of which is my foul language. And I probably shouldn’t have told them I’m manic-depressive, or that I was treated for alcohol abuse last summer. I said that I own handguns. They asked if I’d spent time in jail and I said, ‘Yes, I have, actually.’ A studio executive sees someone with my profile, he might think I’m a risk.”

I looked up to see if he was joking. His blue eyes were as clear as a baby’s.

“Hey, you want something to eat?” he asked.

I shook my head. As a food critic, I’d found it was necessary to conserve, eating sparsely on my own time so I could go out and sample calorie-laden dishes all over town. That day, I’d already had my allotted apple for breakfast; lunch would be a cup of yogurt, after I ran a couple miles at the gym.

But Omer paid no attention. He stood, towering over me, and beckoned over a young man whose lips were studded with bolts. “Get her some Mahnomin porridge,” he called out, then turned back to me. “You’ll love this; it’s my own recipe.”

Not five minutes later, a bowl the circumference of a frisbee arrived and inside was a colorful, steaming stew of wild rice, roasted hazelnuts, dried blueberries and cranberries. I took a tentative spoonful and the taste was of nutty popcorn, sunlight, blueberry pie and chewy fruitcake — all nestled inside a maple-spiked custard that had the mouth feel of gently whipped cream.

I ate while Omer talked.

He went to Iowa State on a football scholarship, but walked off the field one day when he realized he hated the sport. Then he hitchhiked around the country for a while, landing in Oklahoma and marrying at the age of 21. He and his 16-year-old bride moved to the Twin Cities, looking for work. He got a job as a prep cook and sent away for a clergy license from the back of Rolling Stone, becoming a minister with the Church of Mother Earth so he could perform wedding ceremonies on the side.

An explosive employee who was fired repeatedly, Omer partied hard and fought with his young wife. When they divorced in the late 1970s, he took a job as a security guard with traveling rock bands. The life suited him. He got to see the country, and the drugs were good. Somewhere along the line, he got married for a second time and had three children. But instead of settling down, Omer just got wilder.

Then came the Waylon Jennings tour of 1981. Omer found a concertgoer trying to steal some of the band’s equipment. At roughly 300 pounds, Omer easily could have restrained him; instead, he kicked the kid nearly to death.

“That’s when I knew I had to quit.” I paused, spoon midway to my mouth. There were tears in this huge stranger’s eyes and he reached out to touch my hand. “I was out of control. I was hurting people, and I didn’t know why.”

So Omer moved his family back to Minneapolis and went back to kitchen work because it was all he knew. But this time, he landed at the New French CafC) — arguably the city’s best restaurant at the time — and the head chef there quickly realized Omer had talent. Suddenly, he said, he was “lit on fire to cook.” And all was good for about a year. But then his behavior deteriorated again, his second marriage ended. Omer was fired from the only job he’d ever loved.

Lonely and broke, he began eating compulsively and gained 150 pounds. Morbidly obese, he moved to northern Minnesota, where he passed years working as a short-order cook and nighttime radio DJ. Mornings he would take saunas then run naked through the frozen forest, his long hair streaming behind him. Eventually, he quit at the request of law enforcement: skiers who spotted him kept reporting that they’d seen Sasquatch.

By then, my porridge was mostly gone and finally, I couldn’t eat any more. But also, I was beginning to think this man might make a good story after all.

“So how did you get from there to here?” I asked.

“Two things,” he boomed. “I went to a psychiatrist who diagnosed me as bipolar with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And I had gastric bypass.” Though the irony inherent in a starving chef was not lost on Omer, food — more specifically, food in excess — had been the constant through his loveliest highs and vilest lows. And so, in 1999 he underwent the procedure, and immediately lost 165 pounds. And once he was normal size again — or what passes for it when you’re a hair over 6-foot-4 — and on a cocktail of drugs that successfully controlled his moods, he got a new chef job, a good one. Then he met Cynthia.

“You gotta talk to her! She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And she’s a monster of a businesswoman. It’s because of her that I have…,” he opened his arms wide, “this.”

