‘Though there were other men too, you mean,’ Amy said.

No. Only the man in New York who had made her scream so on the tape. Of other men, nothing was recorded.

‘Well, the young woman in the shower was already an experienced young woman.’ I didn’t want to discuss it. My aim was to get all this behind us.

‘There wouldn’t be any way to deny it … But you loved me.’

‘After forty years of thinking it over, the best description I could come up with was “an actual affinity.”’

‘You never did have any use for the way other people spoke, or speak. Everything has to be translated into your own language. But what made it actual?’

‘Other women might remind me of you, but there was only one actual Amy.’

‘But what you heard on the tape that convicted me was my actual voice. Your affinity was screaming.’

I made a special effort to speak smoothly, saying, ‘Well, we all understand what our condition is. It’s an age of liberation. It’s like a great ship, and the passengers are always trampling toward the port side, or stampeding to starboard, and about to capsize. Never evenly distributed. Just now we’re concentrated on the left, the port side. Jay was a leader in the liberation rush. Therefore he should have expected you to retaliate.’

‘Is that what they mean when they talk about the sexual revolution? But where does that leave you with your actual affinity?’

‘I can’t say where it leaves me, but it’s all I really care about.’

Her thoughts turned again to the grave bought half a century ago and held open, reserved for Jay. He would lie beside his father. ‘I wonder exactly why his mother was such an embarrassment to him.’

I said, ‘He convinced himself that his limitations were inherited from her. He always said, “You should be able to divorce mothers too.” His dad was a witty, kidding old guy. Old Wustrin had a jumping mind. But he was dead at sixty. She was the tenacious one and died at eighty. She was an obstacle to Jay. She gave away his game.’

You could picture Jay Wustrin, as he lay in his coffin in the van ahead, confirming this opinion. To be talked about would have made him so happy. By having himself buried beside his mother-in-law, he was doing a tease. It made you wonder whether he really understood what death was, since in death he tried to make himself still felt. Speaking for myself, my opinion was that eternity would trash all human impulses. Eternity would make you sick of existing.

‘I feel uncomfortable in this stretch limo,’ said Amy. ‘Riding in it is too much like a funeral procession. It was the same this morning, on the way to the Heisingers’.’

‘We can get rid of it and go home in a taxi.’

Of course, the gravel road with its potholes was nothing to this overriding monster of smoothness that carried us forward. You didn’t even hear the tires. I wished that somehow my composure were as good as the shock absorbers and the computerized engine. All the usual resources had left me, and I sat exposed, with my spiky black hair, large cheeks, and speechless chub lips. I had trained myself to give nothing away. At this moment I was vulnerably visible. But Amy wasn’t looking at me.