Even now, all these years later, I pause at the brink.

Any telling seems sure to diminish, to transpose what was so overwhelming and painful into something absurd. And perhaps it was absurd, in its keening emotions and weakness for froth. At the time, I believed the least relevant factor of all was that we were both women. Of course this was the first fact that anyone saw, but for us it felt last. It failed to register, at least with me. My adoration of her was so unto itself it could not refer outward, to other affairs between women or even between human beings. It was its own totality, bottomless and consuming, a font of impossible pleasure that from the start also bore down on me like a drill until at last it accomplished a permanent perforation. And yet, irrelevant as I thought gender was to our sex, and to all the disasters it wrought, I now see that the form our love took was fundamentally girlish. The gender-blindness I sensed did apply to the content: I didn’t love Martha for being a woman, and would have loved her no less had Shakespearean whim turned her into a man. So much for the reasons for love, if such even exist. But the way that I loved, and the way she loved me . . . we might as well have been sylphs capering through the glade, crowned with daisy tiaras and trailing lace rags. We lay hours on end raptly stroking the other’s smooth face, or disbelievingly tracing the wavelets of damp lip and brow; we wept a great deal and loudly; and endured our orgasms like shipwreck survivors with hoarse shrieks of actual fear.

That spring Nicholas was teaching his undergraduate Spenser survey on Tuesdays and Thursdays; his graduate seminar, close-reading Areopagitica, Wednesday afternoons; his office hours he held after Spenser lectures, or by appointment; he had no obligations on Monday. Having worked with him so closely, having come to know him so well, being in possession as I was of his schedule even now that I no longer TA’d for his class, had either heightened my conscience in favor of him, so that I might have hesitated at stealing his wife; or, less happily to upholders of morals, it might have given me such knowledge, as of the hours he was sure to be out, to assist in the theft. And so the fact that I phoned their house Monday seemed to suggest that my motives were pure, if “pure” can be meant to describe a compulsion forbidding the slightest resistance. I felt no malice. I meant no one harm. Saturday night I had kissed her. The wee hours of Sunday I’d willfully sullied my body with Dutra. In the hard light of dawn I had washed myself clean, yet the ardor for Martha remained, after torrents of water, immobile as bedrock. Realizing this was a sort of bereavement, and bearing it alone, for the rest of Sunday’s daylight and darkness, had been almost intolerable. How could I wait until Tuesday to call her? Likely immediate consequences—Nicholas picking up his own phone—I disregarded with a rashness I mistook for courage.

But neither Nicholas nor Martha picked up. “Ah-lo,” said a distracted Latin voice. “Hellett-Brawder rezidenze.”

“Is Martha there, please,” I exhaled.

“Whoze calling?”

“. . . It’s a student.”

When she came on the line she said, quietly, as if assuming someone was eavesdropping, “Miss Gottlieb. I thought it might be you. You know I’m not teaching this term, and even if I was, I never give my home number to students.”

“I was wondering,” I began with new uncertainty, for she was so reduced and abstracted, and I couldn’t watch her mouth for the telltale asymmetry, or scent the heady nectar creeping out from her clothes, or lay hold of any other encouragement, so that my wonder, like a shy tentacle finding nothing to grasp, began to shrink back on itself. “I was wondering if you’d meet me for lunch.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said so kindly I thought she might pity me, and a sweat of righteous anger broke out on my scalp.

“Just coffee, then,” I countered.

“Listen. The other night, everyone here had a little too much—”

“Just meet me in Memorial Park, by the flagpole. Just for a minute. We’ll just take a walk.”

“Regina—”

“You want to see me,” I declared, for she’d spoken my name, and all at once I’d felt the telephone disclose her. I knew that if indifferent or bored or alarmed she would have promptly hung up without scruples. She wasn’t a courteous woman. She didn’t protract conversation in honor of form. She had thrown stale baguette at her guests in the hopes they would leave—and she was still on the line.

“Maybe we should have this conversation in person,” she conceded. “Because you really can’t call here again.”

“I understand,” I said, dismissing her injunction like tossing a hat in the air.

She ruled out both lunch and a walk, I knew without her stating it outright because both were too personal; the cup of coffee she accepted. She chose a downtown café highly favored by professors and students for off-campus meetings that was always crowded, that played at excess volume the three-chord anthems of frenetic social outrage favored by the melancholy pierced and dyed counter employees who were all the teenage dropouts and faculty brats of the town, and that was long and shallow with no secret crannies and located on a street corner, with two walls of full-height windows, that made of passersby an exhibit to the patrons, and of patrons no less to the passersby. Its tiled floors were permanently grimy, its pastries were stale, its coffee was rancid, and its bathrooms were effectively public and frequently used by denizens of a bar down the street which had delicate plumbing. Even the most dirty-minded of lovers would not choose this place for a tryst. And so I knew, from the trouble she went to, that the solarium was as vivid in her mind as mine.

I arrived more than an hour before the appointed time, and she was more than fifteen minutes late, so that I was able to secure a booth along the inner wall, with relative if scanty privacy. Most of the privacy there was provided by noise, and by the self-absorption of the other patrons. Before rushing out of the house I’d remembered to bring a notebook and a pile of paperbacks, and these sat on the table as camouflage. I even tried to absorb myself in them, so that she would come upon me in beguiling profile, bent scholastically over a tome, but I couldn’t; I couldn’t take my eyes from the windows, nor stop readjusting my clothes, over which I’d gone crazy before leaving the house, putting on and taking off until I ran out of time, so that I was dressed very strangely, in a gingham sheath dress that the weather was not ready for, and a thick cardigan, and scuffed, ugly black boots.

She turned out to be dressed strangely also, in a fancy and ugly silk blouse, matching slacks, and dark, chilly lipstick, as if to make the point of her superior age and position while also denying her beauty, but this final objective, which couldn’t succeed, had confused the effect of the rest. As soon as I caught sight of her through the windows I erupted all over in mutinies. An idiot’s grin split my face, even as I saw, in her face, a clear series of calculations; she seemed to toss out the script she’d prepared as, perhaps, too polite. “We’re talking about your term paper,” she said warningly as she sat. “Don’t lean so far across the table. I shouldn’t have come.”

“You wanted to,” I insisted, fearlessly combative now because so replete, not with particular joy or desire but whatever that common juice is that engorges the pump works of all the extremes of emotion. Now that she was here at arm’s length, there was nothing inhibiting about the café. If not for her schoolmistress gaze keeping me in my place, I would have lunged over the table.

“I don’t always act in my best interests,” she agreed, “but I didn’t come here to protract our,” and my heart threatened to burst when she used the possessive pronoun, “misunderstanding,” she finished.

“I don’t think it was a misunderstanding.”

“It was very much a misunderstanding.”

“It didn’t feel like one.”

After a moment she said, carefully, “I hope I haven’t hurt you.”

“Do you think—” I gasped suddenly with unpleasant insight. “Do you think I’m just a student with a crush? Who’s going to stalk you, and threaten suicide over you, and tell the dean you harassed me, to get my revenge?”

“I could argue you’re stalking me now,” she said, attempting levity but failing, for gravity had condensed at our table; she was leaning far forward now also, as if she hoped to trap my words under a dome.

“I’m not a student with a crush.”

“Then what are you?”

“I’m in love with you!” I declared with exasperation, for she’d enraged me with this repeat of her coy question: what are you doing? And then I saw her blanch behind the stain of her mouth, and knew at least she was listening.

“Keep your voice down!” she said.

“And you,” I went on, ignoring her. “You—”

“I cannot get involved with a student,” she stated, all the color of her face, having ebbed out of sight for an instant, resurging now as if she’d been slapped. “Let alone a student of my husband’s.”

“We’re already involved.”

“That’s absurd.”

“It’s true. You’re the one in some kind of denial—because you think it’s inappropriate, or because you feel guilt—”

“I’ll thank you not to tell me how I feel or what I think,” she exclaimed, now as livid as I; she’d equally forgotten where we were. “You’re very young,” she warned me. “I’d rather not say that I’m old but I’m older than you. I’ve been stupid and had stupid impulses, but I’m not ruled by them anymore. I don’t know what you know about me. I haven’t been an exemplary wife and I’ve caused my husband, your mentor, many serious problems and he’s caused many problems for me but that’s over, that chapter is closed. I’m married. That’s what marriage is about: you work this crap out. Recommit. I have a child. In fact, I have to go now. I’m sorry we all drank and smoked far too much this past weekend. I hope you’ll forget it.” I sat stunned as she delivered this speech—so the script had not been irretrievable—and as I did, my mute astonishment grew its reflection on the silk of her blouse, for in the course of her words, her heart started to bleed. The stain spread as I watched, a dark drenching that more and more clung to reveal her breast and its hard, bumpy nipple. She must have noticed my gaze the same instant she felt it, and her hand went to cover the spot. “You see,” she murmured, but her voice had sunk and its low roughness thrilled me. “You see, I have to go.” She rose and threw a last glance at me which remained even after she turned and wove back through the tables, and past the bank of windows until out of sight. You see, the glance said, my body tells the truth, if you think that I don’t. But I already knew this.

•   •   •

Once, when still heavy and tethered; and intimate and yet hard, like some tool of a doctor’s, against which, with a sense of transgression, we could squash a hot cheek; when transmitting the sound of the other with that erstwhile fidelity that allowed us to feel they were with us in bed; the telephone, that old bludgeon-shape thing with the corkscrew-curl cord, was intensely romantic. We always wanted to seduce it from its central location to some lovers’ nook, hearing the serpentine hiss of its cord as we dragged it the length of the hall. Success of connection was never assumed; the beloved’s voice saying “Hello?” always felt like good fortune. The handset a seashell, enclosing the perfectly audible breath of far-off, inaccessible flesh; it was no wonder that Dutra had found me, asleep and entwined with the phone as if clutching a proxy, when he followed our household’s cord under my closed bedroom door.

“Hello? Hello?” he barked into the handset, roughly uprooting the phone from my arms before slamming the handset back into the cradle. “Your boyfriend hung up,” he said, pulling the phone back out into the hallway and kicking my door shut behind him.

I understood why he was furious with me. After persuasively ravishing him on the night of our relapse, not only didn’t I touch him again, I could hardly speak to him. Either I stormed into his room without knocking, when the urge to confess what was happening with Martha was too much for me to resist—yet I always did resist, once I saw his outraged bafflement—or, instead of bursting through his door, I closed mine, with our shared telephone as my hostage. “What?” Dutra would shout when I opened his door and stared stricken at him and then turned and rushed back out again, “close the door, you premenstrual freak!” or, as the case might be, “OPEN THE DAMN DOOR. I NEED THE DAMN PHONE.” For, the night of the day she forbade me to call her, Martha instead had called me.

“I didn’t mean to flounce off,” she mumbled, barely audible even by way of that outmoded, quality phone. “I’m sorry. I was embarrassed. I should’ve worn pads. For lactation, I mean. You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” I said, in my trembling elation very consciously quiet and calm, to preserve the enchantment. I comprehended the fact of her voice, of her having called me. I blithely disregarded her words. Of course I didn’t know what lactation was; nor did I wonder. “Where are you?” I said.

“I’m at home.”

“I mean, where in your house?”

“Are you wondering whether Nicholas is here?”

“Yes.”

“He’s at a dinner. To which I was invited as well, but I pled overdeveloped maternal instincts.” I laughed when she said this, again in response to her wry tone of voice, not her meaning, which brushed over me. I was intoxicated, by my hoard of her voice, which I clutched in my hands and against which I squashed my hot cheek, so much so I hardly know what I replied to her comments; I hardly know how we conversed. Yet we did, sleepily, as if the process of early acquaintance had been declared over, and the critical questions—who were we, and what would we do—long since answered, yet at the same time more profoundly unknown. But isn’t this always the progress of love: circular, full of gaps and unlikely accumulations, and unevenly governed by sense.

“. . . I always mean to read when the baby is sleeping, but then I just stare. I see textures vibrate. Like, the threads in the carpet. Because I’m so tired . . .”

“I’d like to read the same book that you’re reading.”

“That’s sweet. But I’ve said I don’t read anymore.”

“I think bicycle thieves might be living next door. Under my window, in the little side yard you can’t see from the street, there’s all these dismembered bikes strewn everywhere.”

“Have they spotted you up at your window? Be careful. They won’t want a witness.”

“If I disappear, you can avenge me. It’s the house to the left, when you’re facing my door.”

“You say that as if I’ve been there.”

“You could come here.”

“Could I?”

“I wish you would.”

“Why?”

“I miss you.”

Her husky laughter. “You don’t know me. But maybe that’s why.”

What did we talk about? Nothing. The night sounds. The incomprehensible show that her nanny/housekeeper, off the clock for the night, was watching down the hall in her room, on her tiny TV. The loud, angry music that Dutra was playing downstairs—but only the music, only the fact of there being upstairs and downstairs, and not Dutra, not anger, not anything close to my separate existence, or hers. We seemed to be dozy night watchmen, on some lofty tower beneath teeming stars, offhandedly trading remarks as we lay side by side with our greater attention cast far out to space, to some imminent wonder we both sensed was making its steady approach . . . the actual words that we spoke seemed inconsequential. Yet sometimes, for a moment, on the wing of some ambling irrelevance, again we’d dip gingerly into our selves and our strange situation. “I only wanted to say,” she repeated, by way of another attempt to conclude the phone call, for every few minutes she began, yet did not reach the end, of an ending remark, “I was sorry I flounced out like that. I’m not angry at you.”

“It’s funny to hear you say ‘flounce.’ You’re not flouncy at all. You’re an opposite something.”

“Like what?”

“Now you’re asking to flirt.”

“I didn’t mean to. No flirting.”

“Isn’t that why you called me?”

“It’s not.”

“Then why did you?”

“I don’t know. Just to talk for a while. Just to say I was sorry for flouncing.”

“I’d like to see you.”

