While he roamed the drugstore aisles as if looking for a magic medication or a perfect birthday card, he slowly filled with fury at her, for going on beyond him and making a life. Sexual jealousy of a wholly unreasonable sort raged in him as he blindly stalked between the cold tablets and the skin lotions, the sleeping pills and stomach-acid neutralizers. He skimmed the array of condoms, displayed, in this progressive, AIDS-wary age, like a rack of many-colored candies, each showing on the box a shadowy man and woman bending their heads conspiratorially close. It occurred to him, as his blood pounded, that sex has very little to do with kindness. He had been rough with Maggie, cruel, in the heat of their affair. It had been his first, but not hers. She had told him in the front seat of his car, with that serious, concentrating stare of hers, “That time when Sam and I were separated, I was an absolute whore. I’d sleep with anybody.”

The sweeping solemnity of the confession would have made him smile, had he not been awed by the grandeur of her promiscuity as he tried to imagine it. She seemed to swell in size, there beside him in the front seat of his Ford station wagon, parked on a dead-end lane between towns. That early-spring meeting, hurriedly arranged by phone, was like an interview, she in winter tweeds from shopping in Boston, he in his business suit. He didn’t ask for details. She volunteered a ski instructor in Vermont, a scuba instructor in the Caribbean—handsome, carefree young fishers of women. She didn’t say if she had slept with any of their neighbors, but he imagined some, and thus his heart was hardened before their own affair had begun. He was obliged to sleep with her now. It was a kind of race, in which he had fallen dangerously behind. The men she had slept with were each still in her, a kind of investment, generating interest while he had been chastely admiring her from afar. Part of Frank’s gift to her was the heightened value that his innocence had assigned her. Because she was so experienced, they were never quite equal. She ran risks, coming to him, the same risks he did, of discovery and a disrupted family, but he considered her marriage too damaged already to grieve for, whereas his own was enhanced by his betrayal, his wife and children rendered precious in their vulnerability. Returning to them, damp and panting from his sins, he nearly wept at their sweet ignorance. Yet he couldn’t stop. He led Maggie on, addicted to her and careless of their fate, until the time came to disentangle his fate from hers. She herself had said it: “You’re hard on me, Frank.”