“How sweet and silly of you. I have scads of it. Don’t you want to hear about Maggie?”

“Sure.”

“She was with this man, she introduced him, in that rather grand way she has, as ‘my friend.’ He reminded me of Sam—big and red-faced and take-charge.”

“Good.”

“Frank, don’t look so sick. You’re thinking back twenty-five years.”

“No, I was thinking about ‘take-charge.’ I guess he was. Did she seem pleasant?”

“Oh, effusive. I always liked her, until you came between us. And she me, no?”

He wondered. At the height of their affair their spouses had seemed small and pathetic beneath them, like field mice under a hawk, virtually too small to discuss. “Sure,” he said. “She admired you very much. She couldn’t understand what I saw in her.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. You’re no fun, Frank. I bring you this goodie, and you look constipated.”

“What did the two of you discuss, effusively?”

“Oh, winter. Food. The appallingness of malls. Apparently a new one is going in on the land of the old riding stable next to that place she had with Sam. She complained there wasn’t any gluten-free flour or low-fat cookies in the whole supermarket—maybe she’s trying to slim down her beefy friend—and I told her we had a new health-food store just open up here, a charming idealistic girl we were all trying to give business to. She said she’d drive right over. If you were hanging out in the drugstore, I’m surprised you didn’t see her.”

He saw he must confess; there was no evading feminine intuition. “I did. I saw this flash of red hair down below the post office, and ducked into the drugstore rather than talk to her.”

“Frank dear, how silly again. She would have been nothing but pleasant, I’m sure.”

“I didn’t like the look of the thug she was with.”

“If she had been alone, would you have gone up to her?”

“I doubt it.”

Ann put the last package into the refrigerator and closed the door, hard enough so that a magnet in the shape of a pineapple fell to the floor. She didn’t pick it up. “Your reacting so skittishly doesn’t speak very well for us.”

Infidelity, he reflected, widens a couple’s erotic field at first, but leaves it weaker and frazzled in the end. Like a mind-expanding drug, it destroys cells. He told Ann, “I felt nothing. I felt repelled.”

“A ‘flash of red hair’—I’ll say. She’s dyeing it an impossible color these days.”

“You always said she dyed it.”

“And she always did. Certainly now.”

“I don’t think so. Not Maggie.”