“No,” she said, a reflex—as if she, like me, hardly heard what we said to each other. For we spoke for the sluiceway of words we created, that bore us along; to discuss the direction might somehow inhibit the motion.

Sometimes she called me at eight, and sometimes at eleven; sometimes we spoke for two hours, and sometimes a few minutes; a week might have passed in this way, or just three or four days. The measure of time mattered less than of weight and momentum, and one night when these seemed to have crested a preordained mark, and as Dutra sat smoking his bong on the couch with the TV on mute and the turntable playing and the slabs of his textbooks in heaps around him adequate to protect him from me, I knew talk was no longer required for motion, and walked out the back door without waiting for Martha to call. I walked up the long hill to the campus, the steam from my body replacing a coat. It was still very cold but I smelled the wet earth, dark bare patches of which now exceeded in size the gray crusts of vestigial snow. Under moonlight I bisected the quad, my shadow sharp-edged and elongated on the flagstones. I passed the bright yellow squares of the library windows, behind which my erstwhile fellows were still toiling over their texts. My purpose seemed suddenly, thoroughly different from theirs, as if a point of divergence had long passed me by, and only now did I notice the change. I passed the ugly juridical hulk of the English department, its colonnade raised in the thirties as proof that the school was a serious place—but at night, under moonlight, in spring, all this moon-silvered kingdom of turrets and archways was plainly the same little state agricultural school it had been at the start. The field’s furrows awaiting their seeds and the animals restlessly pawing their stalls. The landscape I crossed was abiding and elemental; I seemed to see through its various garments to what lay beneath. I left the region of campus, and sidewalks, and walked at the edge of the steep, curving roads, where the shadows of trees thickly barred the moonlight. Houses lay at the backs of deep lawns, and then disappeared behind masonry walls. The few times a car passed, sweeping me with its headlamps, I thought that the driver might call the police. I wasn’t jogging in exercise clothes. I wasn’t walking a dog on a leash. My reason to be there was clear to no one but myself—and Martha. Despite her consistent refusals to see me, I felt expected.

When I passed through their stone entry columns and walked up the drive, I could see a few lights on upstairs. I rounded the side of the house. Through the double interference, of the solarium’s glass and the kitchen’s, shone the solitary light of the breakfast-nook lamp. I thought of Nicholas’s cozy encampment, and wondered if that nook was his particular place. But the nights Martha called me, she was usually in the kitchen. I’d hear her filling a kettle for tea, stacking dishes in a cupboard, sliding drawers open and shut. Performing what struck me as pretexts, for lingering there by herself. It was dark close to their house on account of their numerous prospering trees, and already, in the course of my walk, I’d turned into a creature of shadows. It only briefly surprised me how easy it was to become a voyeur, and duck into the shrubs on tiptoe, the noisy uproar in my heart somehow only enhancing my stealth.

It was Martha in the breakfast nook’s pool of light. An open magazine and a steaming mug sat on the table before her, untouched. Her hands lay out of sight beneath the table, perhaps in her lap. Her gaze was cast forward in thought. Past her I could see the telephone, mounted on the far wall. In love contrary impulses constantly war with each other. I wanted to feast on her image unseen, and I wanted to seize her attention, so that my hand flew up to tap on the glass even as my inner voice exclaimed angrily, Wait! It was too late; she’d seen me. Astonishment and anger froze her face, and then she scooted so quickly out of the snug nook she almost spilled her tea, and it seemed possible she’d shout for Nicholas, or phone the police. But she came out the kitchen door and through the solarium, stopping me at the threshold before I came in. “Nicholas is home!” she exclaimed in a sort of shrieked whisper. “What are you doing? He’s up in his study.” But she’d taken hold of my hands, or else I’d taken hers, and she was warming the gnarled, icy claws they’d become in the course of my walk, for despite all the heat beating out from my core, my hands and feet and lips and ears had gone numb. “You’re wearing pajamas,” she scolded, of my thin, inappropriate clothes. We were wringing and squeezing and clutching our four hands together as if we’d given them the task of communicating on behalf of the rest of our selves. I tried to pull her close to me and kiss her and she said, “No! Are you out of your mind?” Yet her hands kept their tight grip on mine; she pressed her forehead to mine so our mouths couldn’t touch but our stern gazes locked, at such close range our eyelashes tangled.

“Let me come in a minute,” I whispered.

“No! Nicholas is upstairs. Everyone is upstairs.”

“I won’t do anything. I’ll just sit and warm up. I feel cold.”

“How am I supposed to explain you, if Nicholas comes in the kitchen?”

“You can say that I came for a visit.”

“At ten-thirty at night? In no jacket?”

“You can say I was taking a jog.”

“You don’t jog. You’re not dressed for a jog.”

“He won’t see me. If we hear him, I’ll run out the door. Besides, he’s already in bed.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because he goes to sleep early, and you stay up late. When you call, he’s already in bed.” I wasn’t sure if this was true. I only knew that, when she called, she was alone—whether Nicholas was out, or asleep, or for some other reason behind a closed door.

Her hot, bony forehead still pressed against mine. “Ten minutes,” she finally said. “I brewed tea. You can have some and go. While sitting on opposite sides of the table.”

We crept like thieves into the kitchen and gingerly I seated myself at the outermost end of the breakfast nook bench, on the side that was nearest the door. It was the same spot I’d sat in before, grading papers the previous fall, but some translucent reality membrane had been peeled away so that it no longer seemed the same place. I was shuddering and chattering with cold, and hugged myself, and clenched my jaw, to keep quiet, while Martha almost silently poured out my tea, and the silence of the house reasserted itself so that, at its deepest profundity, it yielded to me the faintest broken thread of a televised voice, that might have even been coming from some other house. Apart from this, nothing. I felt sure that, if Nicholas coughed, I would hear him and slide out the door long before he set foot on the stairs. But then Martha, once she’d set down my tea, instead of seating herself on the opposite bench, pulled a chair to the end of the table, so that we were seated diagonally, and only need lean the slightest bit forward to touch. The sledgehammer blows of my heart filled my ears, and my exquisite attention to audible clues was destroyed. I raised a hand and cupped her cheek, and inwardly swooned at its softness, and she, tipping forward, again tented her forehead on mine, and took my own cheek in her hand. “We must stop this,” she whispered. Lovestruck, almost moaning with shame, we caressed our reflections, my tea going cold. Science tells us that scent is retained by the brain for a longer duration than the evidence gathered by eyes, ears, or hands, but my experience differs. I can still feel with unparalleled vividness the strange vulnerability of Martha’s face on my palm and the pads of my fingers, as if it were the first such, of some rare or taboo category, I’d ever dared trespass upon with a touch—a shy and sheltered buttock or breast, even a velveteen scrotum, hot and dry and just powdered with down, and not the dazzling aspect she most often turned to the world. And at the same time I knew that my face felt as strange and forbidden and tender to her, for we could not stop avidly stroking each other, as if we were a pair of Helen Kellers who had just linked the name with the flesh—caressing and heaving our guttering breaths, and passing from solemn surrender to dismayed embarrassment to embarrassed bemusement to solemnity again, as if all our foreignness to each other were encompassed in the ambit of a cheek.

“We must stop,” she repeated at last, sitting back suddenly so that she broke all our points of contact. “I’m sorry. I need you to leave.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Yes.” Her face had gone bleary and distant and offered no purchase. Stunned, I believed her to the point of mute despair, yet disbelieved her to the point of almost laughing in her face, and for a moment it seemed possible that I really would laugh, and that she would laugh also, and clutching hands we’d run out her back door and keep running to some unknown place. At that age I’d only lived four different places, of which the town where we’d met was the fourth, and I truly believed that commencing a wholly new life was just a matter of changing location. But her face and her voice were so altered, that instead I stood blindly and went out her door, and back down that long, ludicrous hill that the glacier clawed out of the rock all those eons ago. At home in my bed, clutching blankets, I grieved at the loss.

At the same time I still disbelieved her, and kept one ear pricked for the phone.

•   •   •

Only Martha’s omniscience, in which I believed by instinct and without reservation, enabled my fierce dignity in the following months. I avoided all groups, to be sure not to hear her name spoken. I kept my eyes sternly downcast, to prevent them from seeking her out down the halls, or in the throngs on the sidewalks, or among loungers sprawled in the strengthening sun on the quad. I stayed away from the department on the days I knew Nicholas taught. With equal prompt care I deleted each message from Laurence, all identically warm and upbeat and devoid of allusion to what had occurred at the party, and with luck and some diligence didn’t run into him, either. I would not seem to put myself under her gaze—her omniscience got no help from me, hence retained my untroubled belief. She saw me. She saw me, near midnight, framed by my own lonely square of yellow library light. She saw me in silent attendance of each of my classes, at all moments purging her face from my thoughts, meantime grinding my molars to dust. She saw me at home, grimly watching my printer saw out the accordion pages of three end-of-term papers that were each, in distinctive ways, brilliant and overly long and excessively weighted with footnotes and for good measure handed in early, and destined to be skimmed and rewarded the cursory A. She saw me achieving ceasefire with Dutra, not by confession nor supplication, but the simple resumption of habits. She saw me sharing the bong with him nights, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and eating the stir-fry I made for us both out of all things not rotten dug out of our fridge. She saw me go to bed alone, and rise alone, and refrain, in my fierce dignity, even from masturbation; she even saw me refrain, when the term finally ended, from the distraction of a trip to New York. “You sure?” Dutra asked one last time, heaving his duffel bag into his Volvo. I knew he wanted very much for me to come. He wanted to show off his city to me, for, to his boundless amazement, despite my adequate wit and sophistication, which this past year had endeared me to him, I had never set foot in that place whose very image appeared in Webster’s as the birthplace of both “sophistication” and “wit.” “I’ll show you a fabulous time,” he cajoled. At least for the four-hour drive, he was afraid to be lonely.

“Another time.” I refused him firmly, for Martha’s eyes on me seemed to lend me her superior composure.

“But you’ve never been there! It’s humanity’s greatest creation! I want to be the first person who shows you the city. I want your Big Apple cherry.”

“You’ll get it,” I made the error of promising. “Just not today.”

Watching him go, waving his left arm wildly and sadly out the window, it occurred to me I might have botched my performance for Martha. Until now I’d shown no sign of weakness, but declining to go to New York could suggest I was pining for her. Equally it could suggest I was wholly content, in no need of distraction. I stood a long time on the porch after Dutra had gone. The term was over. I had done all my work, unnecessarily well. By every available measure I’d succeeded in not falling short, and no available measures remained. Her magical eye rested on me, goose-pimpling my arms, and I exhorted myself to appear unperturbed and even considered lying down in the hammock and inviting its taut knotted cords to bite into my limbs. When the phone rang, despite the fact that her days were still ruled by the same school calendar as Dutra’s and mine, it seemed possible I had conjured the call with the sheer abject force of my longing. “He’s gone,” I heard Martha confess. “Nicholas has gone out of town. On his annual trip. Canoe trip. Georgian Bay. He’ll be gone for three weeks.” And then amid our breathless overlapping exclamations, I somehow managed to direct her to my house, for in our impatience she was going to come pick me up in her car.

“. . . the north side of Pin Creek,” I was babbling. “It doesn’t go through, you have to jog down to Elmwood and take the bridge there. The pizza guys never find it. They go to the south end of town—”

“I can find it,” she promised. “Ten minutes.” And with the spring on the timer thus wound a moan wrenched free of me, so unwilled I could have thought it had come from the couch cushions.

Only aircraft could have traveled from her house to mine in ten minutes. It took her more than twice as long, long enough that I mastered myself. Urgency and solemnity banished emotionalism. I could scarcely let go of the phone but once I did every separate grain of my condition, both inner and outer, seemed to present itself to my unsparing gaze. I showered again, and soaped the grooves between my legs with thoughtful fingers until they might have squeaked. The same scouring finger slipped into my anus as into the teardrop-shape gaps between each of my toes. My body seemed as neutered as a child’s, as if it had never been used, at least never for pleasure. Toweled dry I had no odor at all. All warmth seemed to have left me. I pulled the comb through my hair and the deathly white furrows of scalp lay exposed to the light. The clothes I pulled on could have been for a latter-day monk; I was already dressing as she did without my realizing. Loose man’s jeans that just clung to my hip bones over white cotton panties; a white cotton T-shirt; no bra; hoary Birkenstock sandals. Before you, everything is revealed, I seemed to concede in this sexless and dowdy attire. Any effort to consciously flatter myself, to be beautiful for her, seemed pointless. But she wouldn’t set foot in my house, with its glacial formations of cassette tapes and bong parts and empty beer bottles; to await her I stood on the porch. If we’d been alone on the planet I would have waited there naked, not as provocation but as an admission. When she pulled up, in a black Saab wagon as glossy as a patent leather shoe, I descended the three wooden steps from the porch as if mounting a gangway, to a ship of the seas or the skies, and did not care if I ever again saw my house, or Dutra, or anyone else I had known this past year, or the halls along which I had learned, or the books I had read or the papers I’d written or any of the items of which I’d assumed that my life to that point must consist, and from then I would go on not caring for a very long time.

In the car she took hold of my hand, and turned toward me her stunned, windblown face, and we gazed at each other as if from the opposite sides of a chasm. Then she relinquished her hold to return to driving. The car might not have even halted before we were moving again, quickly, through the downtown streets with their shabby frame houses on handkerchief plots, and then, nose up, onto the hill. To all sides heaps of end-of-term moving detritus, disjointed floor lamps and dog-eared, dry-mounted Warhols and blackened, crumb-glutted toaster ovens and the doughy folds of exhausted futons obstructed the curbs, abandoned by the graduating seniors in the course of their ascension to postgraduate life. Goodbye, goodbye, tolled in my mind, not because I sympathized with the annual rite, the completion of toil and attainment of credentialed enlightenment; nor because I saw myself commencing, in the terms of the familiar metaphor, a new course of education. No conceit requiring my separate existence was tenable now. I yearningly bid it goodbye because I longed to be grappled against her and thoroughly used and subsumed; I couldn’t start to imagine just what we would do, whether we would fuck with our mouths or our fists or an improvised suitcase of devilish tools, but I somehow felt very precisely the final result, and couldn’t have gained it too quickly. I was singed in advance; though I sat very still in the car, my gaze fixed on her face I’d already so carefully mastered, on the slight bluish dent on one side of her nose, and the almost invisible down of her cheek, and the incipient spidery wear at the crease of her eye, when the car stopped, and I made to get out, my right knee popped with pain, for I’d been pressing so hard on an imagined gas pedal I’d ground up the delicate joint.