So I did. The following day I met Cynthia Gerdes, founder of Creative Kidstuff — a $10 million Minneapolis toy company — for a glass of wine. And she started telling the story where Omer had left off: In 2000, she was married with two children and a thriving business, but she wasn’t happy.

“Oh, my first husband was a wonderful man.” A small, round woman with curly, dark hair, Gerdes ate a green salad entirely with her fingers. “But we were so mismatched. I’m all crazy and tons of energy and totally ADHD, and he was just … not.”

She decided to divorce around the same time Omer posted a personal ad on AOL. Gerdes logged on, contacted him, and the two were engaged within months. “I said in my first note to him that I was looking for someone who was sane and insane at the same time.” She rolled her eyes and laughed loudly. “Boy, did I ask for it!”

They married in 2001. Omer cleaned up and began slowly to repair his troubled relationships with his kids. Then, in 2002, he and Gerdes conceived and opened Hell’s Kitchen, a unique spot that, ironically, played up all of Omer’s old demons: rock ‘n’ roll, Goth culture, excess and rich food. And even as he settled down personally, Omer’s manic past turned him into a raging commercial success. By the time I met them, the business was solidly in the black — a rarity among new restaurants — thanks to Omer’s off-kilter gourmet recipes and Gerdes’ careful management.

I went back to my office and the story practically wrote itself.

The truth: I’m not an unbiased source. I was, back then. But today, Mitch Omer and Cynthia Gerdes are my friends. Because when I met them, my life changed for the better in a multitude of ways, much as theirs did when they found each other. And I’m not the only one.

My article about Mitch Omer hit newsstands in November of 2004, and readers responded in droves. Business at the restaurant hit an all-time high, and letters poured into the magazine. “It’s so wonderful to read about someone who figured out his life and found true love at 50,” one person wrote. “This gives me hope.”

It gave me hope, too. At 39, I was tiring of the restaurant beat. I loved the personal stories, like Omer’s, but loathed the politics of the job. I’d never been a foodie, but my publisher was, and he sometimes tried to steer the course of my reviews. Worse, my three children spent most evenings in front of the TV, eating things they’d heated up in the microwave, because I was always out. My friends had given up on my ever being available for a Friday night movie. I hadn’t had a real date in months.

And I had bigger worries. My older son, Andrew — long autistic in a gentle, ethereal sort of way — had become at 17 suddenly volatile and depressed. If I was lonely, he was isolated. But everything I tried to get him out into the world failed miserably: He was too inhibited for school groups, too stilted during interviews to land a part-time job.

None of this was in the front of my mind when I got a call from someone at National Public Radio, asking me to recommend some spots for Jane and Michael Stern — the “Roadfood” duo — to try when they visited Minneapolis. Then, I was thinking only of the heavenly Mahnomin porridge and Omer’s sausage bread, smoky, sweet and so dense that a single slice could be used to tack down a stack of papers in a stiff wind.

But when the Sterns’ review came out a couple months later, calling Hell’s Kitchen “inspired and inspiring” and referring to “huevos rancheros of the gods” and “the best peanut butter we have ever sampled, anywhere,” business went through the roof. And Cynthia called me.

“It’s all your fault,” she said. “People are calling from all over the world to get our peanut butter! We need to put together an assembly line, fast. What’s Andrew doing this summer? Tell him he’s got a job.”

With anyone else, it might have seemed like quid pro quo. But that’s just not how these people work. At Hell’s Kitchen, where customers can get a free cinnamon roll if they come for breakfast still in their pajamas, my eccentric, mostly silent child somehow fit right in.

When I left the magazine in late 2005, publishing an exposé about the reviewer’s life and taking a job in corporate marketing, most of the people in the food world promptly forgot my name. Mitch and Cynthia threw a holiday party in my honor, toasted my ethical stance, and offered to employ my other son, as well.

“I’m so glad you’re out of that job,” Cynthia said, hugging me. “Now it’s time to get online and find you a man.”

We’d been having this conversation for months: Internet personals had worked magic for them. “There’s no way we would have met otherwise; our paths never would have crossed!” Cynthia argued. I maintained that their relationship was a fluke, bizarrely lucky in a way that could never be duplicated.

