I thought she was teasing. “Sure he did. Carter? Come on. He was the one who pushed us together.”

She turned fully to me and began to unbutton her blouse. The light of the candles bathed her.

“Oh, he did. He was very ashamed,” she said casually. “Remember the night he got into the fight with Rene and I made him go for a walk, and you walked Rene to the Greenleaf? It was that night.”

I began to laugh.

“Do you think that’s funny?” she said.

I motioned her to me on the bed. “I have a story to tell you. As Avrum would have said: ‘Such a story.’ ”

We were like children in our gossip of Rene and Carter. As Carter had confessed to me about making love to Rene, Rene had confessed the same to Amy. “We were their inspiration,” Amy declared. “Damn it, they got all the benefit.” She rolled on the bed until her body was against my body, skin against skin. She whispered, “But that was then; this is now.”

We made love freely, exuberantly, in the fluttering, amber light of the candles, with the night and all the eyes of the night watching us through the windows with the pulled-back curtains. Amy was like a sensuous, possessed dancer, moving with a music that consumed her. And then she fell asleep in the cradle of my shoulder, her hand resting on my neck. I lay awake watching her. The beauty that had always been a gift to her seemed even more extraordinary in sleep, and I thought, Yes, the woman and her husband at dinner had been as astonished by that beauty as everyone who sees her. Her breathing against my chest was slow and even, like the purring of a dozing cat, and her breathing coaxed me into sleep and into a dream of being in the restaurant of dolls, and of Maggie and Paul, and of Amy’s laughing voice.

When I awoke, Amy was not in the bed. It was still dark and the room was chilly. I could smell the faint, pleasing smoke of burning wood, and I slipped from the bed and pulled on my pants and shirt and went into the den. Amy was sitting on the floor in a flannel nightgown, leaning against the sofa, staring into the flame that trembled out of the heart of the firewood. There was no other light in the room.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She did not turn to my voice. “Yes,” she said after a moment.

I sat beside her. “The fire’s nice,” I told her.

She leaned her head against my shoulder.

“I thought you were sleeping peacefully,” I said.

“I was.”

“A bad dream?”

She shook her head against me.

“Regrets?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “But not for tonight.”

“For when?”

“For then. Back then. Regrets that we were so afraid.”

“Is that it? Really?” I said.