“Lucia’s at the park with Joachim,” she was saying as we fell out the doors of her car, but amid all the other exigencies passing between us that moment, these particular words were illegible.

We sliced through the rind of the house like two knives. Nothing now was of interest to me except her; that house I’d first come to because of Brodeur, my abruptly imploded polestar, was just so much waste to be shouldered behind. In a more circumspect frame of mind I might have admired the quality of the house’s construction, as the door to her bedroom did not fly off its hinges when we came crashing through. Her bed, a fragrant welter of matelassé and ecru and other characteristics I was yet to be taught, was as she had recently left it, also perhaps as her husband had recently left it, as I might have assumed in a more circumspect frame of mind, but in a more circumspect frame of mind I might have allowed her to tell me that she and Nicholas hadn’t shared the same bed since before Joachim had been born. This was too much to allow her to tell me, when her mouth at that moment was so crucial to my survival that I fell onto it as if drowning, and determined to drain her last breath, even if this consigned her to drowning as well—she might not have been able to handle me if my aggression had not been as frantic and disorganized as hers was efficient. Once again I was wringing the front of her shirt—my hands were abruptly afraid of her skin, so that I wanted to crush her to me without having to touch her; I would have liked a single rope to bind us together, with tightly stacked coils, so that we formed a sort of Siamese mummy within which our two bodies got mashed into one—and having fought me to half an arm’s length so she could undo my jeans, and peel them off with a hard downward step of her deft pointed foot, she simply seized me by the armpits and heaved me away from her onto the bed, and as I struggled to regain her kiss pinned me flat with the heel of her hand so that she could, when I gave up the struggle, with a leisurely sigh sink her face in my cunt. I seemed to come right away, with a hard, popping effervescence, as if her mouth had raised blisters, or an uppermost froth; but beneath, magma still heaved and groaned and was yearning to fling itself into the air. Until now, my orgasms had been deep and ponderous things; slow to yield to excavation; self-annihilating when they finally did, so that in their wake I felt voided and calm, every yen neutralized, and gazed on whoever had managed the work with benign noninterest. Never had there been this tormenting, self-heightening pleasure, like a hail of hot stones, and yet she seemed to recognize just what had happened, so that before I had even stopped keening she bore down again. She made me come so many times that afternoon that had I been somewhat older, I might have dropped dead. Had I been a doll, she might have twisted off each of my limbs, and sucked the knobs until they glistened, and drilled her tongue into each of the holes. Certainly had the windows been open, as would have made sense on that sunny June day, my thundering cries, in the end, would have summoned the neighbors; for Martha, in dismantling me, dredged a voice out of me I did not know I owned; the devastation of my pleasure surged outward and outward again, like an ocean-floor tremor, while that voice I had never imagined was bellowing harshly Oh GOD, Oh GOD, OHGODOHGOD!—and it was then that Martha finally flung herself onto my shore, and through violent sobs kissed me, as if drenched in my juices as she had become, eyes glued shut, stringy-haired, fever-cheeked, parched and gasping for water and air, she’d been born out of me in those hours, bodied forth by titanic orgasm, and now she was helplessly, utterly mine for the rest of all time. Love is tutelage, after all; and ardor, such as we had laid hold of, that same tutelage greatly compressed—so that, knowing nothing but what she’d just taught me, I was somehow no longer afraid, and rearing up on the heels of my hands I threw open her spent, helpless body, already softened as if by a mallet from the hours of toil she’d expended on me, and plunged into her headlong with fingers and tongue not unlike, the thought burst in my mind, having leaped without forethought or parachute out of a plane. Yet, all the while I was plummeting down, I still wafted and roved, and was drawn along ropy cross-currents, and seemed at my leisure to swim in a lush element . . . until with a fearsome huge groan like the earth cracking open I found Martha suddenly near, rushing upward toward me. “Oh,” she wailed, with strange desolation, as if the nearer she came, the more receded her voice, “Ahh . . . OH . . . ,” and then came the sodden implosion of impact, and her bed elephantinely bounced up and down, and her cries filled my ears and we burst into tears from the shock.

Weeping we knotted our bodies together, caressing and hushing each other, until we both must have slept, to awake it seemed many hours later, and gaze at each other in mute wonderment.

“Fuck,” she said, sitting up. “What the fuck time is it?”

Outside the closed windows the horizon-bound sunlight was guttering now through the limbs of the big handsome trees. With the labored strokes of a swimmer pulling dead weight to land Martha got within arm’s reach of a tiny bedside alarm clock while I did everything to impede her, while I nuzzled her neck and her armpits and with fresh resolve nosed toward her crotch—“Oh, God,” she realized. “It’s already six-thirty. Okay,” she said, more to herself than to me, as with adrenaline visibly coursing she leaped out of bed. “Okay. Okay. You’ll have to stay here. Just stay here in my room.” From some far-off realm of the house, I now realized, an irregular noise drifted steadily toward us, part percussive, part exhalative—as of water or wind—part obscurely verbal, and part high-pitched, parrotlike shriek. “I’ve got to take a quick shower. You’d better take one as well, look at you! Your hair looks like a nest—come on, hurry—”

I couldn’t help but behave as if drugged in the shower. The sight of her body agleam with the coursing hot water seemed to muzzle the rational part of my brain. All the minor imperfections of her superior age made me insane with adoration as I one by one rooted them out of her smooth opalescence: the minute dark-purple varicose squiggle midway down her right thigh, as if a single gaudy thread had dropped there from an unraveling garment. The thin rippled furrows streaking out from each side of her pale flat belly, where snagging needles perhaps had been dragged down the silk of her skin—or where her pregnancy had stretched her, I realized only much later, for I was so young then that I had never seen those marks that become so mundane, like the first kinky, colorless hairs on one’s head, just one decade later in life. Either I was poring over her skin with my tongue—“Stop. Stop!” she admonished—or slumped swooning against the wet tile as she soaped me with businesslike hands, but regardless I was no use to her and yet she had us in and out of the shower quickly, as she’d stated she would. Back in her bedroom I lurched and stumbled and fell over in my hapless effort to put on my jeans while she disappeared into a closet and reappeared a moment later in khaki shorts and a pale green tank top, her breasts shifting under the jersey fabric in a way that made me shudder with recognition—and pulling a tortoiseshell comb through her hair. “I’ve got to go down now,” she said. “I have to nurse. Do the dinner thing. Stay here. Just stay here—” In her panic she rushed from the room.

The irregular noises from downstairs continued, very distant and hard to interpret. I swayed on my feet, the walls pitching around me as if I’d developed an inner-ear balance condition, but there was nowhere to sit in her room but the bed, and I disliked the bed without her. I felt the peculiar gratification of having been made a taxidermy of myself, disassembled and rebuilt with some sort of narcotic-soaked gauze densely stuffed in my cavities—I was that deeply satisfied, down to my marrow; all the bones in my pelvis seemed loosened and bobbling around. That tawdry skeletal dishevelment made me grin with remembrance. Martha’s agitated precaution that I stay in the room never could have sunk in, I was so inundated with pleasure, and perhaps, looking back, there was also reluctance on her part to fully avow the requirement of secrecy, to embrace the adulterer’s furtive procedures by declaring outright that my choices were hiding for hours in her bedroom, or inching my way down the outside drainpipe. Such behavior as is natural to criminals could not have been less natural to my feelings, which were most like uncontainable pride, so stratospherically levitating I hardly felt myself in that room in the first place, though for the moment I floated on the outermost fibers of her round bedroom carpet. I did notice, but very remotely, because such things as furniture seemed now so misguided, so many props for distracting the body from what it did best, how impersonal the room was, as was that downstairs powder room. No photos or knickknacks, not even a bookcase. Just a short pile of paperbacks set on the floor, a Penguin Classic of The Last of the Mohicans on top looking wholly untouched. The clothes she’d been wearing before we made love lay strewn about the floor in arrested positions of ecstasy, and descending from the altitude of giants I scooped them up and pressed them onto my face, and devoured her pungent aroma. I was ravenous; sexual satiation flipped over neatly and showed its reverse, which was wolfish hunger. And so it was that without any pang at ignoring her orders, without in fact remembering her orders at all, I left that room in which we’d remade each other, which now looked so diminished, and danced down the carpeted hallway and stairs to the part of the house that I already knew.

It was hot and moist in the kitchen, and redolent with human smells, steam fogging the mullioned windows where it had risen from the great maw of the gleaming dishwasher, its unhinged jaws bristling with fresh-boiled stemware and forks, and from a large saucepan, agitating its lid on the stove. The loud agitation was irregularly doubled, perhaps deliberately, perhaps just by coincidence, by a spoon being banged on the edge of a hard plastic bowl; and a mingled smell of heated starch and salty milk filled the air which swept me back to the sweaty pungency of Martha’s crotch and the marsh we had made of her bed—but of course this scent, though it might share a few of the same molecules, was not like that odor at all. It was salt without sweat, and every glandular species of stink to which sweat can refer. And it was milk without flesh, like the milk I once squeezed from a green clover stem sitting in my backyard as a very small child; because of course it was child smell, though very little of the mixture came from him, but from his bottle and bowl and his one-piece striped suit, like a prisoner’s outfit, and perhaps something recently stuffed in the trash.

He was seated atop an elaborate high chair and observing me with silent thoroughness, his gaze having found me the instant I stepped in the doorway. I only understood now, but with the force of retrospective revelation, those sounds I’d been hearing ever since I’d awoken in Martha’s hot arms and drenched bed. Martha stood with her back to me, half bent over, facing the baby across the wide kitchen island and plunging her arms to the elbow, with excessive and dangerous vigor, in the depths of the dishwasher’s cauldron. Arm’s length from the baby and the other arm’s length from the stove stood an older woman I had never seen before, with a creased, alert, orange-tinged face and a puff of orange hair, in a turquoise sweat suit. Unlike the baby, she made clear she had seen me by continuing to stare, not at me but at the baby, reaching awkwardly back to the stove, as if her eyes lacked the freedom to roll in their sockets. It must have been the peculiar appearance of their stares crossed like swords, firmly pointed in different directions, that made Martha, when she’d straightened her back and seen them, then glance over her shoulder toward me. The baby’s hand holding the spoon resumed banging it hard on the bowl, as if the hand were asserting itself as an agent distinct from the eyes. Martha flushed, or perhaps she had already turned very red from the dishwasher’s steam, and whipping back toward the baby emitted a sharp warning sound lest the force of the spoon on the rim of the bowl flip its wet contents into the air—“No, no, hey!”—which even in its brevity was truncated by the instant response of the orange-tinted, turquoise-clad woman.

“It don’t move,” the woman told Martha, still averting her gaze.

Her tone could not have been convicted of rudeness, but any conscious person would have tried to make the charge. The bowl on closer examination was a specialized one that adhered to the tray of the high chair by some sort of suction, but Martha’s failure to remember this feature, or possibly her failure to have known it at all, seemed hardly an adequate motive for the woman’s contempt. Nor could I believe, at least not yet, that her motive was me, however inexplicable and freshly showered my appearance. Rather the contempt seemed instinctive, as if it were the third thing, along with the saucepan and baby, that this woman consistently kept within reach.

“Either way he doesn’t seem to be enjoying this much,” declared Martha, making for the baby’s other side as if to intercept an enemy combatant and attempting to unstick the bowl from the tray. Though she was still crimson to the roots of her hair she added as if as an afterthought, “This is Regina. She’s one of Nick’s students. I forgot to tell you she’s doing some work for us. Research assistance. Regina, this is Joachim’s nanny, Lucia.”

“Hi,” I heard myself say, so stung by this alibi—by the seeming ease with which, despite her blush, Martha had made it—that now I blushed also, and barely raised a greeting hand, though I saw that I could have said nothing, or stuck out my tongue, Lucia had so resolutely ignored Martha’s introduction.

“He is crazy for his cereal today,” Lucia contradicted. “This is third bowl I give him.”

“Well, he’s obviously done.” Martha wouldn’t return my gaze, hard as I sought hers, as if she’d joined Lucia’s backward swordplay, in which the object was evading contact, and Lucia for her part did not dignify Martha’s comment with an answer—unless the answer was the wrist-flick with which, pivoting, she abruptly extinguished the stove burner, seized the handle of the saucepan, and dumped the scalding contents, of short, pointy noodles, in a colander placed in the sink. She extracted a tub of black stuff from the fridge, scraped a blob of it into a bowl, then dumped the colander’s noodles in the bowl as well, and went to work furiously with a spoon. Martha had set upon the baby as if he presented a door she could lock against me and Lucia. She looked at neither of us nor, in truth, at the baby, but was grimly uprooting him from the high chair and uprooting the spoon from his fist and then sitting down at the table with him and pulling up her tank top and pinning it with her chin, vainly seeking to screw his mouth onto her breast while he swiveled one way and the other, whatever he needed to do, to keep me within sight while he meanwhile hid Martha’s bare breast. But I didn’t begrudge him; if not for his loyal attention I might have thought I had ceased to exist.

“You bought pesto?” Martha said to Lucia. “Damn it, Joachim, settle down! What did you buy pesto for?”

“He is not hungry now,” said Lucia with meaning. “It got so late I gave him his dinner. Now it’s time for his bath.”

“The garden’s already got bushels of basil. I was going to make pesto fresh.”

“I’ll leave it out or I’ll put it away.”

“Leave it out. Regina and I will eat it. Are you hungry, Regina?”

