He’d chosen a table by the window where they could look out on the frozen sidewalk and feel a sense of redemption. He poured out two beers. Joanie lit a cigarette. There was the ding-ding-ding of the pinball machines, the clank of the pizza oven opening and shutting, the drone of the jukebox, the red-and-yellow flash of the neon CARBONE’S sign that hung in the window just over their heads. “So what was it like?” Joanie asked, exhaling.

“What, last night?”

“You came home smelling like a brewery—or no, a distillery. Scotch or whiskey, one or the other.”

“Scotch,” he said, smiling. “You’ve got quite a nose—I mean, for a woman who was snoring when I got into bed. Maybe we can get you a job at one of the distilleries—quality control.”

“Or a cop. I’d make a good cop, wouldn’t I?”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “I don’t know,” he said, “I think I like you better as a sex object.”

She was wearing a knit hat pulled down to her eyebrows. It had a little pompon on top and he liked that because it made her look so much younger than she was, girlish even, and it brought him back to another place and time altogether. She said, “Sounds good to me. When’s the next research session?”

He shrugged, toyed with the glass Parmesan shaker in front of him. “I don’t know, pretty much every Saturday night, I think.”

“And we’re invited?”

“I don’t know—I guess. But I told you, I want to take things slow. It’s a long semester and I’ve got a lot of weight on my shoulders right now, and I don’t—I mean, experimenting once, just to see what it’s like, that’s fine, but nobody really knows what this sort of thing leads to. Even Tim.”

She was giving him her randy look, a look she’d perfected when they were undergrads and didn’t yet have the advent of a son to worry about, as if the act of coitus were free of consequences and human reproduction a kind of menu you chose from when you were established and ready and all your ducks set out in a row. “You mean out-of-body sex?”

“I mean, out of your mind and no coming back. We had a good trip, a great trip, right? But from what I gather, what I hear, it’s not always like that. And last night—at Tim’s office—it was so old-fashioned we could have gone back a hundred years, five hundred, scotch whiskey as lubricant and nothing beyond that. He’s”—he paused, searching for the adjective—“welcoming, I guess, is the word. Very warm. He really went out of his way to make me feel part of the group—”

“Which took till what, one in the morning?”

“You jealous?”