“This woman you almost left Carole for—you still see her?”

“Althea Wadsworth. Sometimes, at big occasions. We all put a good face on it. Life must go on.”

“I suppose that’s what it must do, yes.”

I was not comfortable with the tug of this conversation and went to the front windows, wondering if this was the last time I would ever see these treetops. To the north, there were few skyscrapers, just a low recession of streets and domestic windows. It might almost have been Buffalo, along Seneca Street.

“For this Althea person, you really put yourself out. You tried to leave Carole for her.”

It displeased me that Jane knew these women’s names. I suppressed the impulse to explain that I had seen how Althea functioned as a suburban housewife and mother—that I could envision her fitting into Carole’s slot. I knew all the furniture she would bring with her. Jane’s furniture was impalpable—it was the city itself, the universe of anonymous lights.

“I did, and I swore I’d never try it again. It was too painful, for everybody.”

Jeffrey began to cough in the other room—a dry, delicate, only-child cough—and Jane went in to him. I heard murmuring as she rubbed his back. She began to sing. I had never heard her sing. She had a sweet voice, reedy but true, with an unforeseeable hillbilly twang to it. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” she sang softly to Jeffrey. “You make me happy when skies are gray.”

After a while, the boy asleep, she came back to me, and unhurriedly, moving about with the high-haunched ungainly grace of a deer, she took off her clothes. We made love on her foam-rubber sofa, with its shaky chrome legs, and afterwards we ate six toasted bagels and two half-pints of cream cheese. This may have been the last time I slept with her, but I’m not sure. We phased out gradually. The extruded-aluminum business was facing an onslaught of fresh foreign competition—from South Korea and Taiwan, after all we had done for them—and Buffalo became more involving and complicated, both at work and on the social front, and I stopped rigging trips to Manhattan.