So abruptly had I been reinstated that it took me a moment to speak. “I guess,” I said, launching my own freight of furious meaning, but as mode of conveyance I’d chosen my eyes, and Martha still wouldn’t look at me.

“Time for his bath,” Lucia repeated. Never had I been so in favor of a baby’s being bathed. I wondered if Martha would cling to her baby, gurgle at or fawn on him or worst of all hand him to me, but with hauteur she yanked her tank top back down and held him out to be taken. In transit his smooth round head turned back toward me on his neck’s frail stem, so that I remained his sole object of study. He didn’t attempt to regain Martha’s arms. As Lucia bore him out of the kitchen the two of them made a Janus, Lucia’s outraged gaze boring ahead, the baby’s placid one emanating behind, until they’d finally rounded the doorframe and vanished from sight.

Alone at last we rushed at each other like dueling snakes. “What the fuck are you doing?” hissed Martha. “I said stay in my room!”

“For how long? I can’t hide there all night.”

“All night. You hid there for two minutes.”

“I shouldn’t have to be hiding at all.”

“Regina, Lucia works for me and Nicholas, for fuck’s sake. She’s our nanny!”

“And I’m your ‘research assistant,’” I said witheringly.

“You’d better hope she believed that,” she said sharply, wheeling away.

“Or what?”

“Or you won’t see me this way again.” She’d commenced cutting the space of her kitchen to ribbons, returning again to the dishwasher to snatch bowls, forks, tumblers, a cheese grater, a corkscrew—“What the fuck is this doing in there?” she snapped at it—from its still-smoldering mouth. Objects accumulated on the wide slab of gleaming black stone that divided the room; a pale melon, unearthed from the densely packed chaos of her refrigerator, was trapped between the counter and her knife and butchered to perfectly uniform crescents; so vehement were her movements she’d not only deflected my touch but had beaten me back to the doorway again, until she abruptly commanded, “Come here,” and thrust a white envelope in my hands. “Prosciutto,” she said of the pink skin within. “Drape it over the melon. Or wrap it around. Or attach it with toothpicks.” But there were only so many serving options with which she could ward me off, and I caught her wrist in my free hand and her mouth met mine roughly and then broke away. But something was dispelled, or deferred. “Let’s eat,” she murmured. “We’re starving. We’ve lost our right minds.”

“Let’s go out,” I begged. “I’d rather not see your nanny again.”

“I can’t do that,” she said patiently. “I have a baby to say good night to. But if it isn’t too cold we can eat in the pergola.” She might have equally said we could eat in the bathtub; I didn’t know what a pergola was. I did know that the longer the nanny and baby stayed out of the room, the more Martha returned and was mine. Our vehicle now, that would keep her with me, was the meal. I opened the white envelope with a fraudulent show of experience and the precocious sense that the bathing of the baby upstairs, and the meal preparation downstairs, were in direct competition for Martha’s attention, and I must throw my energies onto the side of the meal if I wanted to win. It helped my cause that the turbulence left by Lucia had finally stopped agitating the room; Lucia even grew sufficiently absent for Martha to joke about her. “It’s classic Lucia to buy grocery-store pesto when my garden is already choking on basil. She learns ‘pesto’ from me—she’s Brazilian—and then to show off she buys it at Friel’s in June, when it’s half-price, because everyone makes their own pesto the whole summer long in this town. Look at this stuff. It’s like kombu. That’s Japanese seaweed. It’s practically black.” But this harangue was pro forma; it told me Lucia was no longer a threat. Not only Martha’s speech but her movements had changed. They had slowed, and admitted the pleasure of usual tasks, and I could hardly complete my own task for the pleasure of watching. She brought out a green bottle of wine, a rough chunk of some stone—this was cheese!—a narrow box stamped with gold as of pricey cosmetics that turned out to be cookies. Now I couldn’t stop catching at her when she passed near enough, or raining kisses on her when she leaned her face briefly near mine, so that my incompetent bunching of pink flaps of meat on the slippery spears of green melon proceeded so slowly she took it from me and like the rest of the meal prepared it herself, and crowding everything onto a tray, led me through the solarium—even tossing a sly smile over one shoulder—into the violet twilight. Down stone steps and along a stone pathway we passed verdant swells of luxurious lawn, to a little wood structure tucked just where the lawn began losing itself to one more of those striking abysses that with their unwarned-of drops past abutments of shale into sooty hemlocks made a rare kind of property line.

“Pergola,” she confirmed, as she set the tray down on the built-in stone table in the tiny octagonal shelter. “Nicholas’s folly. I think it’s supposed to resurrect some cherished boyhood memory of hiking with his scout troop in the Alps.” The lawn rising behind us concealed the house from our view, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, the house now felt somehow more present, and returned to the form in which I had first known it: his house. Her mention of him seemed to tell me she felt this as well. It was unlike the mention she’d made of Lucia and pesto. It didn’t confirm a safe distance from someone who anyway lacked consequence. Though the wine was, perhaps, the best-quality wine I had ever yet tasted, so that I didn’t perceive it as “very good wine” but, as her body had been though with many times less potency, as some entirely new category of pleasure; and though the food, Friel’s pesto and all, dazzled me with its goodness and elegance, for I had never seen cheese that resembled quartz stone, nor a cookie from France with a boy’s figure so neatly stamped in the chocolate that each of his coat buttons showed, nor a silken pink meat that was not boiled ham from the deli; and though we ate mutely, like wolves, as the light died around us, restoking our bodies of all they had spent; in truth we were not really tasting the food or the wine, and our muteness was swollen with words. Mine were all different forms of the same hungry question. Hers were likely retractions, and warnings. When she finally spoke, what she said was, “After I’ve gone up and dealt with bedtime, I can drive you back home.” A warning, but veiled.

What I said was, “I don’t want to go home.” Hungry question, thinly veiled if at all.

“Regina,” she said. After a moment she added, “You understand why I can’t have Lucia getting curious about who you are.”

I thought to say, facetiously, “I’m the research assistant,” in the hopes she’d refute me. Then I longed to say, “Who am I—to you?” but was afraid she would laugh at the question. At last I steeled myself to demand, “What happens when he returns home?” but this I was afraid she would actually answer. After such long hesitation, my silence and hers became part of the dusk, in which I could no longer make out her face though she sat just beside me, and speaking, regardless of what the words were, seemed unnatural.

It had grown very cold. With the afterglow gone winter seemed to return despite the loud chirring of insects. I pressed her to me and felt her arms rough with gooseflesh and her thin tank top sodden in front. She winced at my touch. “Engorged,” she murmured. “Ugh, you’re all wet. I’m sorry. Because the kid wouldn’t eat.” Although her voice was calm she twitched away sharply when I peeled back the drenched cloth from her breast. “No,” she said, but I’d already felt the breast’s hardness and heat, as if changed by infection.

“No!” she repeated, and now I felt what she must have, overpowering me at the start of our day, when she shuddered and capsized, emanating a guttural, helpless, admonishing moan as I sucked on the nipple until with a shocking mechanical suddenness, like a shower head being turned on, her hot milk filled my mouth. It queasily tasted of vegetation, and of her, but mostly and sickeningly of itself, but I was so hungry for the taste it obscured, of her flesh, that I gulped it down just to get past it, and past it, and past it, until her soft breast moved and squelched, deflated, underneath the harsh probes of my tongue, and she’d groaned in relief and then grabbed my head literally by the ears, and forced the other hard breast in my mouth.

“You sick thing,” she gasped when I was done.

“I love you,” I told her gravely, but she brushed this off, nimble and devilish again.

•   •   •

Nothing could have better excused my failure to accompany Dutra on his trip to New York than my confession, upon his return, that I’d fallen in love with not only a woman but the same sanguine blonde he’d accosted that day at the market. Dutra verily hooted with glee. Of course, being Dutra, his response wasn’t mere titillation. He was honestly thrilled I’d found love—though it was true he was thrilled all the more that my love was so racy. There was no man on earth for whom my ardor could have prompted an ardent desire on Dutra’s part that they meet, but for the privilege of meeting Martha, Dutra launched an onslaught of persuasion not unlike an onslaught of threats. “Bring her over to have a beer with me! I’m like the father in this situation, I have to approve. Don’t make me start following you. I got Injun skills, sabe? Me track you. Me not make a sound.”

I was desperate to keep them apart, for every obvious reason. It wasn’t only, or even mostly, that Dutra, with his elaborate bongs and his heaps of ska records and his juvenile know-it-all-ness, had been my most recent lover; had fucked me on his orange Dacron couch and on his capsized king mattress amid a squalor of coffee-damp Styrofoam cups; had been fellated by me while a rerun of Star Trek illumined our nude, writhing limbs; or had pleasured me in our shared shower amid pads of hair and fallen gobbets of toothpaste overseen by a giant ashtray in the shape of a crab keeping laden precarious balance on the tank of the toilet. Far worse was that my alliance with Dutra, whether carnal or not, hopelessly marked me as someone far younger than Martha. In the course of our first torrid week Martha and I had made love in the back of her Saab; in the armchair she kept in her office in the English department; in a stand of lilacs in the riverfront park, on the frigid and dew-sodden grass; each of these trysts taking place at some hour between bedtime and dawn, when she slipped from her house to meet me—but never once in my house, though the whole of that week it stood empty, as if tailor-made for our needs. The idea of bringing her there was unbearable to me, and to her must have been at least sufficiently strange that she never once asked me about it. Perhaps she could sense that the sight of my home would present a disjunction she’d rather not ponder. Yet in my desire to match her adulthood, I somehow failed to notice the logical lapse by which our madness of lust often drove us straight back through her doors—“No noise!” Martha would urge in a whisper as she opened my jeans with one hand and we sank to the checkerboard floor of the kitchen, where I would cringe from the recurring apparition of Lucia bursting in with a shriek of “DIOS!”—“Regina,” Martha exclaimed, looking up smeary-faced, “what’s the matter? I need you to come,” much the way she might say to Lucia, “I need you to clean up this mess.”

In truth, the distance between our ages and stations of life, about which I at least had the sense to be worried when it came to the difference between our two homes, was much effaced in our first weeks together, but by Martha, not me. Nine or ten in the evening—whenever it was, I assumed, that the baby was sleeping and the nanny ensconced in her room with her late-night TV—she would call in low tones from the kitchen to say she was free. I’d rush into the night to meet her—in the same demimonde of our town I had learned beside Dutra. The High Life, the Pink Elephant, the Silver Dollar Saloon. They all crouched beneath guttering neon or behind penitentiary bars, along the farthest-flung, least well-lit, working-class streets most remote from the hem of the Hill. Here erstwhile comrades of Dutra’s from the county community college might join ranks with an unchanging cast of geriatric alcoholics who held down their stools sixteen hours a day, but never university students, let alone the professors. Even I, who had never before had a female lover; much less one who was married; much less married to my own former mentor; much less a professor herself at the school at which I was a student—even I who, due to all this compounded inexperience, truly believed none of this posed a real obstacle—even I understood why she kept our affair to this realm. She might have left the country, so unlikely was she to cross paths with somebody she knew. But of course this was where she met Dutra, whether because he’d tracked me, Injun-style, or because such a meeting was inevitable.

The Pines was a relatively higher-quality establishment, because a car was required to get there; an old-fashioned roadhouse, it featured music on weekends and even served food. I’d ordered fries on a pretense of hunger, putting off the moment at which I’d join Martha on the little dance floor where the tables had been shoved aside. The band had taken a break, and Martha stood dancing with the jukebox while perusing its list, one hand flat on its top as if preventing it getting away. She wore black jeans, black motorcycle boots with silver buckles, a white Hanes undershirt the right size for a twelve-year-old boy beneath which her milk-heavy breasts were squashed flat. She’d begun pumping her milk for the baby with a frightful contraption she’d bought through the mail, and sometimes, halfway through our clandestine evening, we’d repair to the Saab to take care of this chore while I lay across the seat with my head on her lap staring up at the suction cup crushing her nipple. “Sexy, isn’t it,” she’d say wearily, her body briefly the captive of the pump’s tubes and coils. I knew mine weren’t the only eyes in the dimly lit bar watching her. I’d felt the room watching us—watching her, and me as her adjunct—ever since we’d arrived. And then a weight dropping into a nearby chair made me glance over, and there Dutra was, with a victorious grin on his face.

“So,” he said. “Introduce me.”

The trio accompanied him that since long before he and I met had established themselves as the owners of the other three seats in his car. Alyssa was a self-described Jewish-American Princess Gone Bad from Shaker Heights, Ohio, who had graduated the previous year with Dutra but stayed on, not enrolled, to continue her prodigal spending of her family’s money on marijuana for herself and her friends. Zaftig and freckled and borne along on an elaborate rat’s nest of gingery hair, Alyssa bore a remarkable physical and temperamental resemblance to Janis Joplin. She was always so high she was almost asleep, and radiated benign out-of-it-ness from beneath half-closed lids. She shared the backseat with Lucinda, one of the more wayward faculty townies, the bony, viper-tongued daughter of a well-known economics professor. Lucinda had been discharged from Dartmouth on a medical leave after overdosing and had never gone back. The front seat was reserved for Ross, Dutra’s comrade from his days at community college, unless I was along, in which case the trio, with resentment, all squeezed into the back. I had never been comfortable with them, because whenever my relations with Dutra went back on the rise, his with them went back on the decline, but I was most horrified to see them for the reasons I’ve mentioned above. Now they all came to roost at my table, merrily studying me from behind their pint glasses, because Dutra of course had told them.

Martha came to stand beside my chair and passed her hand over my cheek to rest splayed on my collarbone, so that her fingertips just brushed the tops of my breasts. “What’s all this?” she smiled. “Someone’s taken my chair.”

Dutra said, with a broad lying grin, “We thought Ginny was here all alone.”

“Only a fool would leave this girl alone,” Martha said, and from the grin she showed him in return, I could see she recalled precisely who he was.

