I don’t know why I did it. I’d never done anything like that before. She had some money. You could tell it from her house and things. I was a little drunk, but I know that’s no excuse. She took me into her bedroom and she put a record on, some nice slow orchestra or something. I was lying on the bed the whole time, knowing my wife was at home waiting up on me. This woman stood up in the middle of the room and started turning. She had her arms over her head. She had white hair piled up high. When she took off her jacket, I could tell she had something nice underneath. She took off her shirt, and her breasts were like something you’d see in a movie, deep long things you might only glimpse in a swimming suit. Before I knew it, she was on the bed with me, putting one of them in my mouth.

“You sure you don’t want a drink?” I say.

“I want you,” she says, and I don’t know what to say. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking out the window. Ray’s coming out of the bathroom now with the lady’s purse under his arm. But I know they’re all going to be waiting for him, the whole club. I know what he’s going to feel. Everybody’s going to be looking at him.

When this woman got on top of me, the only thing I could think was: God.

“What are we going to do?” my wife says.

“Nothing,” I say. But I don’t know what I’m saying. I’ve got these big soft nipples in my mouth and I can’t think of anything else. I’m trying to remember exactly how it was.

I thought I’d be different somehow, changed. I thought she’d know what I’d done just by looking at me. But she didn’t. She didn’t even notice.

I look at her and her shoulders are jerking under the little green gown. I’m always making her cry and I don’t mean to. Here’s the kind of bastard I am: my wife’s crying because she wants me, and I’m lying here watching Ray Milland, and drinking whiskey, and thinking about putting another woman’s breasts in my mouth. She was on top of me and they were hanging right over my face. It was so wonderful, but now it seems so awful I can hardly stand to think about it.

“I understand how you feel,” she says. “But how do you think I feel?”

She’s not talking to me; she’s talking to the window and Ray is staggering down the street in the hot sunshine, looking for a pawnshop so he can hock the typewriter he was going to use to write his novel.