The men being teased sat in the shadows, on aluminum chairs, with cans of beer, while the mermaids wobbled in and out of the pool lights. When Stacey decided to emerge from the water, she would thrash to the ladder and stand on the pool edge and, tipping her head way over, wring out her long dark hair towel-style. If light was behind her, Owen would see her pubic triangle dripping from a point like a wet goatee between her skinny thighs. Languidly, her long feet leaving prints on the flagstones that rimmed the pool, she would seek out a beach towel to wrap herself in. With the hand not clasping the towel at her chest she would fiddle a cigarette from the pack on the little white poolside table and, her head still tilted as when she was wringing her hair, manage with wet fingers to get it lit in her mouth. It was in this pose, Owen thought, that she looked most glamorous, squinting and exhaling, and her drying hair backlit like a burning haystack. Stacey brought whiffs of the counterculture into Middle Falls. Somehow she produced pot in little cellophane envelopes, and Zigzag paper, and the four of them would partake, usually on Sunday nights, in the Mervines’ living room. Fridays and Saturdays there were dinner parties to give or go to, dances for this or that good cause, and the Mackenzies’ house was too inhibiting, with all those children upstairs listening. Ed and Stacey did not intend to have children, at least not immediately. This was somehow shocking to Owen; Phyllis offended him by seeming to agree. “I think it’s better not to hurry,” she said, making her little frosty moue of thoughtfulness. “The kids now have the right idea—have the sex but don’t get trapped.”

“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.