Frank saw her more than a block away, in the town where he had come to live, where Maggie had no business to be, and he no expectation of seeing her. Something about the way she held her head, as if she were marvelling at the icicled eaves of the downtown shops, sparked recognition. Or perhaps it was the way the low winter sun caught the red of her hair, so it glinted like a signal. His wife used to doubt aloud that the color was natural, and he had had to repress the argument that if Maggie dyed it she dyed her pubic hair to match. It was true, Maggie considered her hair a glory. When she let it down, the sheaves of it became an enveloping, entangling third presence in the bed, and when it was pinned up, as it was today, her head looked large and her neck poignantly thin, at its cocky tilt.

She was with a man—a man taller than she, though she was herself tall. He moved beside her with a bearlike protective shuffle, half sideways, so as not to miss a word she was tossing out, her naked hands gesturing in the February sun. Frank remembered her face whitened by shock and wet with tears. Each word he reluctantly pulled from himself had been a blow deepening her pallor, driving her deeper into defeat. “I can’t swing it,” he had said, with both their households in turmoil and the town around them scandalized.

“You mean,” she said, her face furrowed, her upper lip tense in her effort to have utter clarity at this moment, “you want to go back?”

“I don’t want to, exactly, but I think I should.”

“Then go, Frank. Go, darling. It makes it simpler for me, in a way.”

He had thought that a lovely, pathetic bit of female bravado, an attempt to match rejection with rejection, but in fact she had carried through with her divorce, whereas he had kept his family intact and had moved to another town. That was more than twenty years ago. The children he had decided not to leave had eventually grown up and left home. The wife he had clung to had maintained a self-preserving detachment, which as they together advanced into middle age became a decided distance, maintained with dry humor and an impervious dignity. He had opted for a wife, and a wife she was, no less or more.

As for Maggie, she had recovered; she had a companion, and at a distance looked smart, in a puffy pea-green parka and black pants that made her legs appear theatrically long. Shocked by the spark glinting from her hair, Frank ducked into the nearest door, that of the drugstore, to spare himself the impact of a confrontation, of introductions and chatter. It was somehow an attack on him, to have her striding about so boldly in his town.