But one cold, dark winter night, I capitulated. Sitting in my office with a laptop and a glass of wine I logged on, dashed off a cuttingly honest profile and wrote to three appropriately aged men, mostly based upon their taste in music and books.

One of them answered: someone I never would have met otherwise, whose path I never would have crossed. Six weeks later, we were engaged.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

After a wrenching divorce and six years spent swearing I’d never marry again, I find myself one cool, bright day in fall, floating on a 48-foot cruiser off the shore of Lake Superior, holding the hand of a gentle, long-haired biker I’ve come to love. Cynthia is driving the boat. My three children look on, swaying in time with the waves. And Mitch looms over all of us, his white hair haloed by the early afternoon sun.

This boat belongs to him, and it sits just three miles from the site of what will — on June 1, 2007 — become the second Hell’s Kitchen. A cavernous old antique mall on Canal Park, the jewel of tourism on Duluth’s North Shore, the building will soon have massive red cathedral-domed doors and a 12-foot gate covered with chains and iron bric-a-brac. Inside, a kitchen nearly double the size of the one in Minneapolis will serve a 140-seat restaurant three meals a day. There will be an area set aside exclusively for the manufacture of Hell’s now world-famous peanut butter. And this once depressed, lonely, obese, mentally ill and impoverished man will — together with his woman at the wheel — launch a restaurant empire.

Today, however, Omer’s menu is simple: satin slices of beef tenderloin with sharp, creamy horseradish sauce; garlic crostini cooked golden to their tips; grilled shrimp, lined up like bass clefs on a doily-covered platter; strawberries dipped in bittersweet chocolate and dusted with powdered sugar. We all hold glasses of Korbel, even the 12-year-old, and Mitch raises his so it sparkles in the dazzle of water and sky and light.

“I’m honored by the opportunity to unite these two beautiful souls,” he begins. Then his voice cracks and he takes a step back, tilting us northward, to wipe furiously at his eyes. “Ah, fuck … I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. Give me a minute, OK?”

And we wait, while the boat rocks and slows and settles, for him to go on.

You were married to an addict for 14 years. So you watch carefully as the wine is poured, as your date lifts his glass. You see him sip abstemiously, after using the small reading glasses he keeps in his pocket to read the label. He drinks little these days, he tells you, because he’s in training.

“For what?” you ask, thinking through various middle-class possibilities. Marathons, mountain biking, the company softball team.

“Motorcycle racing,” he answers. And a dangerous flush runs through you.

So you move to a restaurant with this man, where he takes your hand. Asks you what you want from a relationship and you tell him the truth: Saturday nights. Movies, nice dinners and maybe — you force yourself to meet his sharp, hazel eyes — with the right person, occasional sex. He takes this in stride, nods, raises his hand for the check, then takes you out to his car where he slips a hand up your skirt and acquaints you with his fast-cornering ways.

On your third date, he takes you to a motorcycle show. The convention center reeks of motor oil and black leather. You meet various long-haired, tattooed people who greet him with great cheer. Afterward, you go to his place and eat the lime-cured salmon ceviche he’s prepared. Candlelight flickers, the stereo clicks from Coldplay to Rachmaninoff. He touches you reverently. It is, you think, the perfect affair.

But then, suddenly, this thing begins to move faster. It is like you are riding something that’s not within your control. He is around not just on Saturdays, but on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and sometimes Sunday as well. He is teaching your daughter to dirt bike, helping your son with higher algebra, stopping by with grocery bags full of imported cheeses, dark chocolate and red wine.

For your 40th birthday, he whisks you away to New Mexico where he takes you to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum then drives like a demon along curving mountain roads. A sign for Las Vegas appears and he points at it, “Want to get married?” he asks. And you look at him in profile, thrilled with confusion, wondering if this is a joke or a dare.

Summer means racing season. By this time he has made his proposal official and you have accepted. Also, he’s begun taking you to club dinners, where the talk is all of throttles and gear. Race weekends are surprisingly long, you discover — Wednesday night through Sunday — and involve at least three days of prep work to ready the bikes.

