Faye had dressed for Hartford, in a suit of light pimento tweed, over a cream-colored silk shirt, with two-tone high heels that she had changed, in the car, for old loafers, to hike in. She moved the picnic basket off the blanket to give their bodies room. He undid the blouse and, as she lifted up on one arm to let him get at the hooks and eyes, her bra. Her back was bonier than he was used to; to slacken the bra a second her shoulder blades dipped inward, as if in sitting-up exercises. Her shoulders were brown with summer’s merged freckles; her flat midriff showed a tan where Phyllis was sallow and stretch-marked. He wanted to cry out as Faye’s breasts, smaller and tauter than his wife’s, came free, to be touched by his trembling hands, his careful lips. The trees around them formed green walls, twitching and rippling in the breeze, showing leaves’ silver undersides, with here and there a maple or beech leaf already turned yellow.

When they were done with her breasts she lifted her hips up from the blanket matter-of-factly. “The skirt, too,” she directed. “It’s getting rumpled.” He tugged the tweed, but her hip bones, wider than her shoulders, didn’t let go. “The buttons at the side!” Faye said, in the urgent, ungentle tone in which his mother had once said, Don’t touch it!