The band had come back onstage and throwing her grin around to include all of them Martha seized my hand and led me onto the dance floor. In the privacy of our affair, in the secretive nests where we fed on each other, I was heedless and greedy, and had earned Martha’s scolding for ripping a seam of her shirt in my hurry to separate her from her clothes—but now in the dim, seedy bar I discovered she could be brashly extroverted, while I was hamstrung by inhibition, despite the pride that I felt by her side. It was thrilled pride, but it was still shy, and it didn’t stop me from being afraid—of the man who muttered “dykes” as we passed by his stool, but perhaps more of Martha herself, whose provocative smile seemed to challenge not the drunk, wary men staring at us, but me. “Can you?” her eyes asked, their penetration concealed from others by her lopsided smile. Can you follow me out in public, and not be afraid of what others will say? But this wasn’t her public, I half-reflected, even as I emboldened myself to join her. She was insinuating trails through the smoke-heavy air, astraddle the beat of the music, and I pretended to share in her trancelike indifference and juked loosely beside her until Dutra and trio joined us, Dutra dancing alone in the pent-up, skilled way that marked him as a child of Manhattan, Alyssa and Lucinda tossing arms overhead and whipping hair side to side so they looked like two trees in a storm, and Ross sardonically doing the pogo to conceal his discomfort at having to dance, so that Martha and I were absorbed by the group, and I became grateful that Dutra was there.

“Smoke break,” everyone agreed several songs later, and we shouldered our way back outside.

The backseat of Martha’s gleaming black Saab was half taken up by a baby seat, a sort of wide plastic bucket lined with calico cloth and a strappy web harness that would apparently safeguard the baby from a violent impact. I had never paid the seat much attention, but I couldn’t imagine it was hard to remove, and my first desire now was that Martha not see Dutra’s car, ankle deep like our living room with Dutra’s typical sediment of takeout boxes, fruit peels, sodden tea bags, stray rolling papers, unraveling cassette tapes, empty beer bottles, and cigarette butts. I rode in his car all the time with no thought of its filth but envisioning it now through Martha’s eyes I was disgusted—it was possibly worse than the house. “We brought a car,” I offered as we crossed the gravel lot, and was surprised when Martha sharply dissented.

“There’s no room in the back,” she reminded me.

“I could help take it out—”

“Where’s your car?” she asked Dutra, decisively following him.

As always Dutra had parked in the lot’s remotest, least-lit corner, the better to smoke pot or snort cocaine off the car key, and the better, at least, for me to conceal my mortification as Martha made herself comfortable in the front passenger seat amid heaps of refuse and pulled me down onto her lap. Of course Dutra sat at the wheel, and the trio in back. Alyssa’s thick joint made the rounds. Martha sucked long and held even longer before slowly exhaling.

“Nice,” Dutra said.

“Very,” Martha said as she gave it to me. “Thanks, Alyssa.”

“That’s cool.” Alyssa had stretched her legs over Lucinda and Ross, and lay against the car window enthroned on her nimbus of hair. “So you live in town, Martha?”

“Yeah.”

“Where at?”

“Taughanock Heights.”

“Oooh. Lucinda’s old nabe. Very swanky.”

“My parents’ old nabe,” Lucinda clarified testily.

“I might have cleaned out a pool up there once,” reminisced Ross. “Or mulched someone’s hedges with dog shit.”

“You live with your folks up there, Martha?” Alyssa went on. Martha was leaning against the headrest with eyes closed and lips forming a very slight smile of bemusement, or contentment, or both.

“Nah,” Martha said, eyes still closed. “I’ve got my own place up there.”

This wonderment made Alyssa the most alert I’d ever seen her. “Wow!” she said. “That must be awesome!”

“It is,” Martha said. I could see Dutra silently laughing, gazing out the windshield.

“Do you go to school here?” Alyssa asked almost shyly, aglow in the warmth of new friendship.

“Nah, I went to school on the West Coast,” Martha drawled.

I’d been on the point of correcting Alyssa that Martha was no student, but a professor—but Martha’s swift embrace of the imposture had left me speechless.

“Oh, that’s cool. I’ve always thought that I shoulda gone west.”

“It’s not too late.”

“Oh, man. I just feel like I’ve got roots here now.”

“Alyssa’s been here even longer than me,” said the wise man Dutra. “You’ve been here like, what?”

“Fuckin’ five years, man,” Alyssa revealed.

Their banter was endless. “Wow,” Martha said. “Holy shit,” Dutra said. “I road-tripped out to Portland once,” Ross announced, making his own bid for Martha’s attention. “Shelton Circle—the brick and limestone one,” Lucinda admitted under Martha’s encouraging queries. My silence had evolved now into something that Martha, at least, couldn’t ignore. She said to me, “Tired, huh, baby?” though it was she who more needed to leave. It was past two o’clock in the morning. I knew her breasts must be painfully swollen and I was even, in my growing hostility, purposely sagging my weight against her.

Driving away in the Saab she said, “That was just what the doctor ordered.”

“Being mistaken for a college student by a dim-witted pothead who can barely see past her own hair?”

She rotated her head very slowly, to study me, even as the car raced down the dark lakeside road. She was letting me know that I hadn’t hurt her, though I might have embarrassed myself. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know I can’t pass for nineteen anymore.”

But the truth was she could. She was a changeling. In the bar, in the front seat of Dutra’s Volvo, in her fading black jeans with her uncombed hair carelessly draping her face, that other putatively actual backdrop of professorship and husband and mansion and child made no sense—you understood her impatience with it. You might even see some of the habitual gestures of hers I had started to learn—the way she had of quickly straightening her shoulders; of roughly hooking her curtain of hair on her ears; of sweeping objects out of her way when she was ready to make love and they had made the mistake of falling into her path—as her repeated attempt to shrug all this stuff off and be rid of it once and for all.

“No,” I conceded. “You can, actually.” But it wasn’t my disapproval of her fleeting charade that preoccupied her.

“I guess I’m entitled to my little escapes now and then,” she was saying, whether speaking of this evening, or the whole of our affair, I couldn’t tell.

“What do you have to escape from?”

“I think you’ve met my husband.”

“He doesn’t seem so awful as to call for escaping,” I said, so surprised as to argue against my own interests—for not only was this the first time she’d disparaged him to me, it was the first time she had mentioned him at all, since the night in the pergola. Did I think he had vanished forever, or wish that he would? It was far worse than that. I still admired Nicholas, as much as anyone I’d ever known. My esteem for him was hopelessly mixed with my ardor for her. And at the same time, the two felt so confoundingly separate that Martha’s speaking to me of her husband was somehow perverse.

“I suppose he just took you to bed a few times,” she went on. “It’s once you’ve been sleeping with him for a while that it’s really soul killing.”

“What?” I cried.

“The inattention,” she said, misconstruing my question. “The remarkable absence. He’s right there, but there’s nobody there.”

“I never slept with Nicholas! Never. Not even sort of. Never anything like that.”

“For goodness’ sake, don’t freak out. Can’t you see that I wouldn’t have cared if you had? In fact—” She broke off. “Am I driving you home?”

“In fact, what?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing to do with you. Am I driving you home?” But she couldn’t withstand my silence. It was a power I was learning to use, in our voluble passion. “In fact, I would have been glad,” she said finally. “If it had made him happy.”

“You would have been glad,” I repeated, incredulous.

“If he was glad. I would have liked him to be happy. I would have liked to be happy, myself.”

“I don’t understand.”

She looked at me frankly, while bending the wheel toward my part of town. “I don’t want you to understand,” she said after a moment.

“Take me home with you,” I suddenly insisted. “I’ll hide in the morning. I’ll hide the whole day. I’ll climb down the drainpipe. Just let me sleep in your bed. I want to come, and make you come, and fall asleep and not have to put on smelly clothes and walk home in the dark.” I couldn’t know if her desire, or her guilt, from having made that admission to me, played the larger part in her consent—for her face in desire, and her face in the unease of guilt, often looked much the same. When we came to the desolate light near the Hobo Deli, instead of crossing toward my neighborhood she took the left turn, toward hers.

“I didn’t know you when I hoped you were his lover,” she clarified, as the car started climbing the hill. “You were the latest of his female TAs. He tended to go to bed with them. Though never for long.”

“So that stuff with the petition was true.”

“That was bullshit,” she said, with a surprising flare of loyalty. “The so-called harassment? Neurotic virgins who were fixated on him. He never touched an undergraduate. Never so much as looked at them—that was their actual grievance. But with his TAs, the affairs were consensual. And sanctioned, I guess you could say. We never made an explicit arrangement. I tried, once. Quite a long time ago. I suggested that we have an open marriage.”

“Might as well not have the marriage at all.”

“God,” she said. “You are young.”

I winced as if she’d hit me. “Don’t talk down to me.”

“No, you’re right. Your reaction might have nothing to do with your age. Nicholas was also repulsed when I made that suggestion. He preferred to have poorly kept secrets.”

I remembered her warning-off speech. I haven’t been an exemplary wife but that’s over, that chapter is closed. At the time I had hoped she was bluffing: in my selfish and shortsighted hunger I had hoped that exemplarity continued to elude her. Now I feared that it did. “So how many affairs have you had before me?” I asked coldly. “Is this just your latest ‘escape’?”

“Please don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t . . . drag us into the quagmire of what ought to be. Just let it be.”

“Oh, that’s very Alyssa,” I sneered.

“Alyssa isn’t my type. Regina. Just let us be for a while.”

“I love you!” I raged.

“I know,” she said, which made me that much more shrill and combative.

“You know?”

“Come on, Regina. You ‘love’ me, you want to come set up house? You ‘love’ me, you want to be Joachim’s other mommy? You want to pay half my mortgage? You want to bake little pies every day? What is this bullshit? What more do you want? You have me. Quit the ‘gimme.’”

“What ‘gimme,’” I whispered, my throat walls grown thick.

“Your ‘I love you’ is like ‘gimme, gimme,’” she said, pulling into her driveway. She turned off the engine and we listened to its tick-tick dying noise as if marking the hours before dawn. Then she seized my hand and at her touch I yanked her close, a tug-of-war stalemate across the gearshift of the Saab. “I want you here, too,” she whispered. “I want you sleeping with me, in my bed. I want that even though it’s insane, and my life goes to pieces if we get ourselves caught, I still want it. Can’t that be enough?”

•   •   •

Love bestows such a dangerous sense of entitlement. That first morning, waking up beside Martha in her own fragrant bed, dense with pillows and finely spun fibers and waffled goose down and with Martha, her body unsheathed, hotly pressed against mine, did I marvel at such change of fortune? Did I store up delicious sensation, against a day it might only exist in remembrance? Did I recall all my mornings awaking alone, so this contrasting morning was all the more sweet? No. I exulted, I reveled, I buried her flesh beneath tireless kisses, but I also felt arrogant justification. I felt I was finally where I belonged.

And I felt this despite being told that I must be clandestine; despite Martha’s leaving the room very early to wrest from Lucia her smug satisfaction at reaching the baby’s crib first when he stirred; despite Martha’s urgent reminders, which never relaxed, that I stay in the room until fetched; despite how she pulled the door shut as if wanting to bolt it; despite my confinement sometimes lasting hours, until the nanny transported the baby far enough from the house that I might make my tawdry escape—and not only despite all of this, but exactly because of it. Because the great risk was all Martha’s, and all undertaken for me. What did I risk but squalor—for the injunction to silence forbade me from taking a shower—and boredom—for I was even reduced, while I waited for her, to reading that unloved copy of The Last of the Mohicans she’d chucked on the floor? The answer, my only real risk, was that hers would become unacceptable to her. But to this I was blind, even though it lay clearly before me, the same way I was blind to the bright little bottles and bowls and spoons of an infantile breakfast that lay in plain sight in the kitchen dish drainer, once Martha had freed me at last from the bedroom and was hurrying me out the door.

Only days could have passed in this way though they felt like luxurious weeks. One morning the quality of my awaking was so different I lay in momentary confusion, unsure where I was. The door to the bedroom stood open. A light draft I’d never felt in that room, where my body had shed so much vigorous sweat, slightly chilled me. Her bedside clock said twelve-thirty P.M. A note by the clock added: Everyone’s out for the rest of the day. Come down whenever you want.

I pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and stepped into the hall. The house was perfectly quiet. I didn’t feel that slight alertness of the air that can tell us, even through a deep silence, that some unseen person is sitting nearby. Five other doors lined the hallway, only two of which I could identify, for they were the two, side by side at the hall’s farthest end, we slipped past late at night when we crept like thieves into the house: one the baby’s, Joachim’s, and the other the nanny’s, Lucia’s. Like the door at my back they stood open, emanating a calm emptiness. Irresistibly compelled, my swift footfalls silenced by carpet, I went and looked in. I’d never done this before. I’d always lacked opportunity, but it was true I’d also lacked curiosity. A riot of color in one, very clean but tight-packed. Tufted hot pink bedspread such as it was inconceivable Martha would buy, with many figural wildly colored pillows in a similar vein heaped on top, posters as from a travel agency hung on the walls, bedside table bristling with photographs of grinning toothy children in imitation-metal frames. The other room used such a different palette as to seem a different planet. Robin’s-Egg Blue, Cappuccino, and Leaf would have been fitting names for the paint. Wood crib restrainedly flounced with a pattern of monkeys. Small colorful wood sculptures which perhaps were expensive playthings, placed haphazardly over the carpet. All these impressions in a single furtive glance. I turned to face the other three closed doors again. Martha’s bedroom was opposite the head of the stairs, which suddenly seemed a strange place for her bedroom to be. Still the house lay in deep silence. Like Bluebeard’s wife I walked the full length of the hall to the opposite end and pushed open a door.