It is the first time you’ve been apart for four nights in a row since you met. He calls you several times from the track, text messaging “I miss you” in the middle of the night. His friends, he says, are teasing him about being whipped. But he is racing better than ever, shaving two to three seconds off each lap. You are secretly pleased that even at 40, while schlepping kids to and from the YMCA and the shopping mall, you can inspire both recklessness and love.

He arrives home Sunday near midnight with a new beard and a raw quality to his voice, both of which turn you on. You welcome him into your bed, though he is sweat-stained and slimy with axle grease. It’s never been better than this.

During the second race weekend, he calls you from the track to tell you one of his friends crashed. You notice that your man sounds odd — both anxious and strangely high. He’s packing the injured man’s gear while two other guys accompany him to the hospital. They’ve all agreed to forgo the last race while waiting to see if their buddy will lose a hand. He says this as if it is a major concession, an act of extraordinary goodwill.

You join the racers at the bar where they eat tacos each Tuesday. It is here that your fianci announces your engagement. His friends raise their glasses and the only other woman at the table leans in to give you a hug. The evening goes on, more beer is drunk. Someone tells a joke: Why do they call it PMS? Because the name Mad Cow Disease was already taken. You draw in a breath that you let out raggedly, almost like a laugh. You think about your 12-year-old daughter who once went dirt biking with this crowd, and remember her, just last month, doubled over with cramps.

Not the sort of person who hides your feelings easily, you are probably quite visibly tense. Aloof behind your plain librarian face. One of the men scoots his chair over next to yours. He is young and handsome, with a wide Tom Cruise grin, which he employs at its fullest wattage now.

“A guy gets to be a certain age, starts to slow down, he starts feeling a little desperate,” he says quietly, in your ear. “Suddenly, he’s getting married.”

You stare at your blood-red glass, realizing at exactly this moment that you are the only one in this entire biker bar who is drinking wine, and blink back tears. The room is awash in ’80s music and laughter. You may as well have morphed back 28 years; this is junior high all over again. And you remain the odd, eggheaded girl on the edge.

The third race weekend coincides with your book tour. You have a hotel suite in downtown San Francisco and a car, all-expenses paid by your publisher. You mention once, trying not to sound needy, that your fianci would be welcome to join you but he simply raises his hands and shrugs. “If it weren’t a race weekend…” he says.

So you go alone, enjoy your canopied bed and complimentary champagne. Your cellphone rings on a bright, breezy afternoon in California as you are standing on the bay, gazing out at the fortress of Alcatraz. It is he, calling from the track, his tone heavy, morbid, depressed. There was a rainstorm and a flood, the races were canceled, his entire weekend was ruined.

There is a wedding scheduled for the Saturday of the fourth weekend — a racer who “messed up” (or so you’re told), forgetting to inform his fiancie which dates were off-limits. By the time he figured out the ceremony would conflict with an endurance race, it was too late to change it.

“The race?” you ask hopefully.

Your math geek stares at you. He’s decided to keep the scruffy beard and seems suddenly unfamiliar. “No.” He speaks patiently, as if to a small child. “The wedding. They tried to switch to another date, but the reception hall had already been booked.”

You excuse yourself, get a bottle of water, ponder the fact that he offered to plan and book your own wedding and honeymoon. Then you return and sit down with the man who is on your couch reading “Middlesex,” your cat lying across his lap. “Did you schedule our honeymoon around race weekends? Is that why we’re rushing to get married?”

He lowers his book, nods calmly. “I thought you understood that.”

You stand, and in the only act of violence you’ve committed since leaving your first husband, throw your water bottle at him.

To his credit, he forgives your violence and is himself contrite. To your bewilderment, he remains singularly focused. He offers to move your wedding, absorb all the cancellation fees, and plan something nice for winter. After the racing season is over.

You go away to brood. You calculate the following things: that he is helping your younger son apply to MIT; that he is coaching your autistic son to find a job; that he once fixed your garage door; that he is kind to your parents; that he took your daughter to school on the back of his bike after she sprained her ankle — lashing her crutches on with bungee cords and performing a few comic stunts for the waiting crowd.

