Owen took the question as rude aggression, some kind of cuckold’s gibe, and refused to answer it, but in hindsight imagined a watery earnestness in Jock’s eyes, their strained, pickled whites. What would the honest answer have been? It was too embarrassing—Owen wasn’t sure. Faye had been so loving, so smiling, and had bestowed upon their trysts (pathetically rare, in retrospect) such a glad aura of excitement and relief, that he had assumed so without any more evidence than his own easily obtained satisfaction. She would lie under him with her eyes closed, a little pulse in the lids, and when she opened them give him her gorgeous big grin and speak in a higher, shyer voice than usual. Phyllis, though he thought of her as cool and not often interested, gave clearer signs of orgasm. But, he reasoned, on this matter where so much of his education was yet to come, female sexuality must have many styles; he pictured it as a kind of harp whose strings, always faintly murmuring, were of widely different lengths and thicknesses. Yet the notion that Faye had been faking climaxes, or unprotestingly feigning contentment without them—that she had been, beneath her flashiness and show of ardor, frigid—wounded his sense of her; she had been deceiving him.

Phyllis, too, in the long aftermath, contrived to diminish his image of Faye and reconcile him to his loss. “Didn’t you kids,” she asked him, “ever seriously discuss divorce and remarriage?”

He could not exactly remember. He had more than once said how lovely it would be if she were his wife, but this wasn’t a proposal, was it? It was a dream, an alternate universe.

“It seems obvious,” Phyllis went on mildly, considering the problem like one in topology, “that she wanted it. Jock takes good care of her financially, but as a husband I think he’s exhausted her capacity to romanticize him.”