“The next morning, he started talking to me as if nothing had happened. He had to go straight to work from school and he would call me at six o’clock; he needed handkerchiefs and he wanted me to buy a dozen. The business of life. The funny thing is, I expected a change. That night we made love. It’s one thing to manipulate each other and have intercourse, but another to make love. We were affectionate. We tried things. I don’t know how all this was communicated in advance, but it was. When he called that evening, I did most of the talking. I don’t know how we achieved an understanding of something else, but we did. I felt a kind of self-interest that I hadn’t had before. The affection we exchanged wasn’t love as I had known it. If I thought of the breach of faith, it hurt, but it made me more passionate. Maybe it was depraved, but I was proud of myself for having survived. And something else: he was a mystery to me again. I know that he had a similar reaction, because the way I acted was a surprise to him. I withdrew from him. He wanted to know if I was all right but I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to encourage him and make more love. It wasn’t pretending.

“Something like that isn’t abated in a single night,” she said more quietly. “During the days there’s a kind of glory in knowing that someone has that kind of faith in you. And in not being afraid of the meaning of your desires. I could go home almost singing, knowing that I was going to continue to be happy—it was a happy thing, too, to know that he was interested in sharing something like that with me.”

If she had talked about love, real love, it would have been as if she had been trying to describe the way it was between Karen and him. They had made the same discovery during their courtship, the joy of not being afraid of the meaning of their desires. It flowed and ebbed with circumstance; twice it had sustained them when love had broken down; in Port Smith before they had gone completely sour; and again after he had split up with Anne. On those occasions the good faith required of them had had the effect of love-in-reverse, generating the strength of ego they had needed to conduct “the business of life.” Now, in recent months, with everything else going so well, they had caught themselves up in it again. There was a danger: too many telephone calls, not enough time, anxiety heading to a collision with exhaustion—their needs becoming too intense for the way they were living. It was not new to them. It did not have to go badly, either; they knew that. In the past the pressure had eased without them becoming altogether aware of it. At other times circumstances—a job like this one, a regional conference for her, even a very bad cold—had intervened. That was not a side of them they ever thought about. They had their one fiction, the myth she had created of his accomplishment with other women, but—he believed—there was no real honesty they could not welcome, that they were not sound enough to face.