Moreover, you truly love him. Sexy, dirty, dangerous obsession and all. You will marry him as planned, you decide. Take the bad with the good, the yin with the yang. That’s what marriage is all about. In fact, as a gesture of supreme solidarity, you will go up to the track and show support for your man the weekend before your wedding.

You show up on a Saturday at the end of summer. It is a warm, golden day and when you walk into the garage he looks up and breaks out into a huge smile. He is happy to see you even though you don’t wear American flag short shorts and a spangled halter top, like 98 percent of the other women at the track. You take this as a sign of true love.

There are races all afternoon and evening. You travel from one to the next on the back of the bike of an onlooker — an elementary school teacher who tells you he’s thinking of taking up the sport. You listen, even as the news of a near-fatal crash is broadcast over the P.A. system. Two riders have been transported to the hospital by helicopter; the track is closed until officials can assemble more ambulances on-site.

After dinner, there is a campfire. Your fianci, freshly showered, sits with your hand in his and jokes with his friends in a desultory way. Racing, politics, science. A weirdly sarcastic reference to concentration camps. You stiffen at this last and pull your hand from his, but he barely notices, so focused is he on the conversation.

Back at the hotel, you cry. Your people died in those camps, 6 million of them. He listens to your latent, useless grief and holds you. Moves in and makes love. But the next morning he awakens agitated, irritable and brusque. At 8 o’clock, he says, “Gotta go, the races are starting.” And he hurries away, without a kiss, leaving you to drive blearily 180 miles back home.

The wedding is off, you tell him when he returns. You have a career, three children to raise, a set of hard-won values of which you are proud. He turns meaner than you’d ever imagined he could and rages for a while, then drives off into the night and follows with a frantic series of e-mails. He is worried about you. He is sorry. He is done racing, no matter what you decide.

The next day, he pulls up after work and explains that racing is like cocaine. Expensive, destructive, addictive. He wants to quit, to help raise your children, to have a life with you instead.

This is like some kind of fable in which the beginning matches the end. You recall the hailstorm at the end of your last marriage: whiskey, drugs, gambling debts. Never again, you have told yourself. And yet…

This is a truly fine man. Your children have come to love him; they will be torn apart — again, as they were when their father left — if he disappears. Your wedding is just five days hence and his arguments are compelling. He was an unencumbered bachelor when he began racing. Circumstances have changed and he is willing to change with them.

You make a date with a couple you trust, motorcycle riders themselves who have been married for 22 years and still treat each other with the utmost respect. They tell you to have faith in your commitment. Romance, disillusionment, joy, they say. This is the endless cycle. So you take a breath and decide to believe.

Your wedding is perfect: a sunny, cool day on Lake Superior. A friend — licensed by the church of Mother Earth — marries you. Throughout the entire ceremony, Bach’s cello suites play in the background and your 240-pound linebacker son cries.

You leave for your honeymoon by train. Glacier Park, Mont. It is completely remote: no phone, no e-mail. Just the two of you hiking and camping in the mountains. By the fifth day, you are certain you have made the right decision. The man you met in that wine bar so long ago — the sweet, gentle math geek with the funny pince-nez — is back.

Day 6, on a side trip to Alberta, you stop at an Internet cafe to download the hundreds of e-mail messages each of you has received. Then you drive to the trailhead where you begin an 11-mile hike. It is on your first water break that he speaks.

“You should know, my friends are talking about us,” he says, referring to the racing listserv to which he still subscribes. “Dallas wrote to ask why I’m not racing anymore and Mike posted back saying you laid down the law and if I ever want to have sex again, I have to quit. A few people actually defended you. But overall, it wasn’t … good.” His voice is mournful, his bearded face perplexed.

It is late afternoon and the air is beginning to chill, but you flush hot with embarrassment and irrational hurt. You are the mother of teenagers, a woman with a small but respectable literary reputation, and a gang of bikers has been discussing your lovely new marital life via e-mail. Making it sound dirty and ugly. Accusing you of using sex as currency. Essentially calling you a whore.

You open your mouth to say this is not your life, you do not associate with people who talk about women in such a diminishing way. Then see that, in fact, you do: When you married him, you inherited this group as surely as you would have a set of in-laws were his parents not both deceased. You close your eyes and try to adjust to this.

