Stacey was a charmer, it turned out. She was skinny but soft-boned, floppy even, in the way she moved and talked. She had a wide soft mouth that seemed to slow her words, like a child’s endearing impediment. She was enough younger than they to lack some of their inhibitions. She liked to swim naked in the heated pool that came with the somewhat pretentious house Ed bought for them in the new hillside development on Wilson Drive. “Woodrow, Charlie, or Don?” Owen had asked, but Ed was too besotted with the married state to hear any sarcasm. By the second summer, Owen and Ed had gotten used to her nudity and some nights Phyllis joined her in it. It was no worse, after all, than a hot tub, which is supposed to be good for you. The older woman’s figure, breasts and stomach taut now that her spell of child-bearing was forever over, had nothing to lose in the comparison with Stacey’s, which was, younger though she was, droopier. Ed and Owen kept their bathing suits on.

“Aren’t they sweetly shy,” Phyllis said to Stacey. The pool as well as being heated had underwater lights that revealed wobbly truncations of the two women’s hips and water-treading legs. Their heads looked small, with their hair licked flat against their skulls.

“Oh, aren’t men just!” Stacey said back, in her twang. “They’re afraid of having their little jimmies chopped off.”

“Or laughed at,” Phyllis suggested, to make the image less horrific.

“Pretty much the same thang,” Stacey said.