This hurt me and aroused me. Rodney and I were severely discreet, talking about nothing but our chaste sports—golf, poker, tennis, skiing. We didn’t even talk politics, at the height of Vietnam and then through Nixon’s prolonged downfall. Yet it was stirring, to think of Maureen and Rodney talking about me, in their marital intimacy. “Like a woman, am I?” I said, growling and wrestling her under, to reverse our positions in the bed, that guest-room bed I knew so well, a mahogany four-poster, with a removable pineapple topping each post. Maureen’s shrieks of resistance and amusement rang through the oak-floored rooms of her Victorian house and out, I feared, into the street.

Pierce Junction was a town of secrets that kept leaking out, like sawdust from a termite-ridden beam. There were all these tiny wormholes, with a flicker of life at the end of each. When Jeanne learned of my affair with Maureen, she reacted with a surge of fury that surprised me, since I had been putting up with her and Frank for years. Unforgivably, she demonstrated her anger by storming over to the Millers’ and telling Rodney everything. Maureen, with her pious streak, worked Wednesdays and Saturdays at a Methodist home for delinquent children in Concord, and it was the telephone company’s efficiency, listing non-local calls by town and number, that had given our liaison away. When I try to recall our passion, it comes not with X-rated images from our hours in bed but with a certain dull taste, the madeleine of an especially desolate minute in an idle day, the longing that made me, of a dull and hollow afternoon, insatiably crave the sound of her voice—lower and huskier over the phone, more thoughtfully musical, than it seemed when we were face to face. Her voice momentarily pushed aside the sore dread in which I lived in those years; her voice and its quick inspirations of caustic perception painted the world, which seemed to me rimmed with a vague terror, in bright fearless colors. Hearing Maureen reassuringly laugh, as if we were all caught in a delicious, precarious joke, slaked a thirst that weighed in my throat like an iron bar. Without her in it somewhere, at least as a voice over the telephone, the world lacked a center. I had to talk to her, though the phone bill did us in.

The hunger was not only mine, but pervaded our circle with the pathos of unsatisfied need: poor Jeanne and Frank, stealing that silly half-hour in the blizzard. Maureen for me was like a campfire whose light makes the encircling darkness seem absolute, and whose heat becomes a sharp chill a few paces from its immediate vicinity.