From the glacial valley below a silence rises, thick and clear. And you are simply two tiny people at the top of a gorge, whimsically linked together for life, risking everything, wondering what comes next.

Then there was the wait, the hardest part. A quick walk along damp sidewalks. Terse words. And finally submission to a woman in flannel pants patterned with hearts and mud-flap girls in silhouette, to her rubber-gloved hand holding a tool that looked like an electric drill but actually contained sterile needles and ink that caused my skin to burn.

“It’ll feel like cat scratches,” she said. And it did, only better.

Afterward, there was relief. His, mine. Vaseline and bandages. A dark evening sky and a slower walk back to the car, during which he commented, smiling now, that it might not be wise to get matching tattoos with a man I’d known for only two and a half weeks. I said no, but I wasn’t really in this for wisdom. And then he asked, “So is it for the story? Are you going to write about this?”

Which made me pause.

Once inside the car and firmly belted, I may have been cool toward him. I’m nearly certain I was. That he took my hand and I let him but held his only loosely. Closed my eyes. Felt the rhythm of the wheels turning under us, the slow heat of my left shoulder, the place on my neck where she, the woman with the heart-and-silhouette pants, had rubbed me gently while whispering in a hoarse voice, “You’re done.”

He waited patiently. Drove us toward the restaurant and a nice bottle of Spanish wine. I opened my eyes into the brilliant lights of the cathedral on the hill.

“I can’t,” I said, as if only seconds — and not minutes — had passed. “There’s no story yet. Something happened, and it’s interesting, but I don’t yet know what it means.”

“Because you have to know what will happen with us?”

“It’s not just that.” I was warming fast, reeled in by his questions and the hand slowly wandering up my thigh. “The tattoo. I haven’t figured out what it is to me. It has no context, no real meaning, no slant.”

I find myself giving this lecture quite often, about the slant. And not only on dates.

This would make a good story, someone will say. You should write about it. This will be after something big or funny or tragic. And I’ll explain that yes it would be a good story, in terms of plot, because a lot happens, and that makes for a nice narrative arc with well-paced bursts of action. But it’s missing something.

What? they will ask.

Theme, I will say. Something underlying. Back story. Emily Dickinson called it slant. This is the point at which most people lose interest.

But for those who hang on, still curious, or for the students who are compelled to listen when I begin to speak, I go on. About Red Riding Hood and the underlying message: Don’t talk to strangers. About soap operas, their constant roiling battle of good vs. evil and paradoxically cheerful theme of redemption (you can always come back from the dead, even if you get thrown off a moving train or bludgeoned by a madman; salvation is never impossible). About essays. “Once More to the Lake” is not about a trip to a fishing cabin but rather about mortality, as it is when confronted by a father whose youth and life are reflected in an unwitting son.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant, Emily Dickinson wrote from her solitary room in Amherst. Enlighten, enrich, illuminate. There are only seven major plotlines — something like that. We’re all writing about death or war, fear of the monster, man’s search for God, true love. What is there new to say? Nothing, I tell my students. Whatever your idea, your plot, it has been dreamed of or experienced before.

It is all, I say to them, in the slant.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

So. It happened on Valentine’s Day. I rushed home from work, made a pot of spaghetti using organic hamburger and canned sauce, then changed my clothes — exchanging the suit for a camisole and sweater, so my shoulder could be easily exposed. Then the doorbell rang and I might have kissed the man who stood on the step, but I might not … I cannot recall.

I do know I led him through the living room, past the table where the flowers he’d sent stood shredded because the cat liked to nibble them, and into the kitchen with its too-bright lights and oregano scent, to say hello to my children. My older son stood, rising 2 inches above the man, at least, and tucked his head down as if trying to minimize the difference. There were awkward handshakes, desultory talk. My younger son made his sister laugh and she stumbled, crumpled to the floor, farted noisily, said excuse me, laughed some more. And through all of this he stood solid, one hand on the shoulder I later intended to bare.

The design he’d made using a CAD program and sent for my approval was lying on the counter. We’d discussed it the night before, the children and I: Did I like this symbol meant to signify the union between his life and mine? Was the man a good artist? Was he, for that matter, a good man? A man who would still be around, whom I would choose to have around, after the ink had dried and the scab had formed and fallen away?

