She sinks lost into the sofa’s breadth.

He prompts her, “He makes better love than me,” to keep her confession flowing, as a physician moistens a boil.

She bites her tongue, trying to think, surveying her ruins with an eye toward salvage. Impure desires—to save her skin, to be kind, to be exact—pollute her primary fear and anger. “He’s different,” she says. “I’m more exciting to him than to you. I’m sure it’s just mostly our not being married.”

“Where do you do it?”

Worlds whirl past and cloud her eyes—car seats, rugs, tree undersides seen through windshields, the beigy-gray carpeting in the narrow space between the three green steel desks and the safe and the Toyota cutout, motel rooms with their cardboard panelling and scratchy bedspreads, his dour bachelor’s apartment stuffed with heavy furniture and tinted relatives in silver frames. “Different places.”

“Do you want to marry him?”

“No. No.” Why does she say this? The possibility opens an abyss. She would not have known this. A gate she had always assumed gave onto a garden gave onto emptiness. She tries to drag Harry down closer to her; she is lying on the sofa, one shoe off, her bruises just beginning to smart, while he kneels on the carpet, having carried her here. He remains stiff when she pulls at him, he is dead, she has killed him.

He asks, “Was I so lousy to you?”

“Oh sweetie, no. You were good to me. You came back. You work in that dirty place. I don’t know what got into me, Harry, I honestly don’t.”

“Whatever it was,” he tells her, “it must be still there.” He looks like Nelson, saying this, a mulling discontented hurt look, puzzling to pry something open, to get something out. She sees she will have to make love to him. A conflicted tide moves within her—desire for this pale and hairless stranger, abhorrence of this desire, fascination with the levels of betrayal possible.

He shies, afraid of failing her; he falls back from the sofa and sits on the floor and offers to talk, to strike a balance. “Do you remember Ruth?”

“The whore you lived with when you ran away.”

“She wasn’t a whore exactly.”

“Whatever she was, what about her?”

“A couple of years ago, I saw her again.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“Oh God no. She had become very straight. That was the thing. We met on Weiser Street, she was shopping. She had put on so much weight I didn’t recognize her, I think she recognized me first, something about the way this woman looked at me; and then it hit me. Ruth. She still had this great head of hair. By then she had gone by, I followed her for a while and then she ducked into Kroll’s. I gave it an even chance, I waited there at the side entrance figuring if she came out of that one I’d say hello and if she went out one of the others, O.K. I gave it five minutes. I really wasn’t that interested.” But in saying this, his heart beats faster, as it had beat then. “Just as I was going away she came out lugging two shopping bags and looked at me and the first thing she said was, ‘Let me alone.’ ”