The house I trailed Lorraine to that night was an unremarkable suburban homestead, some miles outside the city. Once she had parked, I drove past her as she strode happily up the walkway to the front door. Completely unsuspecting, she never looked back to see me. After parking my own car a block away, I scurried through a series of unfenced backyards printed randomly with the oblongs of lights from kitchen windows and TV screens, until I reached the lot that held the house Lorraine had entered.

Curtains were drawn nearly all the way across the doors, but one panel of glass had been drawn back several inches for ventilation. Through this slit I could see a tiny slice of the room -- nothing more than a comer of a couch and a seated man's trousered legs -- and hear speech quite plainly.

Drugs. The answer hit me with the force of a punch.

Lorraine had fallen in with a bunch of high-class heroin addicts. But then the absurdity of that easy solution struck me. She exhibited no symptoms of drug use, no needle marks, no cravings, no secret expenditures. And no drug I knew of could explain Lorraine's effect on others.

Without a clue regarding what was about to happen, I settled in behind the foliage and began to concentrate on the conversation. The chummy, clotted voices of those inside the house bespoke a bloated satiation mixed with an undercurrent of still unsatisfied avarice.

A woman said, "Now that Lorraine's here, we can begin. Who'd like to start?"

"I'll share first," said a man. "I have something very piquant for you. Try a taste of this."

A vague sense of happiness leaked out of the house and tickled my mind. The sensation was as familiar as the pleasure I felt in Lorraine's daily presence. Impossibly, horribly, I found myself smiling, despite the rotten atmosphere of corruption I also sensed. Inside, a chorus of mmms and ahhhs followed the man's proffered taste. The wordless sighs and moans were almost sexual in tone, yet I was somehow certain that no conventional orgy was in progress.

"Any ideas on the source?" the man asked after the sounds of appreciation had subsided.

"Give us a hint."

"Young."

"Oh, come on now -- anyone could tell that much!"

"Well, how about young and outdoors?"

"A kid flying his first kite?"

Now Lorraine spoke. Her voice held that same note of jaded anticipation. "I sense the sea."

"Exactly, Lorraine! What a nose! I snatched a toddler's first dip in the ocean! You should have seer his mommy and daddy wondering why he wasn't more excited!"

Laughter greeted this telling detail, and I felt the gorge rise in my throat. Now began the trading in earnest of stolen happy hours, pilfered from their rightful perceivers.

The audience at a circus when the clowns tumbled out. The viewer of a sunset as the clouds began to burn. The author of a book typing a period at the end of the final sentence. The winner of a footrace as the tape broke against her chest. The new owners of Detroit's latest model as the dealer handed them the keys. The parents gazing through a maternity ward's windows. The student receiving a higher grade than expected. The bum finding a quarter in the gutter. The politician winning a legislative victory. Lovers in bed.

Serially, like gourmets at a leisurely wine-tasting, the happiness vampires exchanged stored samples of other people's joy.

And I, outside in my hiding place, experiencing the merest inebriatory edges of this awful communion wanted only to vomit.

At the same time I admitted a growing, unmasterable desire for more. After an unknown interval guiltily swallowing the crumbs from the thieves' table, I finally tore myself away.

When Lorraine entered our living room that night with a big "Hi!" I did not greet her in turn, but instead asked her a single question.

Someone else might have demanded, "How could you?" or "What are you?" But I only said, "Are you happy, dear?"

"Of course."

"That's too bad."

My hands were around her throat before she knew what was happening.

As I throttled her, I began to weep at the imminent death of all I had loved.

And to laugh with manic joy.

For in a reflex of survival, Lorraine poured out at me all the charge of exuberant stolen hours she still retained.

This close, the recorded sensations hit me like the blast from a firehose.

I was a horse eating my bard-earned oats, and a dog having its stomach scratched. I was a kid playing hooky, and scientist tabulating ground-breaking research. I sailed a yacht on gleaming waters, and piloted a plane I had built for myself I roared at a touchdown, and hit a brilliant serve across the court. I was a supermodel on the catwalk, and a monk in my cell. Glory and exaltation burnt down my nerves like fire down a fuse.

But my grip on my wife's throat never slackened.

I knew she was dead when the happiness stopped.

When I left our home for good, Lorraine's corpse sprawled across the rug, I took nothing but any wallet. At a gas station outside the city I filled my car's tank, as well as a jerrycan.

The front door of the house where the happiness vampires had convened had been left ajar; even though it was 3 a.m. Despite intact furnishings, the house radiated a deserted feeling, and I knew no one would be returning. Its owners, with their greater sensitivities, must have felt Lorraine's dying burst all the way from the city, and fled, the coven scattering to new identities, new haunts, new victims. I torched the place anyway.

And then I fled too, with nothing left to me forever, except the American dream.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.