Jeanne didn’t come back from her interview with Rodney for hours. Not immediately, but after some days had worn us down to skeletons of weary honesty, she confessed that, Maureen being absent, she had slept with him, in some delirium of revenge, though he had been reluctant.

“One of Maureen’s sadnesses,” I told her, “was always that he was so faithful, so satisfied by her. Or so she thought.”

“How funny of her. You remember that period when Winifred and Frank were just breaking up, and Freddy was wildly on the make? I was terrified she was going to seduce you, that snowy night. Well, Rodney was the only man around here who didn’t disappoint her—who lived up to her self-image. Apparently she is very sexy. Rodney said he was rather put off by his sensation that at that point in time—I sound like Nixon—she would fuck anybody. I wish he hadn’t told me—even Frank doesn’t know, and I hate having a secret from him.”

“Such beautiful scruples,” said I.

“Go ahead, mock. I deserve it, I guess.”

“My martyr. My Jeanne in the flames,” I said, hardly able to wait until I could take her to bed and discover how her new knowledge, her fresh corruption, had enriched her.

Yet we did divorce, in painful piecemeal, as did Maureen and Rodney. I moved to Nashua, but would return to Pierce Junction to visit the children, take Jeanne’s temperature, and play my old games. One poker night, rather than let me drive back to Nashua full of beer, Rodney insisted that I sleep in his bachelor shack, up in the hills, at the end of a mile of dirt road. While waiting for my turn to use the bathroom, I saw a note carelessly left on his cluttered desk. The rounded upright handwriting, with its “a”s oddly like “o”s, struck me as momentously familiar; Audrey Lancaster had been the secretary of a conservation committee I had once served on. Another fool’s errand, it read. Did I misunderstand, or has Friar Lawrence goofed again? Now my van is dusty and my legs full of mosquito bites from an hour on your porch. Some damn bird in your woods was trying to deliver a message in clear English but couldn’t quite make it out of birdsong. Yours, sort of. Yes? Unsigned. A blue-lined page torn, with an anger visible in the tearing, from a college notebook. A thumbtack hole where it had been pinned up outside. It brought me thrillingly close to Audrey, as close as we had been the night I had rested my palm on her haunch. She had come up that gloomy dirt road through the forest like a big smooth salmon upstream, and ignominiously driven back down again. Her literary allusion seemed more like Winifred, somehow.