“Another question.”

“Yes?”

“Are you fucking Stavros?”

“I thought women only got fucked.”

Janice turns and choppily runs into the house, up the three steps, into the house with apple-green aluminum clapboards. Rabbit puts the mower back in the garage and enters by the side door into the kitchen. She is there, slamming pots around, making their dinner. He asks her, “Shall we go out to eat for a change? I know a nifty little Greek restaurant on Quince Street.”

“That was just coincidence he showed up. I admit it was Charlie who recommended it, is there anything wrong with that? And you were certainly rude to him. You were incredible.”

“I wasn’t rude, we had a political discussion. I like Charlie. He’s an O.K. guy, for a left-wing mealy-mouthed wop.”

“You are really very strange lately, Harry. I think your mother’s sickness is getting to you.”

“In the restaurant, you seemed to know your way around the menu. Sure he doesn’t take you there for lunch? Or on some of those late-work nights? You been working a lot of nights, and don’t seem to get much done.”

“You know nothing about what has to be done.”

“I know your old man and Mildred Kroust used to do it themselves without all this overtime.”

“Having the Toyota franchise is a whole new dimension. It’s endless bills of lading, import taxes, customs forms.” More fending words occur to Janice; it is like when she was little, making snow dams in the gutter. “Anyway, Charlie has lots of girls, he can have girls any time, single girls younger than me. They all go to bed now without even being asked, everybody’s on the Pill, they just assume it.” One sentence too many.

“How do you know?”

“He tells me.”

“So you are chummy.”

“Not very. Just now and then, when he’s hung or needing a little mothering or something.”

“Right—maybe he’s scared of these hot young tits, maybe he likes older women, mamma mia and all that. These slick Mediterranean types need a lot of mothering.”

It’s fascinating to her, to see him circling in; she fights the rising in her of a wifely wish to collaborate, to help him find the truth that sits so large in her own mind she can hardly choose the words that go around it.

“Anyway,” he goes on, “those girls aren’t the boss’s daughter.”

Yes, that is what he’d think, it was what she thought those first times, those first pats as she was standing tangled in a net of numbers she didn’t understand, those first sandwich lunches they would arrange when Daddy was out on the lot, those first five-o’clock whisky sours in the Atlas Bar down the street, those first kisses in the car, always a different car, one they had borrowed from the lot, with a smell of new car like a protective skin their touches were burning through. That was what she thought until he convinced her it was her, funny old clumsy her, Janice Angstrom née Springer; it was her flesh being licked like ice cream, her time being stolen in moments compressed as diamonds, her nerves caught up in an exchange of pleasure that oscillated between them in tightening swift circles until it seemed a kind of frenzied sleep, a hypnosis so intense that later in her own bed she could not sleep at all, as if she had napped that afternoon. His apartment, they discovered, was only twelve minutes distant, if you drove the back way, by the old farmers’ market that was now just a set of empty tin-roofed sheds.