“I think it’s nice,” the 18-year-old had said in his eternally gentle way, then floated off with iPod plugs poking insect-like from his hairy ears.

“I don’t know.” The 15-year-old, sitting at the kitchen table, spoke from under a middle-aged furrow of brow. “This is permanent. You have to ask yourself, will you want this on your body when you’re 60 years old?”

“Maybe you should get something else,” suggested my daughter. “If it were me, I’d get Scrappy Doo.”

There was an hour spent looking at images of Scrappy, the short, chesty dog of Saturday morning, and debating the merits of various cartoon characters. Rafiki, the sage baboon from “Lion King,” Foghorn Leghorn, Sebastian the crab. The middle child relaxed, his forehead smooth by the end, his laughter nearly childlike. “I say, I say…” he stuttered, eerily perfect in his mimicry of the laconic barnyard rooster who was developed in 1946, 20 years before I, his mother, was born.

Now, as the man and I stood in the kitchen preparing to leave, someone poured boiled noodles into a colander and steam rose in a cloud. He raised a hand to the children, patted the cat, and took my arm. Out the door and into the night, we entered the stream of rush-hour traffic, fell silent on the ride to east St. Paul. Then there was the Polish-American legion hall, the Miller sign, Acme Tattoo.

He stopped the car and we stared at the building, square as a fire station. “My friends told me to make sure you went first,” he said, voice lilting, a touch of my cheek meant to convey that he is not serious.

“Of course.” I opened the passenger side door, levering myself out, slamming it closed. “I intended to go first.”

He was concerned, contrite, and came around the car to slip one arm around my shoulders and apologize. But I am the sort of woman who cannot be so tamed, especially when holding back fear through sheer will. Once a challenge has been issued, there is no taking it back. I would go first if it meant kicking him with my high-heeled boot to move him out of my way.

Her name was Tanika, the woman with the hearts-and-silhouette pants. And her hands felt good, even through latex. “What made you decide to do this?” she asked as the tool whirred and my skin burned and twitched and I sighed.

“I’m going to be 40,” I answered. She waited, needle gun suspended inches from my skin, humming. “In three and a half weeks.”

“Oh.” She bent her head over my back and touched one spot with her index finger, as if she were anointing me. “What about him?”

He’d just begun, shirt off, straddling a chair backward under someone else’s needle gun. I’d allowed him to start because I was already partially inked — a combination of the Hebrew aleph-subscript-null (which he told me means infinity) and the base of a blue quill. There was no going back.

“Him?” I shifted and arched a little, letting the pain thrill me for a moment. “He’s a computer guy. But I think I really like him.”

Then it was after and the thing was done. Tanika rubbed my neck and I was sorry when she told me to put my shirt on and let me go. Do another one, I almost said. But instead, I waited for the computer man, watching his face seize in pleasant surprise, seeing that he, too, enjoyed the pain. A good sign.

But it wasn’t then — as we walked down the hill to the car hand-in-hand, each protecting a left shoulder, careful not to bump into each other and swinging the doors open with our right hands — that he said what he did. I did get in and let him drive, close my eyes and open them only to see the lights of the cathedral stream against the silky black sky. I was quiet because of the beauty of it all, because I was, truth to tell, in love equally with the man and with Tanika at that moment.

It was as we pulled up in front of the restaurant. After we had kissed for a couple minutes. “They asked me how long we’d been going out.” His voice caught and he cleared his throat. “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell them the truth. I said it had been a couple months.”

“Hasn’t it?” I asked.

Now, here’s the thing. I’m not very good with time. And I do have a magnificent capacity for self-delusion. He did not yet know this. How could he? So he thought nothing of leaning back in his seat and smiling — his eyes, though he is slim and only 44, crinkling kindly in a Santa Claus-ish way — and saying, “No, love, it’s been two weeks and three days.”

