“Well, you didn’t say anything. You just sat there stoned, and I guess she felt too funny to stay and argue.”

“I was thinking about how lovely everything is, here among the four of us. She has a negative side, Phyllis.”

“I know she does, darling Owen. I know she does. I know all about you both. Ed talks about the two of you all the time. Phyllis wouldn’t let you have Faye and you’ve given up inside. May I be frank?”

“You may be frank.”

“It makes me sad”—“sayud”—“to see the way you’ve given up. Owen, you’re jes’ gone through the motions.”

“Am I truly? How do I know? I mean, I don’t feel I’m just going through the motions. It’s like everybody asking if computers think. Well, do people? All you can say about people is that they think they think.” He was fending; her assertions about him seemed self-serving, his cold half-brain saw, but overall there might be something in them.

“Oh yeass,” Stacey said. “You pore, pore beautiful prisoner.”

Her warm wide face had moved even closer, to between his thighs as he slouched dreamily in Ed’s teak armchair. She leaned her face against the inside of his thigh so that when she smiled he felt the bulge of her cheek press lightly through the khaki cloth. “Prisoner?” he asked, trying to coördinate the word with these surfaces, the walls and furniture that he had felt to be such repositories of bliss not many seconds ago. The clear half of his brain felt like a splinter in the flesh of this bygone revelation. “When is Ed coming back?” he asked. People were in the wrong places and he had to straighten it out.

“Not quite yet, you sweet thang,” Stacey said, still smiling, her perfect white California-Texas teeth biting down on the lower lip as if to taste her own smile. “I want to do something, Owen. Now, you’ll just have to bear with me.” With her middle finger and thumb pinched as if to untie a bow, she pulled the tab of his fly zipper down. “Don’t you get nervous, I just want to see him, all by myself,” she explained soothingly, with a touch of petulance.

The windows were black, Wilson Drive outside was clean of traffic, it was late on Sunday night. They were, in a sense, alone, but, then, Owen half-saw, the world, all those atoms and neutrinos and electrons, is always with us. Her clever hand had found the fly of his boxer shorts and the little limp sleeping thing was in the open and then in her warm soft mouth. He felt himself begin to harden, and said, “No.”