The word “fuck” and its cousins bore in this era a pleasurable charge of decided intimacy. Also in this era, incredibly, sex was thought of as safe. At worst its consequences were easily reversed, by a shot of antibiotics or a trip to some more enlightened land where abortion was legal. Women were on the Pill or contained an IUD; crabs were something that happened to hippies, as part of their good-humored, anti-bourgeois life-style, and herpes was not yet a proclaimed problem. Itches were passed from vagina to penis to vagina and nobody in polite society mentioned it except to the doctor, who provided an ineffective salve. Sex was then thought to be innocent even if its practitioners weren’t. Owen and Alissa were explorers in a terrain, adultery, not totally strange but far from deeply familiar to them. They had been driven into this wilderness by annoying or neglectful traits of their spouses, and the film of guilt that attached to them was, like the secretions of lovemaking, something to be wiped off before they went back out into the street. Like those secretions, it was part of it, part of its defiant health.

“Making a baby mightn’t be so bad. But don’t kill me, Owen.”

“I know how it happens. I get crazy with jealousy sometimes, lying in bed at night picturing you and Ian in bed together probably screwing.”

“Do you and Phyllis always not?”

“Not quite always, no.”

“Well, then. We’re married and this is extra and let’s not think too closely about it. You ask why do people do the things they do. People don’t know, it’s deeper than the brain. It’s pheromones and all sorts of programmed behavior, like the nest-building instinct. Haven’t you ever watched birds building a nest and wondered how they do it, just the right twigs and so on? They don’t know either.”

“Welcome to my nest,” he said, of the bleak tall brick room around them, feeling uneasy. Ed might be needing him—some little crisis or other, some scramble nobody else could sort out.

“Women need attention,” she explained. “They don’t have a lot of a man’s ways of getting it. So they do what they can, with what they’ve got.”

“You fuck just to get attention?”

“When you put it like that it sounds silly, but, yes, sort of. For this time with me you are paying attention, though I can feel you beginning to wonder how you’re going to ease me out of here and get back to work.”