He gets off the bus early, on the other side of the bridge, and walks along the river through the old brick neighborhoods burdened with great green highway signs. Peggy Fosnacht’s buzzer buzzes back and when he gets off the elevator she is at the door in a shapeless blue bathrobe. “Oh, you,” she says. “I thought it would be Billy having lost his key again.”

“You alone?”

“Yes, but Harry, he’ll be back from school any minute.”

“I only need a minute.” She leads him in, pulling her bathrobe tighter about her body. He tries to wrap his errand in a little courtesy. “How’ve you been?”

“I’m managing. How have you been?”

“Managing. Just.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“This early in the day?”

“I’m having one.”

“No, Peggy, thanks. I can only stay a minute. I got to see what’s cooking back at the ranch.”

“Quite a lot, I hear.”

“That’s what I wanted to say something about.”

“Please sit down. I’m getting a crick in my neck.” Peggy takes a sparkling glass of beaded fluid from the sill of the window that overlooks Brewer, a swamp of brick sunk at the foot of its mountain basking westward in the sun. She sips, and her eyes slide by on either side of his head. “You’re offended by my drinking. I just got out of the bathtub. That’s often how I spend my afternoons, after spending the morning with the lawyers or walking the streets looking for a job. Everybody wants younger secretaries. They must wonder why I keep my sunglasses on. I come back and take off all my clothes and get into the tub and ever so slowly put a drink inside me and watch the steam melt the ice cubes.”

“It sounds nice. What I wanted to say—”

She is standing by the window with one hip pushed out; the belt of her bathrobe is loose and, though she is a shadow against the bright colorless sky, he can feel with his eyes as if with his tongue the hollow between her breasts that would still be dewy from her bath.

She prompts, “What you wanted to say—”

“Was to ask you a favor: could you kind of keep it quiet about the Negro staying with us that Billy saw? Janice called me today and I guess you’ve already told her, that’s O.K. if you could stop it there, I don’t want everybody to know. Don’t tell Ollie, if you haven’t already, I mean. There’s a legal angle or I wouldn’t bother.” He lifts his hands helplessly; it wasn’t worth saying, now that he’s said it.

Peggy steps toward him, stabbingly, too much liquor or trying to keep the hip out seductively or just the way she sees, two of everything, and tells him, “She must be an awfully good lay, to get you to do this for her.”

“The girl? No, actually, she and I aren’t usually on the same wavelength.”

She brushes back her hair with an approximate flicking motion that lifts the bathrobe lapel and exposes one breast; she is drunk. “Try another wavelength.”