Affairs probably always started that way, he thought now. A little bit by accident. He had expected her to change her mind, but she hadn’t. They started by exchanging details of their failed relationships—John had had a serious relationship when he was twenty-one. He had met a San Francisco girl while he was in the navy and brought her to Durango to live with him. That put a few gray hairs on his mother’s head. But it didn’t last long. She didn’t like small-town life and had really wanted to be a rock star, even though she couldn’t sing or play an instrument. She left him a note; it didn’t take him all that long to get over her. He expected he might catch her on MTV one of these days, wearing underwear for a costume and belting out some deranged sonnet…off tune. Since then, he admitted unself-consciously, he dated women who were just in town on vacation.

Commitment, said John, was not his bag.

Leigh had married a very successful, well-known stimulating older man. A scientist. A genius. She had been too young, she knew, and he had been too old. But her circumstances had been somewhat unusual—she didn’t immediately explain how—and she had married her teacher, a father figure. “Did you know,” she had asked John, “that my father did medical research? Biochemistry. Mom and Dad moved here to attempt retirement, although my dad just couldn’t seem to slow down. My dad was pretty famous.”

That had no impact on John; he didn’t peruse any scientific journals. He hadn’t attended one day of college and had no desire to get any smarter.

Now, Leigh had said, she realized her mistake. She wanted children and friends, for example, and her husband didn’t feel so inclined at his age. His work was as demanding as any unruly child, and he really couldn’t keep up a social life. In fact, Leigh’s husband was not terrifically interested in having a wife. Assistant, protégé, student—yes. Wife? The only kind of wife he could conceive of was one with goals like his, schedules like his, and who would not distract him from his research, which was his first wife. He was too busy for marriage, really. He was married to his job.

Even when they had separated, drifted apart, Max still called her to come to the lab to do this or that for him; he couldn’t count on anyone else the way he could count on her. She had finally filed divorce papers and come to Durango because, “He seems as disinterested in our divorce as he was in our marriage. It’s as if he hasn’t noticed. At least if I’m here with my mother he can’t call me to come in to the lab.”