An immense corner bedroom, with two walls of windows, framing fine views of trees. Floating at an angle, an enormous wood bed with tall headboard and footboard, a twist of quilts hanging off to one side as if someone had fled, gotten tangled, yanked free in great haste, and then left the quilts half on the floor. A chest, lamps, books, wastepaper basket with waste, chaise with a robe crumpled on it, door standing open to a large walk-in closet within which I could see a pale ranking of shirts, and below, a dark army of shoes. Unopened dry cleaning box on the floor. Here and there, something—a camisole, a pair of leather flats—I knew was Martha’s. Not much. She’d taken her most needed stuff when she moved down the hall. In one corner, a club chair with a small shelf beside it containing perhaps fifty palm-size books bound in crumbling red leather with their nearly illegible titles stamped in flaking gold onto the spines: All’s ell at nds Well lfth N ght Th ercha t of enice e Me y Wi es f Wi ds r O hel o

I stepped back and closed the door noiselessly. Two doors remained, both of them closed. Behind one was his study. I didn’t need to open the door to know just what it looked like.

I showered and dressed, and when I went down the stairs she was there, in the breakfast nook, reading. I didn’t know why I felt angered, and somehow deceived, that she’d been sleeping with me in her guest room. Perhaps I felt foolish for not having realized it sooner. She tented her book on the table when I slid in beside her. Those upstairs rooms into which I had trespassed had followed me down, bearing witness in silence, so that it did not feel surprising when Martha said, “Joachim’s with Nicholas. Lucia’s taken him over.”

“Over where?” Though I knew we were alone, our voices sounded too loud.

“At the moment, the Holiday Inn.” She studied me for reaction to this and despite not receiving a protest went on, “You must have realized his canoe trip was over.”

“I hadn’t been thinking about it,” I claimed, which was narrowly true. I’d been making a furious effort to not think about it.

“Did you lose track of time? I would have liked to but it’s something I can’t seem to do anymore.” She stared across the table and through the far wall as if her lost capacity to lose track of time lay there, just out of reach. “I don’t know when that ended. It was after my marriage, but long before having the baby. I started to always know what time it was, practically to the minute. I stopped wearing a watch and I’ve never been late.” Again she looked in my face as if expecting I’d argue with her, and I remembered the day we’d met in the coffee shop, and her lateness, which she was telling me had been deliberate. As if her thoughts mirrored mine she added, “At least, not because I’ve lost track of the time. While Nicholas never has the remotest conception of what time it is. I called up the ranger last week, on the day he was due to come into the lodge, to leave a message for him to call me. He was amazed I remembered his schedule—he could barely remember himself. I asked him to put off coming home. A short-term separation.” Perhaps she’d been afraid I would crudely exult at this sudden announcement, because she added, harshly, “It’s not because of you.”

“Is that a reassurance or a warning?”

“Neither,” she said. “Just a fact.”

We were sitting with shoulders and thighs pressed together in the snug little space, but less like lovers than like accidental seatmates on a train. “Either way it’s a cruel thing to say,” I said, meaning to sound very calm and, I thought, succeeding. “If it’s not because of me then why is it?”

“Regina, I don’t have problems in my marriage because of you. I have you because of problems in my marriage.”

“That’s sophomoric.”

“I think you might have meant sophistic. Even if you didn’t, you’re hardly old enough to call me sophomoric. I might have to ask for identification.” But there was nothing joking in her tone, and I lost what composure I’d had.

“Why not say what you were too much of a coward to tell me before? I’m your escape, just like acting eighteen at a roadhouse and smoking a joint. When you’re all done with me you’ll just flick what’s left into an ashtray—”

“Can this really be true? I’ve told my lover we have more time together, and all she does is scream and cry and complain.”

“Because you’re at such pains to tell me that it’s not because of me! ‘We’re gonna have more time, babe, but it’s not because I wanted time with you.’”

“I did not fucking say that, Regina. I said that I’ve asked Nicholas to give me some time, to sort out what the fuck’s going on with our marriage, and that’s about us, that’s about myself and Nicholas, not you.”

“What the fuck is the difference?”

“I need time apart from my husband; I want time with you; but these two things aren’t caused by each other. They’re not connected!”

“How the fuck can they not be connected?” I screamed, shoving her breakfast-nook table behind me. For love had bestowed such a dangerous sense of entitlement I thought nothing of storming my way from the house into which I had tiptoed just hours before. Just hours before, when we’d whispered our blunt urgencies, and suffocated our climaxing shouts in her pillows. Now that we had privacy I was shrieking and throwing her kitchen door wide on its hinges. Down the length of her drive and the prosperous lane with its tasteful stone walls and its fake hitching posts I went wailing without inhibition, and when the Saab pulled up just beside me I was so overtaken with woe I did not even realize at first who it was.

“Get in the car,” she urged me. “You cannot put this show on in front of my neighbors!”

“Why should I care what your neighbors are thinking?” I snarled. But I got in the car, and for once she had no quick response, and we drove down the hill in silence.

We continued the silence a long time in front of my house, gazing out her windshield, again like uneasy travelers who are no longer sure what direction they’re going. At last I said, “Did you tell him you’re seeing me?” and with too little hesitation she said,

“No.”

“Because—the fact that you’d rather not see him has nothing to do with the fact that you’d rather see me.”

“Yes,” she said after a moment, remotely. “That’s right.”

I turned my head slightly, allowing her into my sights. I was only trying not to shed more tears, but she seemed to feel my gaze as a further chastisement. “I don’t think you can understand—” she began, in the worldly-wise, weary voice that I most would have liked to despise, if I could have despised any part of her.

“Please don’t,” I said, getting out of the car, “add insult to the injury.”

“Nicely put.”

“I’ve always been bright for my age,” I said, slamming the Saab’s door as hard as I could.

I sobbed myself to sleep at the height of the day and that evening awoke through a fug of trapped heat to an awareness of weight at the end of my bed. My lamp was off and my door almost closed, but a needle of light crossed the floor from the hall. The TV was nattering faintly downstairs. “You and Dutra really do live like pigs,” mused her voice in the darkness, and then she stretched out beside me and I gasped in the vise of her arms.

“That prick let you in,” I protested.

“He was happy to see me. He said, from one prick to another, that I’d better shape up or be sorry.”

“I love you,” I said, with my face hotly pressed to her neck.

“We need to get out of here,” she was deciding. “We’re going away.”

•   •   •

Any amount of time later I’d far better understand what at that time I barely understood at all, though Martha might have approved of my incorrect, seafaring view of our progress: sometimes against the wind, sometimes with it, but always forward. She might have approved, in her maritime way, but she would have been equally wrong. We weren’t zigzagging forward but wildly seesawing, the ups ever higher, the downs ever lower, our fulcrum nailed smartly in place. Martha’s flights of hedonism—Martha’s brooding resolutions and remorse. Martha’s desire—Martha’s duty. I’d like to say I defied gravity just as often as feeling its snare, but my efforts were more likely spent clinging on with white knuckles to not be dislodged. Still, that was my heroism—my tenacious fidelity to her, though it was based on a grave misperception. I thought desire was duty. No trial could not be endured nor impediment smashed in desire’s holy service, or so I believed, with naïve righteousness. I didn’t grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often do.

Since the start of their marital troubles, which at least I had rightly perceived had begun very far in advance of my entrance, Nicholas and Martha had been in the habit of borrowing homes—always on the pretext that they lived in the middle of nowhere. They knew many accomplished people, principally New Yorkers, who were always decamping for Paris or Oxford or Stuttgart or Rome for a month or semester or year, to accept invitations to research or teach or complete overdue manuscripts. Nicholas and Martha would ask for the keys, so they need not reserve a hotel when they came into town for their opera subscription—but there was no opera subscription, and their travels together had long ago ceased. Tacitly alternating, one would go for a weekend or week to New York, then the other, and though both liked New York very much they went less to be there than away from each other.

This routine, once the baby arrived, had become both more halting and more necessary. At Christmas, a Manhattan professor they knew relocated to Los Angeles for the semester, and Nicholas, in response to insistent suggestions from Martha, became able to spend frequent weekends away. In May, the professor decided to remain in L.A. until August. And so it was that when Martha asked Nicholas not to come home right away from his three-week canoe trip, she knew her request would be, if not easy, at least possible for him to grant, and that in fact the Manhattan apartment was already fairly well stocked with his clothes.

That was where he had been since he’d left the Ontario woods, with the exception of the day he had driven five hours to spend a wretched less-than-two with his eight-month-old child at a Holiday Inn. At the time I didn’t ponder this insult to Nicholas’s parenthood. Far less did I dream Martha might have, or that she’d set out to redress the imbalance, if only to safeguard her interests. When she explained to me that she and Nicholas were switching places for a week, I didn’t number the innumerable grains of need, and counter need, of hurt and counter hurt, of expectation shortfall and unhappiness surfeit that might, all bagged up, have the heft of a faltering marriage. I didn’t see the circumstance as having much to do with marriage at all. Some forgiveness is owed me: Martha meant my perspective to suffer strict limits. Perhaps she wanted to impose them on herself. Her husband would enjoy the freedom and mastery of his own home and the company of his own child for the first time in over a month; but what she said to me was, We need to get out of here, baby. We’re going to New York! Could I have blamed her, had I realized how many enmeshed purposes she was serving by each of her actions? In fact I might have loved her more, for the exhausting intricacy of her achievement, but this was the last thing she wanted.

We were going to New York—that was all I need worry about, and in the days leading to our departure I indulged that concern every way that I could. I bought new clothes of the sort I naïvely imagined would make me appear a New Yorker. I had my hair cut and my toenails done. I fretted, in the campus bookstore, over which was exactly the right sort of casually intellectual, urbane novel to read in New York in whatever spare moments I had. André Gide? Djuna Barnes? The morning that we were to leave I awoke by myself in her bed, morning light streaming through the tall windows. This time she’d left no note for me. It was already nine-thirty, the house very quiet as it always was this time of day, for Joachim and Lucia would have departed by now on their unknown, by me un-thought-of, rounds. Martha must be downstairs waiting. My eager efficiency in the shower was blunted somewhat, as if encountering headwind, by the enveloping recollection of the shower we’d taken the previous night, when we’d come in by stealth at some hour past one in the morning. We liked to make love very clean and go to sleep very dirty, sweat-enmatted and pungently syrup-adhered. Now back in the shower my attempts to self-cleanse became counterproductive, as my hand dropped the soap while one cheek squashed against the cool tile, and I muffled a groan that emerged like a gurgle and, though standing, almost drowned myself. Even with all this digression it was just ten of ten when, in a brand-new short skirt and short-sleeved leotard and new wedge-heeled sandals, I hurried downstairs to make coffee for Martha and instead almost stepped on Lucia. She knelt before the open refrigerator, silently accusing its disordered contents with a dripping rag poised in one hand. A cloud of bleach fumes scorched my face, originating logically from a bucket that sat on the floor but more persuasively from her contemptuous, unsurprised gaze as she slowly revolved it from the open appliance to me.

“Ree-search assistant,” she satirically addressed me. “You don’t have your own home?”

“I didn’t realize you were here.” In my shock at encountering her, my words sounded brusque, even rude. I hadn’t faced her since the first time I’d met her, though we’d logged scores of hours beneath the same roof. Now I wondered in a cascade of panic if she could have been conscious of me all that time.

“You don’t realize much,” she agreed, returning eyes forward again. “You are young but you supposed to be smart. One of his favorite students.” In another speaker, or in another speech, the emphasis might have meant snideness toward Nicholas but here I understood it meant snideness toward me. I was all the more contemptible, for failing to live up to the esteem of such an admirable man.

“I’m not so young,” I snapped, for she couldn’t have chosen a better way to rouse my indignation.

“Then you worse,” she said. “Better young and stupid than old enough you should know better.”

“Know better than what?” I demanded.

“You got kids?” she demanded in turn.

Lucia was, as I knew via Martha, a great-grandmother at the age of fifty-eight. Bullet-shaped, orange-skinned and -haired, partial to fuchsia and orange tones as well for her eye shadow, rouge, blouses, and elasticized slacks, Lucia was, I would recognize later, as thorough a manifestation of uncompromised will as I’ve ever encountered. Marooned in the northeasternmost corner of the opposite America from that which she preferred, she had responded to a seven-month snow season, a twelve degrees median wintertime temperature, an average of two hundred and eighty-nine overcast days every year, with a personal palette of tropical colors that would brook no dilution; and the unwavering glare that she cast with her wardrobe was well matched in strength by her judgments of people and things. Lucia subscribed to notions of honor and blood loyalty with which no amount of enlightened employer-employee behavior on the part of Martha could ever compete. Martha might pay Lucia a staggeringly generous wage; procure her health insurance and a retirement account; attempt chatty, confiding analysis with her of Joachim’s abilities and temperament; and it would never offset Martha’s fundamental crime: that she was not, by her nature, maternal. Martha left the lion’s share of decisions regarding Joachim’s diet, sleep schedule, quotidian amusements, and even, as he grew a bit bigger, his discipline to Lucia, under the hopeful assumption that such obvious respect for Lucia’s judgment would inspire Lucia to have respect for Martha’s judgment, in return. Of course the opposite happened. The less Martha bossed Lucia, the larger and louder grew Lucia’s contempt. Lucia now resorted to almost flamboyant sedition, as if she hoped, perhaps with the last shred of respect she retained for Martha, to instigate from Martha the sort of brute retaliation that would restore Lucia’s regard to the exact extent it put her in her place. Instead Martha continued to give Lucia yet more reasons to disrespect her, of which I was merely the latest.

But all this insight was yet to be mine—it lay years in the future—for it was contingent on the very condition she’d sarcastically asked me about. At that time she knew better than I did how far children were from me, not just chronologically but mentally.

“Of course not,” I shot back, as if she’d given offense.

“Why ‘of course’? Your age, I had two kids already. Now five. Fifteen grandbaby. Last year, first great-grandbaby.” She still squatted where she had been but she had turned her whole body toward me, hunkered on her haunches like a toad about to spring, both extremities of temperature skewering out from her eyes, the overtaxed refrigerator, its door propped wide by her muscular rump, raising the pitch of its whine as its compressor went into high gear. As if to show me that I would not, by my malignant presence, cause her to neglect that appliance no matter how I might try, she seized a tub of sour cream out of its depths, pitched this into the trash, and then with some obvious pain straightened up to her full height and smacked the door shut. “I give them everything,” she concluded, pushing her eyebrows at me as if to dare me to doubt it.

