“I was terrified that man would tell Jock,” Faye was explaining, a tiny voice caught in the receiver, like an insect under a water tumbler. “Or that somebody would see us in a car together. It could have happened at any time, and then Jock would have had me over a barrel—he can be very tricky, about money. This way at least he found out from me: the errant wife confesses. Owen, I can’t talk forever about it; we were awake all night, except for a couple of hours, and he just went out of the house to go buy cigarettes and the Wall Street Journal. Watch out for him downtown.”

Owen was not sorry to think that the conversation would be short. The workaday world around him had become realer, for the first time in seven months, than that illicit annex into which he was pouring his voice, through this little electronic hole at his lips. “Still,” he said, seeking for leverage in the sudden shift, “you should have discussed this with me.”

“You would have argued and got me more confused.” Faye laughed—a disagreeable yelp, a high-pitched sound a child would make when pinched. She said, as if reading the words from a card, “Men don’t think beyond their next piece of ass.”

Was she deliberately trying to offend him, to soften this blow? He said, angry anyway, “Is that what Jock tells you?”

“It’s what I tell him. You’ll get over it, Owen. We all will. People do.”

Those showy clothes of hers, that babylike happy nudity, those wide-open hazel eyes, that voice with its stagy range from high to low, all slipping from him, into the abyss of forever. “Thanks a lot for those comforting words,” he said, so sarcastically that she hung up.

Ed, visiting Owen’s cubicle in the next hour, took a look at him and said, “You want to go home early? You look like you’ve been socked in the belly. You look like shit.”