4

“So why didn’t you stay the whole weekend?” Carole asks him when he comes to bed. “I thought you were looking forward to this thing.” The way she says the word thing betrays her feelings about reunions, that they are all, without exception, events to be avoided whenever possible.

“I was going to stay. I’d made plans to meet up with a couple of guys, maybe even play some racquetball after the picnic. But, I don’t know, after the main attraction, the cocktails and dinner thing on Saturday . . .” Will trails off. He should tell her about running into Elizabeth. Instead, he finds himself talking about Mitch. “After the hundredth person approached to ask me about my famous brother, I got a little tired of the whole thing,” he says. Carole makes the face she always does when he mentions his brother, something between a wince and a frown.

“That must have been crummy.”

“Well, I should have known. Prepared myself. I guess I was so wrapped up in my own fantasy of his appearing that I didn’t consider the more likely scenario.”

“Where’d they hold it?” she asks, having apparently decided to move them along to a less loaded bedtime topic. “They’d have to use a basketball court or something for a reception that big.”

“There were tents. A separate tent for each class.”

“Tents? Ick.”

“You don’t notice when it’s crammed with people. And at least there’s fresh air.”

“Yes, you do. You do notice.” Carole wrinkles her nose. “Even if it doesn’t rain, they still have that dank, tenty sort of smell, like old sneakers. Aside from the temporary, makeshift feeling of a Red Cross relief effort.”

Will shrugs. “The other thing was, after I’d mingled and reconnected and seen how much hair the men had and if the pretty girls had grown up to be pretty women, and who’d gotten married more than once, or twice, and who’d turned out to be gay, and all the rest of it—after that, it seemed like the next day’s activities would be sort of redux. Like those picnics the day after a wedding, when everyone just wants to go home.”

“Uh-huh,” Carole says, picking up her book. She turns the page.

“So, instead, I hung out at the hotel and watched triple-X movies on pay-per-view.”

“Yeah?” she says. Will pulls the book from her hands. “Hey! What are you doing!”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“Yes, I am.”

“What did I say, then?”

“That you mingled and it was . . . it was like a picnic.”

“No. I said I left and watched triple-X movies at the hotel.”

She looks at him. “You did?”

“No! I just said that to see if you were paying attention.”

“I’m sorry, Will,” she says, and she moves closer to him. “I know a way back into your good graces.”

“Do you? How?”

Carole slides one hand under the waistband of his pajama bottoms.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But first give me back my book.”

“You don’t need it. Not now.”

“I want to mark my place.” She pulls her hand out of his pants, lets the elastic go with a little snap, but instead of returning the book, Will lifts it high out of her reach. “Give it,” she says, “or I’m downgrading you to a hand job.”

“What? No way!”

Carole makes a grab for the paperback, and Will rolls out from under her, keeping it out of reach. He opens to a random page, reads aloud in a voice of breathless suspense.

“‘Glatman jerked the ligature around Christine Rohas’s slender neck. His knee in the small of her back, he pinned her to the ground, facedown in a field where, only hours before, the local peewee championship was played. Swiftly, he bound her ankles and through the loops threaded the end of the rope trailing from her neck. One brutal tug, and . . .’ ” Will closes the paperback to consider its lurid cover, which promises sixteen pages of shocking photos! “I really don’t see how this can compare to my report of who from the class of ’seventy-nine went bald and who didn’t.” Carole lunges, and the fitted bottom sheet springs off one and then another mattress corner as she tries to wrestle his arm down.

“Now, how is it that you can square something like this with higher consciousness and feminism and yoga and all that?” he asks, holding the book far above her head. Carole gets up on her knees, but as soon as she pries one hand off the cover, the other has it fast.

“I don’t,” she says.

“Stop it. You can’t pull hairs out of my arm.”

“Why not?” Accidentally, Carole kicks the bedside table, toppling a stack of exemplary reading material: professional journals, novels chosen by her Thursday book group, New Yorkers of varying vintage, arts and education sections pulled and saved from the Times, all lying untouched. The books she actually reads, with titles like Hillside Stranglers, The Greenriver Killer, Beauty Queen Slasher, she keeps hidden from view, on the top shelf of her closet—enough true crime to fill two banker’s boxes with the rape and murder, or murder and then rape, of young women—cheap paperbacks whose covers bear snapshots of the victims taken in happier times, on holidays and at high school graduations, mementoes from a family album. “Basically, this is porn,” Will says, paging through the photo insert.

“Okay, it’s porn.”

“Otherwise, why hide it?”

“Because it’s not for children, obviously. It’s not for Sam to see.”

“Meaning unsavory. Subject to parental censorship.”

“Yes. I admit everything. Now give it.”

“Lowbrow. Do you admit to lowbrow?”

“Yes.”

“You’d die of embarrassment if your book group caught you?”

“I don’t know that I’d die.”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“I wouldn’t like it. Let go, Will, you’re tearing the cover.”

He lets her have it. Lying on his side, he props his head on one elbow. “They don’t turn you on, do they?” he says.

“Sexually, you mean?” Carole looks at him, raises an eyebrow.

“Sure. You know, sex so radically sexy it’s fatal.”

She shakes her head. “Disappointed?”

“A little. What about recipes? I thought women liked to read recipes.”

“Boring.”

“Romances?”

Carole turns out the light. “Don’t you think I deserve a secret vice?” she says, sliding her hand under his T-shirt and stroking his chest. “A teeny-weeny vice that doesn’t hurt anyone?”

“No.”

She tugs on the waistband of his pajama bottoms, and Will lifts up, off the bed, slides them down. “I want you to have big fat vices. Give in to your basest impulses.”

“Do you?” She pulls her nightgown over her head. “What do you imagine those impulses might be?”

“Hard to say.” Will shudders as her mouth touches him. The hairs on his arms and thighs lift his skin into gooseflesh at the wet heat of it, that shock of pleasure that never wears off. “Probably nymphomaniacal.”

“Huh,” she says, substituting hand for mouth. “You don’t think that secretly I might be a compulsive shopper? Or, um . . . let’s see, a gambler? A glutton maybe?”

“No. Not for food, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“I can tell that you’re a sex addict,” he says, “by the way you can’t let more than a few seconds go by without taking me in your mouth again.” With his hand on the back of her neck, Will guides his wife’s head back to where he wants it.