“She loved you,” Janice explains.

“She did and she didn’t,” he says, and loses her sympathy with this complacence. “I offered to buy her a drink but all she’d let me do is walk her up toward the parking lot where the old Acme used to be. She lived out toward Galilee, she told me. Her husband was a chicken farmer and ran a string of school buses, I got the impression he was some guy older than she was, who’d had a family before. She told me they had three children, a girl and two boys. She showed me their pictures in a wallet. I asked how often she got into town and she said, ‘As far as you’re concerned, never.’ ”

“Poor Harry,” Janice says. “She sounds awful.”

“Well, she was, but still. She’d gotten heavy, as I said, she was sort of lost inside this other person who pretty much blended in with those other fat bag-luggers you see downtown, but at the same time, still, it was her.”

“All right. You still love her,” Janice says.

“No, I didn’t, I don’t. You haven’t heard the worse thing she did then.”

“I can’t believe you never tried to get in touch with her after you came back to me. At least to see what she did about her … pregnancy.”

“I felt I shouldn’t.” But he sees now, in his wife’s dark and judging eyes, that the rules were more complicated, that there were some rules by which he should have. There were rules beneath the surface rules that also mattered. She should have explained this when she took him back.

She asks, “What was the worse thing?”

“I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“Tell me. Let’s tell each other everything, then we’ll take off all our clothes.” She sounds tired. The shock of having given it all away must be sinking in. He talks to distract, as we joke with a loser at poker.

“You already said it. About the baby. I thought of that and asked her how old the girl was, her oldest child. She wouldn’t tell me. I asked to see the wallet pictures again, to see if there was, you know, a resemblance. She wouldn’t show them to me. She laughed at me. She was really quite nasty. She said something very strange.”

“What?”

“I forget exactly. She looked me over and said I’d gotten fat. This from her. Then she said, ‘Run along, Rabbit. You’ve had your day in the cabbage patch.’ Or something like that. Nobody ever calls me Rabbit, was what sort of got me. This was two years ago. I think in the fall. I haven’t seen her since.”

“Tell me the truth now. These ten years, haven’t you had any other women?”

He runs his mind backward, encounters a few dark places, a room in a Polish-American Club where Verity was having its annual blast, a skinny flat-chested girl with a cold, she had kept her bra and sweater on; and then a weird episode at the Jersey shore, Janice and Nelson off at the amusement park, him back from the beach in his trunks, a knock at the door of the cabin, a chunky colored girl, two skinny boys escorting her, offering herself for five or seven dollars, depending what he wanted done. He had had trouble understanding her accent, had made her repeat—with downcast eyes, as the boys with her sniggered—“screwin’,” “suck-off.” Frightened, he had quickly shut the flimsy door on them, locked it as if they had threatened to harm him, and jerked off facing the wall; the wall smelled of damp and salt. He tells Janice, “You know, ever since that happened to Becky, I haven’t been that much for sex. It comes on, wanting it, and then something turns it off.”