“Not much. That had a view.”

They try to talk, but out of sleepiness and strangeness it only comes in spurts. “So,” Janice says after a silence wherein nothing happens. “Who do you think you are?”

“Nobody,” he answers. He snuggles down as if to kiss her breasts but doesn’t; their presence near his lips drugs him. All sorts of winged presences exert themselves in the air above their covers.

Silence resumes and stretches, a ballerina in the red beneath his eyelids. He abruptly asserts, “The kid really hates me now.”

Janice says, “No he doesn’t.” She contradicts herself promptly, by adding, “He’ll get over it.” Feminine logic: smother and outlast what won’t be wished away. Maybe the only way. He touches her low and there is moss, it doesn’t excite him, but it is reassuring, to have that patch there, something to hide in.

Her body irritably shifts; him not kissing her breasts or anything, she puts the cold soles of her feet on the tops of his. He sneezes. The bed heaves. She laughs. To rebuke her, he asks innocently, “You always came with Stavros?”

“Not always.”

“You miss him now?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You’re here.”

“But don’t I seem sad, sort of?”

“You’re making me pay, a little. That’s all right.”

He protests, “I’m a mess,” meaning he is sincere: which perhaps is not a meaningful adjustment over what she had said. He feels they are still adjusting in space, slowly twirling in some gorgeous ink that filters through his lids as red. In a space of silence, he can’t gauge how much, he feels them drift along sideways deeper into being married, so much that he abruptly volunteers, “We must have Peggy and Ollie over sometime.”

“Like hell,” she says, jarring him, but softly, an unexpected joggle in space. “You stay away from her now, you had your crack at it.”

After a while he asks her—she knows everything, he realizes—“Do you think Vietnam will ever be over?”

“Charlie thought it would, just as soon as the big industrial interests saw that it was unprofitable.”

“God, these foreigners are dumb,” Rabbit murmurs.

“Meaning Charlie?”

“All of you.” He feels, gropingly, he should elaborate. “Skeeter thought it was the doorway into utter confusion. There would be this terrible period, of utter confusion, and then there would be a wonderful stretch of perfect calm, with him ruling, or somebody exactly like him.”

“Did you believe it?”

“I would have liked to, but I’m too rational. Confusion is just a local view of things working out in general. That make sense?”

“I’m not sure,” Janice says.

“You think Mom ever had any lovers?”

“Ask her.”

“I don’t dare.”

After another while, Janice announces, “If you’re not going to make love, I might as well turn my back and get some sleep. I was up almost all night worrying about this—reunion.”

“How do you think it’s going?”

“Fair.”

The slither of sheets as she rotates her body is a silver music, sheets of pale noise extending outward unresisted by space. There was a grip he used to have on her, his right hand cupping her skull through her hair and his left hand on her breasts gathering them together, so the nipples were an inch apart. The grip is still there. Her ass and legs float away. He asks her, “How do we get out of here?”