At which point my world tilted just slightly. I leaned back, closed my eyes, heard the echo of my daughter’s voice. And felt the slant begin.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

It’s all true. Everything happened just this way: the children, Foghorn Leghorn and Scrappy Doo, the cat, the flowers, the long, quiet ride to St. Paul. Only I doubt it happened in that order, or even maybe on exactly that night, because again — I’m not very good with time. In order to achieve the slant, you can’t be. You must be willing to collect events and paste them together so the story makes sense. And it must have some sort of coherent theme.

Only this story doesn’t. Not quite. The man, the tattoo, the nearly 40-year-old professional woman, now bandaged and dizzy in the front seat of his car. It’s all just plot. All My Children. Days of Our Lives. Perhaps what’s missing is the back story.

There are the children: proof of her stable, maternal side. Their fidelity, the way they have pulled together over the years since their father left, a tight gang of three, protecting the mother fiercely. These details provide contrast — the beginning of the slant.

But there was also a marriage of 13 years. A different, larger, dark-haired man about whom she has written many stories, all true, only slanted so they met the basic requirements of narrative. A brawny hero: him. A series of conflicts: money problems, an ill child, alcohol abuse. Love: the kind that cannot withstand the pressures of life but remains intact, specter-like, for the rest of time.

Maybe the story about the tattoo really begins five months prior to Valentine’s Day, as I lay on a table in an operating room that was rented by the hour. A small, ridiculously white person with organs as delicate and unforgiving as those of Russian kings, who’d given birth to the 10-pound babies of the oversize husband — three times — and torn the muscles from ribs to pelvis, twice. For a decade, things shifted inside my belly in a vaguely unpleasant way. But finally, I could afford the 20 percent co-pay to cut my body open, sew the muscles back together, make me whole again.

After the surgery, when I was sent home with Oxycontin, the former husband was there, making dinners, folding laundry, pouring my wine. He was haggard now, mostly mute, with long hair going to gray and dark around the mouth where the shadow of 30 years of cigarette smoking had begun to form. But there was a routine, familiar, nearly married. Our children returned to it automatically, as if it were dancing or roller-skating. A rhythm inside that need only be reawakened. You already know how to move.

But it was empty. Helpless and high on opiates, lying on the couch, watching a stage play about a real family unfold, I saw, finally, that that first story was over. The hero was tired, the love had receded to something warm and distant that existed more on the page, in stories, than in the real world.

I once was married for a long time and it was its own kind of battle and I am now deeply, permanently scarred. You cannot hide these things, I realized, or erase them. Never mind the children themselves who mill constantly in the kitchen, many heads taller than the mother, moving her gently aside as they fry endless omelets (two dozen eggs a week, at least, and four gallons of milk). There will always be that lightning crack of blood across her belly to remind her of what once was true.

By Christmas, I was recovered enough to start running again. The scar was a ridge of tissue, burgundy in color. But my body felt strong. Work was good. The novel about the large, young, drunken husband was selling well. And then, there was the strange, random meeting with this open-hearted computer man.

Emily Dickinson spent most of her life in that garret in Amherst, watching out the window, wearing her pristine white skin like a glove. Tell all the truth, she said. And she was right.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

It is the 13th of February, the night before Valentine’s Day. I am washing dishes and my daughter is sitting behind me with my laptop, at the table, searching the Web for images of Scrappy Doo. “This is better,” she says, turning the machine, showing me the bullish puppy poised on his skinny legs with tented ears. “Please, Mom, I really think you should get something else.”

She is a risk taker, a tree climber and football player, a great, admirable adolescent with a big laugh. But suddenly — I can hear it in her voice — she is frightened.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. And she pauses, looks down.

“What if you break up next week?” I sit so we are on a level. Or perhaps, she is slightly higher. She raises her head and stares at me from her father’s dark brown eyes. “You’ll still have this thing on your back and it will make you sad.”

I draw a long breath. Visions of this very thing dance in my head and I wonder, What is the right thing to say to this girl?

“Baby,” I say, taking her hand and trying hard to keep my voice light. “I really hope that doesn’t happen. But in my experience, when you let people into your life, they leave a mark whether they stick around or not. So I figure, I might as well choose what it will be.”

It takes a moment. But then she nods and grins, rolling her big chocolate eyes, and wriggles her hand free.