“He told me that he had been married before and that his first wife had remarried. They had been married three years and it hadn’t worked out. He made such a confession of it and told it with such difficulty that I didn’t want to make him discuss it with me. I had to go by what I knew of him on my own. I did want to know if he had cheated on her; I was thinking then of the way I thought I was finally going to give myself to him. I didn’t want it thrown away stupidly. He told me he hadn’t—and that she hadn’t done it to him, either. I told you he was careful about that. He still didn’t like her, but he kept it quiet. But because of her, he didn’t expect a lot from me. It crept into the way he treated me. We’d go to a crowded bar and he’d wait for me to say something about being knocked around by the other people. One night he had to work late and called to cancel a date. He asked if he could come up later, at eleven o’clock. It seemed silly, so I said no. He didn’t sound sincerely interested in dragging himself up to my place for an hour after a long day. I wasn’t disappointed about having our date broken, and that confused him. He wasn’t hurt by my reaction; he just didn’t understand it.

“When we were talking about a thing and he had no more that he wanted to say, he wouldn’t say anything, just drift off. Most people can’t sit and do absolutely nothing for half an hour, but he could. He never thought about her, though—Betty, his first wife. Once, in the beginning, I asked him. He didn’t lie. I don’t like to think that she knew him longer than I did. At least, it wasn’t important to him when he knew me.

“There were women in between. I don’t have anything to prove that except what went on with us, but I have the feeling that he had had a lot of women before he met me. I mean a lot.”

“Just a minute,” Leland said.

Karen had stood up at her table. She glanced behind her once and then, when she saw that she had his eye, gave him a little signal to go to the lobby. “Excuse me,” he said to Norma. He saw Karen say to her companion, “I’ll be just a minute.”

On his way out the bit of lipreading gave him a curious pleasure: she had been too far away for him to have actually heard her, but her voice had sounded perfectly in his ears, soft and close. He waited near the checkroom.