“I’m sure you’re a wonderful mother,” I said unkindly.

“Everything. I have nothing. Still they have everything. For my girls always beautiful clothes. For my boys always bikes, they get soccer, they get good shoes no one wore them before. Then they get big, they go, I come here so I do for them better. All my grandbabies, my great-grandbaby, I want I am giving to them. Always giving! Not taking!”

“Why are you yelling at me?” I yelled at her. “Where’s Martha?”

“With him,” she condescended to my utter stupidity, and then as I gaped in mute astonishment, realized she was still giving me too much credit. “The baby,” she clarified in exasperation.

Even had I guessed on my own I would still have felt somehow deceived. “The baby? Where are they? Where did they go?”

“How do I know? He’s her baby. I guess she can take him somewhere.” After a beat she appended, as if to herself, but without at all changing her volume, “That the way she do it. Don’t give nothing. Don’t give nothing. Then give a little. Then leave. Now he’ll be all week asking for her.” Her face enlivened with satisfied mischief as she completed this speech. It was bald sedition: if I didn’t dispute her I implicitly agreed.

“You shouldn’t talk that way about someone you work for,” I said prudishly. The insult to Martha outraged me, yet strong inhibition, the accurate sense I was out of my league, held me back.

“I don’t work for her,” Lucia surprisingly dismissed me. “I work for him.”

“Professor Brodeur?”

“Joachim.” She compressed her lips smugly at me. She pronounced the baby’s name the Spanish way, a tender “wah-KEEM.” By contrast Martha used the British style of willful mispronunciation—“JOE-a-keem”—a decision I acknowledged, if deep within, as pretentious and somehow remote. Even in this, Lucia staked her claim to the natural order of things.

“Of course you work for him, in a way, but you’re not employed by him.”

“I work for him,” she persisted. “He’s the boss. If you were smart, he’d be the boss of you too.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’d leave her alone. You’d stop taking like stealing from him.”

“How on earth am I stealing from him?” I exclaimed. Then we both heard the car crunching into the drive, and a door thumping shut.

Lucia was on the far side of the big kitchen island from me, so she leaned over it, with deliberate theatricality, though in her squat stature she did not reach far. “You selfish like her,” she said, smiling to show she did not feel rushed. “So you make her be worse.” Again came the expression of satisfied mischief. She didn’t fear I might tell; she was goading me to. She might be crestfallen if I did not.

A gay, perhaps overly gay, babble of singsong and nonsense now came up the walk, and grew louder passing through the solarium. Then Martha shouldered open the door, Joachim on her hip, and saw us. That she registered the unprecedented conjunction of Lucia and me, my red-faced combativeness, Lucia’s malevolent gleam, was unmistakably betrayed by her behaving as if nothing was strange. “So we had a fabulous romp in the park,” Martha informed Lucia, as if I weren’t there. Martha set Joachim in his high chair, with much mugging and tickling of him on his belly to which he responded with gales of laughter which redoubled in resonance and helplessness each time he managed to squawk new breath into his lungs. His fluff-crested, jug-handled head, very slightly wider than tall on his soft little neck, like a small pumpkin or a cartoon child drawn to endear, a Charlie Brown or a Dennis the Menace, kept rearing back so he could better square her in his sights, fill his gaze with more of her; and each time he did his laughter died back a bit and he gave out a noise of pure surfeit and adoration. “Heh,” he sighed at her. “Heh . . .” It struck me first as a disorientation for which I then had to locate the source that he looked very different from when I’d last seen him, some five weeks ago. No one feature had changed; the gestalt was transformed. He seemed far more there than he had in the past. At the same time his eerie watchfulness of me, which had formed such a large part of my first impression of him, had now vanished—but perhaps he was taking his cues from Martha, who could not seem to look at me. With great effort his eyes left her face for Lucia’s, which had more and more intruded on his peripheral vision. “Chee!” he finally cried, with an imperious gesture, and Lucia fairly glowed with her summons.

“He needs new diaper,” she tutted at Martha, undoing the elaborate high chair safety harness Martha had only just finished engaging. “And wash hands before eat.”

“He needs those playground germs for his immune system,” Martha mock-argued.

“So he wants to be sitting in poop for nice skin,” Lucia countered, hefting Joachim into her arms while Martha kept up her clowning claim on him, goofing with her eyes and tongue until he’d chuckled and heh’d himself into a mild state of hiccups.

“It’s not poopy—”

“Full enough.”

“You change his diaper twice as often as I do. Those go in landfills, Lucia. They’re made to take a lot more and you waste them. It just makes more garbage to strangle the earth.” But this was still in the key of indulgent teasing, of a listing of foibles.

“Baby’s butt more important than earth,” Lucia huffed as she bore Joachim from the kitchen—but she was teasing Martha too, in her way, and Martha laughed as she left.

Throughout this diaper badinage I had been standing there as mild and inconspicuous as Joan of Arc with the flaming sword raised in one hand, yet Martha, like deliberate Lucia, had all but ignored me—how triumphant were Lucia’s footsteps up the stairs! How exultant her banter with the baby! Martha yanked open that mute witness, the refrigerator, and said in low tones, “Now you’re shooting the breeze with my nanny?”

“I beg your pardon? I came downstairs and practically stepped on her. She ambushed me, then she insulted me—”

“What were you doing downstairs?”

“Martha, you were gone when I woke up! What was I supposed to do, shiver like a kitten in your room until you brought a bowl of milk—”

“You know the drill for sleeping over.”

“You were gone. You did not leave a note.”

“I can’t fucking leave a note every fucking occasion! I’m leaving my house and my child for a week, I have, possibly, a couple of things on my mind, can’t you use your common sense—”

“My common sense told me to make myself breakfast. It didn’t tell me my lover had left me alone in her house with the person she least wants me ‘shooting the breeze’ with, who happened to insult me, and you, not that you’d ever care!”

“All you needed to have done was stay upstairs—”

“Why? Why, exactly, do I need to hide upstairs like Anne Frank when you’ve asked your husband for a separation, and there’s nobody here but your baby and nanny, who, by the way, has not an ounce of respect for you—why am I hiding from her? Why, Martha? Why won’t you tell her who I actually am?”

All through our escalating argument, which we conducted in stage whispers, not for risk of being heard but because, perhaps, hissing is second only to shrieking for the gratification of heated emotions, Martha had been concocting herself a breakfast of yogurt and granola and dried “mirabelle” plums she and Nicholas had brought home, I for some reason knew, from their last trip to Paris a lifetime before, first hurling yogurt bowlward by the spoonful, then reducing the plums to a mince with impossibly rapid-fire blows of the huge butcher’s knife, then beating in the granola until the result was appropriate for mortaring bricks. Preparation complete, she leaned on the kitchen island and ate standing up, at a steam shovel’s rate, at the same time as launching and dodging our argument’s barbs. But I, motionless and foodless, had the better of her. However thin she constitutionally was, however many debauched evenings she’d passed with me dining on nothing but Jim Beam and ice cubes and Marlboro Lights, Martha was particular about food. She hated eating food that wasn’t worth it, and hated eating if she couldn’t commune with her meal in peace. She wouldn’t have stooped to granola and yogurt without the “mirabelle” plums. And she didn’t bother with breakfast at all if it wasn’t sun-drenched and serene, conducted, ideally, in the breakfast nook with her lover tucked close beside her and the New York Times paving the table. For some moments she kept up the act, as if she liked eating glop standing up, but I won: I spoiled her meal past her tolerance point.

“Why won’t I tell her?” she repeated, throwing her swiftly scraped bowl in the sink. “Are you truly naïve? You don’t seem to notice that this is my life.”

“And it isn’t mine?”

“No! That Nicholas should know all about it, that Lucia should know all about it—that’s my life. I’m not asking you to tell your husband, tell your nanny, tell the father of your child—”

“I haven’t got such people.”

“Exactly.”

“Does that make me less deserving?” I cried. “My existence is less complicated and so less important . . .” but I trailed off, having somehow proved the very point I had meant to rebut.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘deserving,’ but no. It doesn’t make you less anything.” And yet we both knew, standing there, that I was somehow less; I could have walked to the Greyhound bus station and boarded a bus anywhere and it wouldn’t have touched any life but my own. To be less entangled felt shameful and trivializing. Oh, youth!—that hopeless condition that marked me as different from her.

“I don’t want to hide upstairs!” I was saying, like a petulant child. “I don’t want you to say I’m the ‘research assistant’ . . .”

“I know, babe, I know. Give it time . . . can’t you please give it time . . . I don’t know what I’m doing. . . .”

Thankfully no transit of Lucia’s and Joachim’s through that house could have ever been stealthy. Now we heard them returning, her resolute stomp on the stairs, and his voluble babble, and her attentive, I had to admit admirable, responses, as if he were Horace relating the Odes. “No!” came her shock. “Oh?” she realized. “Oh my,” she marveled anew. As Joachim had, I drew back from Martha the better to see her, and my heart burst again.

“I love you,” I said ardently. She was right; it was always my trump card. You don’t know what you’re doing? I do.

But—“I love you,” she echoed—at last! “Let’s just get to New York, okay, babe? Bear with me . . .” And her overwhelmed eyes spilled their tears: joyful tears like my own, I was sure, though the tears of exhaustion, concession, and bafflement are reportedly equally salty and wet.

Still, my tears were joyful enough upon hearing her speak those three words. Exhilarated I shouldered past Lucia and the baby as they made their return to the kitchen, and upstairs, before zipping my suitcase, I flung myself back into bed, and scooped the damp, redolent bedclothes in a heap to my face, and inhaled them and kissed them and clutched them. Outside I waited for her in the Saab, enthroned on its palm of black leather, and no more than ten minutes later she’d heaved her bag into the trunk and climbed in beside me. “You never ate!” she fussed. “We’ll pick up bagels. Nicholas said he would be here by one.”

We sprang into flight like the arrow released from the bow. Racing down the two-lane state road between humped Ice Age hills and the little red barns and the round silver silos, music fugging the rush of the car with a sideways vibrato—it was the summer of Beck’s first, irresistible single, with its twanging bass line. My bagel vanished unheeded by me, was devoured for fuel, for I hadn’t yet fully absorbed Martha’s lessons of living, and then a ball of brown sack and wax paper distracted my hands. “Just chuck it in back,” Martha yelled, wanting both my hands free to clasp hers, and so I did chuck it, and it surely bounced off Joachim’s Swedish-made child restraint, already obscured under coffee cups, sun hats, Martha’s summer-weight silk cardigan . . . so that only a full hour later, at the junction with the interstate highway, did Martha realize it was there.

“Fuck!” she screamed, in a sudden access of such frustrated rage as I’d never yet witnessed. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

“It’s okay,” I soothed. “We’ll get there, we’ll get there, we’ll get there . . .”

Then the full hour back to the start, for if Nicholas wanted to drive Joachim in his car, there was no second seat. Almost all the way Martha screamed “Fuck!” and her tears of frustration recorded their paths down her face, but I kept up the mantra We’ll get there and Look! Our vacation’s already begun and I kissed her all over her face and her neck and her gear-shifting arm. We trailed a dust plume through her yard and she yanked out the car seat and hurled it in the solarium. Then we retraced the road a third time and at long last climbed onto the interstate highway with New York just another four hours down the road.

“What did you mean, that Lucia insulted you?” Martha realized, as the noise of our speed settled safely around us, like silence.

“It was nothing,” I said, kissing her. It had shrunk to a speck.

•   •   •

How had I lived with my perfidy up until now?

The question was put to me quietly. Not by the glittering reach of the Hudson alongside the car. Nor by the somber limestone edifice, facing a riverfront park, through whose shadowy door we came pulling our bags. Nor by the mute uniformed man with a Mayan’s fierce warrior face and a robot’s impervious arm, cranking the wheel of the Victorian oak elevator with the brocade-trimmed, velvet-topped bench. No, these dazzlements were too grand and too distant from me to slip the admonition, like a feather’s quill end, in the coil of my ear. It was not until we were inside, and Martha rooting through the kitchen for something to drink, and myself helplessly in the bedroom with the idea of unpacking my bag, that I heard it. I had opened the obvious drawer, the top drawer of the room’s only dresser, and found myself gazing into a masculine cache of compressed, crumpled things. Wash-worn Brooks Brothers white cotton shorts now a pale shade of gray. Snake-tangled, unpaired argyle socks, all in bright Easter colors like clover and mauve which still showed fairly crisp near the tops, but down toward the heels were marred by thread pills and snags, and at the toes by the outright abjection of holes. To see laid bare in their entirety those socks, of which I’d heretofore glimpsed only brief merry stripes, when a pant cuff rose up from the rim of a shoe, was like seeing the man himself fully exposed to me—naked. Of course I would know whose these were, even without the additional scatter of items strewn over the top or sifted down into the gaps: a geode, a whale tooth carved into some sort of large rodent or bear with long ears, a clothbound copy of Areopagitica, a handful of spare change and tokens, and a photograph of Martha in a plain wooden frame. The photo showed so little of her face that only someone who well knew her body and carriage, the way she held herself standing or sitting, would have instantly recognized her as I did. She sat, facing mostly away from the camera, on a sort of steep hillside or bluff, dressed in a T-back jog tank top, loose pants, and heavy boots, with a windbreaker tied at her waist. A baseball cap covered her head, her long hair carelessly pulled through the vent. She had glanced slightly over her shoulder, as if just realizing there was someone behind her, so that some of the left side of her face could be seen, but her attention was still clearly cast forward, toward whatever the view.

