So Devlin drove out in his jewellike Mercury hardtop. Six weeks with Maryellen Brennan had been action-packed. After their second date, he realized as he drove home, he could have written the script in advance, especially her dialogue explaining why she wouldn’t let him near her: Last week was a mistake. I was drunk and upset. He had been through it before with two other women he had taken to bed on first acquaintance. They always wanted him to know they were not that kind of girl. He had to laugh at the logical impossibility: what kind of girl did it, if not the kind who already had? Maryellen was as vehement on the second date as she had been passionate on the first. Irritating about it, too, aggravating, until after a while he got the idea that she wanted to convince him the week before had been his fault. Catholic craziness, she-craziness, mixed with sweet talk and touchings just too provocative; he was wise to her, he decided. Parked outside the Jamaica Estates house—his first glimpses, for he had met Maryellen in town—he opened his pants and brought her head down on him, her struggling giving way quickly to an astonishing expertise. After a moment, he was pumping himself furiously into her mouth. And then she held him warm in her lips. The girl was a champion. A star.

But then she began to sob. She wrenched away from him and curled up against the car door, wracked by heaving wails he had never heard from a human being before. He put his hand on her shoulder—she screamed. Frightened, even beginning to worry about his career—(What had he done to her? What would she say he had done?)—he withdrew, smoking a cigarette to quiet his nerves as she slowly unwound, shook silently, floundered for a handkerchief.

“There’s something wrong with you,” he said.

“And nothing wrong with you, I suppose.”

“I didn’t say that…”

“Well?”

He was ready to set her straight when she turned suddenly, as if to get a better look at him, sneered, and quickly got out of the car. He watched her march up the drive, his mind going back to an earlier experience, a name he couldn’t remember.…

Pamela, growling at him outside the church before Alice’s wedding. Well, he hadn’t needed that, and he didn’t need this, either. He slammed the car into gear and screeched the tires as he drove away. He knew there would be no quick calming down. Twenty minutes later, on Queens Boulevard, he could not shake the memory of her violent sobbing, and so he cursed her, aloud, at the top of his lungs. What was the matter with her? He was done, finished. He wasn’t going to call her anymore.