“Trapped?” Owen asked, offended. “Who’s doing the trapping?”

“Nobody, sweetie—it just happens. Used to happen. Are you going to pass that joint or just hang on to it in that foolish way?”

“Do you really think Owie is foolish?” Stacey asked in her slowed, sweet Texas voice. “I don’t think he’s foolish, he’s just stunned.” The last word elongated in Owen’s mind like a lasso. When had women started to talk about him as if he were absent? Nearly being sued for alienation of affections had given him a sort of Exhibit A status.

“You mean …” Phyllis began, and let the thought trail as she relinquished the joint and passed it to Ed, who held the smoking thing up before his nearsighted eyes and studied it as if it were a distasteful puzzle.

“Drugs,” he announced, “eat up your brain cells.”

“Yeah,” Owen agreed, anxious as always to preserve male solidarity, “but so does aging. Brain cells die all the time, and still the brain has more than it needs, for most purposes.” Completing so extended a thought seemed a miracle, like a strand of DNA.

“Listen to them,” Stacey said to Phyllis, “worrying about the size of their brains. Isn’t that macho?”

“Men,” Phyllis offered, “are into quantification. Did you mean,” she went on, in her lovely light laid-back style—he had always been drawn by her diffident voice, from the days at MIT, when he had to strain to overhear it—“that Owie, as you call him, is still stunned because of that affair he had ages ago with that ridiculous woman? I forget her name.”

“Faye Dunham,” Ed supplied, taking a very gingerly hit from the joint, which was becoming a roach. In these Sunday nights all the Middle Falls gossip came out, bringing Stacey up-to-date, including Owen’s affair, mostly as presented by Phyllis, as a pathetic breach not only of marital vows but of self-respect and enlightened self-interest. Stacey seemed interested, to Ed’s discomfort, which he expressed by withdrawal into silence or laconic pronouncements. “Faye was O.K.,” he said. “Just easily bored. She was at a restless time of life, married to a lush like that.”

Stacey crooned to him, “Don’t you ever get to that time of life, honey.”

“How could I?” he asked.

Nobody knew the answer. Did he mean he was too fat? Or Stacey was too perfect a wife? The women were in clothes now. Stacey sat on the floor, on a large Navajo rug she had brought as part of her dowry. Its stripes, black, red, green, and clay-color, vibrated around her. She sat in the yoga position, her miniskirt hitched up her thighs and barely hiding the crotch of her underpants. Phyllis was erect on the pale sofa beside a slouching Ed; her long neck stretched as she sucked down the smoke on a deep inhale. Owen sat in the ample, cunningly made Danish teak armchair that was probably Ed’s when there was no company. They were drinking watery bourbon-and-sodas, with a beer for Ed. Phyllis passed Stacey what was left of the joint. From the floor Stacey cried, “How’d this poor little thang git so wet? Who’s been slobbering, honey?”