For reasons clear only to David, we always had sex in the same room—he needed to watch and to be watched. Brigid sat across me, wearing her little slip like a masonic apron, steering my penis inside her with one hand as she squeezed my testicles with the other. Yvette at last made me come while she lay on her back, breast held to my mouth as she forced her finger into my anus. In turn, David liked me to watch him on the adjacent bed. His eyes would be fixed on mine in a curiously innocent and trusting way. Shoe marks flushed his thighs, and Yvette sat across him, smearing my semen from her vulva onto the pillow. His hands thoughtfully massaged the stretch marks of her heavy abdomen. One evening he had taken photographs which no one in Moose Jaw would develop. The flash lights irritated the women’s eyes, but in the sudden glare their faces, so empty of expression when they had sex, at last came alive, and I saw two blue-collar housewives who had ditched their husbands and aspired to the most bourgeois of lives.

“You NATO boys sure need your liquor,” Yvette opined. She grimaced as David carried my trousers into the bathroom. “How come they ever let him into the air force?”

“It’s all part of the Communist conspiracy,” David explained. He began to wash out the trousers in the handbasin, picking at the shreds of turkey. “Don’t you listen to Senator McCarthy? NATO is a plot to overthrow the U.S. of A. We’re so busy fighting each other we’ll have no time to take on the Russkies.”

“I can believe that. It beats me you’re ever fit to climb inside those airplanes.”

“Yvette, let me tell you. A few drinks make those old tubs really sit up. Jimmy boy’s planning to start World War III on his own.”

“Looks like he’s already finished.” Brigid, the dark-haired girl in the black petticoat, sat on the bed beside me. Her small, detergent-chafed hands, with their smell of lipstick, semen, and rectal mucus, ran across my forehead, trying to find a surviving personality. A flicker of concern crossed her eyes and then faded into the vast indifference that separated her from all men. Her small, bony face had the seriousness of a determined child’s. She helped me into the bathroom and watched without comment as I sat on the edge of the bath, washing my face in the basin. David had rinsed out my trousers and hung them over the radiator. When I finished she stood in front of the mirror and began to bathe her breasts, trying to soap away the marks left by David’s teeth.