I glanced over my own shoulder, hearing Martha in the living room now, one room closer to me, calling out titles of records. “Handel,” she called out, “Haydn, Haydn, more Haydn.” “Anything!” I called back. Now I noticed the low bedside table, entirely bare except for a cheap radio alarm clock. I knew that Nicholas had cleared off that table, probably at the last moment, perhaps after he’d already gone half out the door—rushing back to sweep the loose coins and little totems and portable shrine to the adored wayward wife off the surface in one hasty motion and so into his underwear drawer. He would have done so not to protect these items from her but to offer her the uncluttered table, get them out of her way.

How had I lived with my perfidy up until now?

The apartment, elegant and small, was still very much the apartment of the professor acquaintance who was spending his summer in California. As I took the further measure of the bedroom, I understood even more the effort Nicholas had expended erasing his presence, for there had been very little room here for him to start out. The other two drawers of the three-drawer chest were so full of clothing I could not fully open them; clearly the resident professor had overstuffed them to offer one drawer to his guest. It was the same in the closet, a mashed upright bale of drab-colored, unfashionable men’s clothes to one side, and at the other, a mere handful of hangers, half of them bare, the other half double-hung with handsome shirts I recognized. Double-hanging meant trouble for the sleeves of the shirts underneath, besides being a pain, but I knew why he’d done it. For her. Had there been a cubic inch in the other two drawers of the chest he likely would have mashed his things in there to give her the whole upper drawer, but this was physically impossible.

I closed the chest of drawers and the closet doors also and was leaving the room when an impulse drew me back. I found myself reopening the top drawer and reburying the photograph of Martha, at the very bottom and back where she could not ever happen across it, as I had. I didn’t do this because I feared that the sight of it would melt her heart toward him. I did it for the opposite reason, to shield him from her scorn. I owed that much to him.

In the living room Martha had filled two glasses with greenish wine. “I don’t have any idea how old this is, but I know it was cheap to start out,” she said. “For a man of his supposed refinement Nicholas is an amazing ignoramus about spirits and wine. Left to himself he’d drink Jameson’s for every cocktail and sticky grocery-store red every meal.”

“I know you haven’t told him, but if you were to tell him, what do you think his reaction would be?” I wondered abruptly.

“I don’t see the point of speculating, nor do I see the point of revisiting this conversation. Regina, look around. We’re here in this apartment in Manhattan, all by ourselves. I want to enjoy that. Don’t you?”

But it didn’t feel like we were there by ourselves. Somehow in his paltry exile, his dispossession he’d even seen fit to erase, Nicholas felt more present to me than he did in his home. He felt more present than he had in that well-furnished, book-lined master bedroom wherein sat his abandoned dry cleaning, awaiting his doubtful return. The trouser-pocketful of spare change scattered over his shorts, the double-hung shirts, the framed photo might have all had his eyes. When Martha persuaded me onto the sofa and began with one hand to tease open my blouse, I was stiff as a corpse. But this remoteness of mine, which was rare, seemed to deepen her amorousness. She put her wineglass on the table and metaphorically rolled up her sleeves.

“Am I the first woman you’ve been with?” I now wanted to know.

“I’m afraid not,” she said, not elaborating because too intent on her work, like a mariner leaving the dock. There was uncleating and unfurling and hoisting, and all to be done with quick, deft forcefulness.

“Why did you marry Nicholas?”

It must have been the optimism of lust on the scent of its gratification that allowed her to lightly endure such an onslaught of questions. “He was not the first man in my life, certainly,” she remarked, in refutation of some logic I couldn’t follow, but then she firmly disregarded further queries and I stopped making them. For all my history of love, which coincided with my history with her, an exquisitely porous membrane lay between the mundane and the deeply ecstatic. She’d only needed to caress me, even send me a glance down the length of a room, and pure ardor bloomed. The transit from reading the paper or taking a shoe off or draining a glass to the howl of titanic passion was no transit at all. Now for the first time I experienced delayed, obstructed passion as it stubbornly burned its way toward me through a lacquer of fear. What was I afraid of? Losing her. What alone quelled that fear? Having her. So the woe and its cure locked their horns, each gaining what inches the other gave up, until finally cure muscled forth and I wailed and shook in her arms. But afterward as we languorously dressed the forewarning stayed with me.

Yet we thrived in New York, that first night the germ of the week, that one week, afterward, the beau ideal of our whole time together. Heat, the day’s and our own, had built up in those rooms. Passing back out the doors of the building into indigo twilight a temperature differential submerged us, like going into cool water. The doorman—a new man now, pale-skinned and black-haired and transfixed by a tiny TV he’d set up on an overturned bucket—glanced without surprise at our linked-fingered egress, made with one of his own hands a careless salute, and in a flash I perceived the lifeblood of that city, its particular meaning, paradoxically mapped at the cross point of the greatest breadth of possibility with the highest expectation. You could be anyone that you wanted, yet you had to be someone. I was wearing her clothes—she had vetoed every item I’d brought—but I felt less diminished than transposed into my more ordained form. At the corner of Broadway the subway was two blocks away, but she hailed a cab and directed the driver to almost the opposite end of the island. “We might be in this cab for an hour,” she predicted with satisfaction. Our driver turned his attention to traffic and we turned ours to each other, and the endless innovations of fingers and tongues.

In the deep velvet booth of a crepuscular velvet-rope club she gave me my first gin martinis. At the white marble bar of a clamorous French brasserie she fed me my first oysters. Everywhere we went we attracted approving attention, the more so the drunker and more flamboyantly demonstrative we grew. At the brasserie when we surfaced from necking, the shells of the oysters denuded and strewn on the ice, the bartender, middle-aged and avuncular in a white Oxford shirt with sleeve gaiters, stood grinning at us with arms crossed. “What are you grinning about?” Martha said, but flirtatiously—the more she groped me in public, the more flirtatious with others she grew, but the less, I now found, that I cared.

“I find your friend very attractive,” the bartender said.

“She’s my lover, you dolt,” Martha smiled.

“That’s disappointing. Maybe you’d like to go out sometime?”

“I’m her lover.”

“Oh, twist the knife,” the bartender admonished.

And yet there were times in that endlessly dilating week—for every day’s newness made days within days, so that the week seemed to magically lengthen, the more it diminished—when Martha and I, having drunk our way past drunkenness to a gritty sobriety; having eaten ourselves hungry again; most rare having fucked ourselves calm, so that sex relinquished its hold for a while on our minds; would sit across from each other in that professor’s apartment, or in a white-doily coffeehouse run by Greek Orthodox nuns, or in a bleach-washed linoleum Chinatown diner with scum-covered lobsters in tanks by the door, simply pouring ourselves out to each other in talk, as we somehow had not done before. “I married Nicholas because I didn’t know him or understand him, and that gave him mystique,” she said with regret one late night, as we ate salt-baked shrimps from a bed of limp lettuce, and carefully stacked up the shells to keep count. “There was something so impenetrable about him, he had this surface that was so alluring but everything just bounced off, he was always charming, you never saw him upset or confiding or out of control, and I thought—I think I thought—that getting past that, being on the inside, must be extraordinary. To be the One he was intimate with. But he isn’t—there’s no intimacy. There’s no inside, inside.”

“There’s something so intimate and disarming about his casual manner, just the first time you meet him,” I recalled.

“There is! But that’s as deep as it goes. You get there right away, but then—” She mimed with her hands a blade striking a wall. “You don’t get any further.”

“Having the baby with him must have gotten you further,” I said, as I might have said to a friend—not to a lover. Instantly I wished I had not.

“That’s why I did it,” she replied, looking sharply at me—a challenge, to see if I judged her. I didn’t. But I also doubted it had been so simple, the baby as a tool to pry Nicholas open. For at other times Martha spoke with real wistfulness of just the sort of thing she claimed Nicholas lacked: his element of surprise, of disclosing aspects of himself both unexpected and unknown to observers in general. In Berkeley, where they had met, he’d had much the same public persona as now, if an occasional Far East/West Coast trend to his clothes. He was not above wearing, and with perfect success, a Nehru jacket, leather thong flip-flops, and pajama-loose striped linen slacks. He could have looked like a mincing bohemian or he could have looked like a soldier of empire gone native (and indeed the wrong idea that he was British clung stubbornly to him, on account of his superlative charm and his scholarly specialization). If the latter, still Martha’s surprise was complete when, to woo her, he took her on a grueling backcountry canoe trip in Yosemite Park and turned out to know what he was doing. He’d been as deft as an Algonquin portaging their boat, perhaps a Canadian national trait but for that no less sexy.

Growing up in Maine Martha had been the sort of statuesque girl who is a natural athlete, but Martha’s particular athleticism, though versatile, was severe. Exceedingly competitive and self-contained, she did poorly on teams. She was a fine horseback rider but disliked the culture. There was a period of skiing, and, my personal favorite for its apt symbolism, of archery, but what suited her best was to sail. All that cleating and tacking and furling—these were really the earliest habits ingrained in her limbs. And so she and Nicholas had that in common, she said smiling wryly, disparaging such a slight bond. But it was more, at that time of her life, than she’d found herself sharing with anyone else. Both very smart, she and Nicholas had wound up professional scholars, in a milieu where climbing stairs was considered exertion and driving a nail a rare physical skill. Yet they were both, unbeknownst to their colleagues, outdoorspeople partial to small wooden boats.

That discovery made, their alliance was rapidly sluiced down the obvious channels. They took sea kayaks up from Fort Bragg along the so-called Lost Coast, with the migrating whales. They sailed among the Channel Islands, and south to Baja. That each possessed a slightly different expertise gave them much—at the start—to discuss. But from the beginning there was a strange discontinuity between their modes of interaction. Certain types of togetherness seemed to mesh them as snugly as beings can mesh. They did wonderfully on boats, all the more if there were challenging conditions. Their steps easily synced on remote hiking paths. They never struggled with shared physical tasks. And though they seemed their best in wilderness, it was not mandatory—they had terrific abstruse arguments about some books and films (not all: Nicholas, unlike Martha, was indifferent to popular culture, not snobbish so much as uncomprehending and bored, so that she could not even keep him awake through Pulp Fiction, let alone make him argue about it). Yet much of the rest of the time a space of unfamiliarity, even abashed awkwardness, seemed to open between them. It happened very regularly at the table, when their talk was as halting and random as that on an ailing first date. It happened on walks in Berkeley, where the sublime wilderness wasn’t there as a shared interlocutor. It happened while socializing with their colleagues, when Martha—always animated by desirous attention to a height of brash, husky-voiced, devil-may-care posturing—would feel herself turned into their mascot, while Nicholas, smiling much like a parent, withdrew into silence. But it happened most often in bed, most particularly after foreplay. While a master of coy and withholding techniques of arousal, Nicholas always seemed to conclude at some point that his dues had been paid, diving into her body with as much savoir faire as a twelve-year-old boy diving into a pond. He wasn’t restrained or inhibited—he’d once abraded her tailbone bloody with his furious thrusts, and he screwed his whole face up, and yelped like a dog being pulled by its tail. But neither did he seem aware of her. She had the uneasy sense, when he fucked her, of spying on him while he got himself off—of intruding on a private and unguarded moment to which she lacked any claim.

Once she’d grown aware of this sense of aloneness, which weighed down at precisely the moments she ought to feel closest to him, the moments of untroubled intimacy also took an odd tinge. She wondered if he felt so porous and attuned to her when they mended a sail or pitched a tent less because she was his lover than a sort of fellow scout. Nicholas had a boyishness to him, a shy, watchful sweetness that joined to his romantic appearance and his mercurial clothes was a significant source of his sexual cult, of the countless women and men of all sorts slavering in his wake. But the boyishness, reframed by their affair, proved incompatible with sexual feeling. After sex Martha found herself watching his back as he mopped with a Kleenex and slid into his robe and from there a hot shower. They rarely lingered in bed after sex, nosing over each other, carefully nursing depleted limp flesh back to life. They never showered or bathed together. Martha, who had never given a thought to nudity, began using a robe as he did. Martha had pursued her carnal interests since the age of thirteen, with no small number of women and large numbers of men. Always, in her lengthy experience, sex had been the key to a door behind which lay a realm of shared secrets. Sexual love was conspiracy, the blood pact with the partner in crime—you didn’t spend the evening with that person wondering if conditions would tend toward a fuck. You didn’t find yourself, some twelve years and twenty lovers after losing your virginity, wondering if you were “good” at sex as had wondered those overpainted, knobble-kneed girls you grew up with, aggressively fellating their boyfriends as if swallowed spunk would improve the complexion. But if sexual insecurity had been foreign to Martha before now, so had certain types of esteem. Nicholas neither marveled over nor competed with her professional accomplishments. He expected them, as he expected and desired her enormous intelligence. For her part, she had never been involved with a man she knew to be her intellectual equal. This might have had to do with her previous habit of favoring, for example, the sexual attentions of a cocaine-addicted motorcycle enthusiast and bar owner who lived on her street over those of her departmental colleagues, but no matter. Her partnership with Nicholas gratified needs her previous lovers had not even suspected. This was enough, for a while, to distract from the niggling distance she felt.

A vague futurity settled on them like fog. Within it, keeping busy as if keeping ahead of too much circumspection, they did what they did best, executing elaborate plans. Martha must defend her dissertation. Nicholas must publish again. Both must throw their charismatic weight around on the scholarly job market. Two appropriate jobs in one appropriate place was a pay dirt that most academic couples did not dare expect in the early part of their careers, but Nicholas and Martha achieved it, perhaps because, being so striking, they seemed more than the sum of their parts. There was a touch, Martha said in a tone of admission, of a prom royalty atmosphere. Nicholas and Martha were dazzling where dazzle was rare. Had they met as professional windsurfers, perhaps; as 1940s Hollywood contract players; as vacant-eyed fashion models somewhere in Milan; had they simply not seemed so remarkable, to others and so to themselves, none of it might have happened—the earnest boat trips, the uncomfortable fucking, the marriage.

Yet marriage has its own momentum. This was a truth she was forever impressing on me, and that I was forever disputing. Like any inexperienced fool, I believed that one need only follow the heart.