“Listen to them,” Stacey said to Phyllis, “worrying about the size of their brains. Isn’t that macho?”

“Men,” Phyllis offered, “are into quantification. Did you mean,” she went on, in her lovely light laid-back style—he had always been drawn by her diffident voice, from the days at MIT, when he had to strain to overhear it—“that Owie, as you call him, is still stunned because of that affair he had ages ago with that ridiculous woman? I forget her name.”

“Faye Dunham,” Ed supplied, taking a very gingerly hit from the joint, which was becoming a roach. In these Sunday nights all the Middle Falls gossip came out, bringing Stacey up-to-date, including Owen’s affair, mostly as presented by Phyllis, as a pathetic breach not only of marital vows but of self-respect and enlightened self-interest. Stacey seemed interested, to Ed’s discomfort, which he expressed by withdrawal into silence or laconic pronouncements. “Faye was O.K.,” he said. “Just easily bored. She was at a restless time of life, married to a lush like that.”

Stacey crooned to him, “Don’t you ever get to that time of life, honey.”

“How could I?” he asked.

Nobody knew the answer. Did he mean he was too fat? Or Stacey was too perfect a wife? The women were in clothes now. Stacey sat on the floor, on a large Navajo rug she had brought as part of her dowry. Its stripes, black, red, green, and clay-color, vibrated around her. She sat in the yoga position, her miniskirt hitched up her thighs and barely hiding the crotch of her underpants. Phyllis was erect on the pale sofa beside a slouching Ed; her long neck stretched as she sucked down the smoke on a deep inhale. Owen sat in the ample, cunningly made Danish teak armchair that was probably Ed’s when there was no company. They were drinking watery bourbon-and-sodas, with a beer for Ed. Phyllis passed Stacey what was left of the joint. From the floor Stacey cried, “How’d this poor little thang git so wet? Who’s been slobbering, honey?”

“Not me,” Ed said. “I passed.”

“Now I’ll need to make another,” his wife complained.

“Not for me,” Phyllis said. “I feel funny.”

After what seemed quite an interval, Ed said, “You need air. Let’s go walk around.”

“How funny?” Owen asked.

There seemed to Owen to be a curious double quality to time in the room: very slow when people spoke, yet speeded up in the silences, with many hurried pulse beats crowded into seconds.

Phyllis refined her statement: “I feel sick to my stomach,” she said, and asked the air, “Who would have thought this country would wind up dropping napalm on a lot of Indochinese peasants and children?”

“That’s no worse than what we did to the Indians,” Stacey said.