“Not at all. I’m crazy about you.” A substitute for that poisoned chalice of a phrase I love you. He didn’t say it to Elsie and now not to Alissa. Faye had believed it and so had he and they had done damage. “Give me twenty minutes and you’ll see how much.” He pictured her on her knees on the hard floor, or back on the sofa: the curly downy bits at the nape of her neck, the glossy knobs of her spine.

“I appreciate the thought, kind sir,” she said, and jackknifed her flashing legs together around him, so she sat up and her bare feet rested on the floor. “But I must go shopping for Ian’s dinner and pick up the cleaning before school gets out.” Alissa and Ian had two children—Norman, who was ten, and Neysa, whose entry into the first grade had freed her up yet left her, she had told Owen, at enough loose ends to begin her affair with him. Her lips had trembled, after laughing at this comic connection. Though this was November her body still bore the gold-and-silver disparities of her summer tan. Having made the effort to rise, she slumped back on the squeaky imitation-leather cushion. “I don’t think it’s good, by the way,” she volunteered, “for a woman’s health, to screw like mad and then jump up and do errands. We’re supposed to harbor the seed, or something.”

He would treasure such casual glimpses into what it was like to be a woman, which Phyllis rarely afforded him; she knew she was female but didn’t deign to dwell on it, whereas Alissa was something of a village philosopher on the subject. “A woman would rather be hit on the head than ignored,” she once told him. He couldn’t imagine ever hitting her on the head, but the idea of it fed the brutish tenderness with which he contemplated her back as he pumped away at her on his smarting knees. After their little contretemps with her menstrual blood, she confessed, “When I was just, you know, coming into womanhood as a teen-ager I imagined that would be the time when I would be most attractive to men, when there was the blood.”

It was such an intimate illusion for her that she trailed away shyly, and he hardly dared pursue the subject. “What did you think,” he asked, “men would do with it?”

His mistress blushed. “Oh, I don’t know, Owen, don’t keep after me; it was just a feeling. It’s like giving milk, it feels very feminine. It’s exciting.”

“Even with the cramps?”