“The cramps aren’t so great,” Alissa admitted, “but they establish a woman’s relation with pain. You have it, and you hide it. Everything, come to think of it, that makes you you is hidden. Including,” she went on, melancholy overtaking her nudity and with it a need to lighten the mood, “your savage lover,” and jabbed him, not just in play but with enough animus to shorten his breath and give him pain, there in that defenseless pocket just under the sternum. Seeing the shock on his face, she looked away and sighed. “There are so many claims on me, or on any woman, Owen, that it’s a relief to know that when I’m coming to you it’s for one purpose. There’s not that awful vagueness there is in marriage—will we or won’t we, and if so shouldn’t we be getting to bed before we get any sleepier? At least with you I know we will, you’ve been counting on it, dreaming about it; I feel focused. Sometimes down on River Street, before or after seeing you here, I can’t get the smile off my face, and it frightens me that everybody out there in the sunshine will guess, that I’ve been fucked or soon will be.”

“Do you feel that way after Ian?”

“Don’t fish for compliments, darling. It’s unbecoming. I’ve already told you, we’re sleepy. Sometimes one of us falls asleep before we finish, we’re so bored.”

“Ian can be boring, lately,” Owen pointed out, with tentative cruelty.

“He’s boring,” his wife explained, “because he’s trying to explain away in general terms what he really feels is a personal failure, a loss of creativity.”

“I know the feeling,” Owen said, in a tone that said they were done for the day.

For a year and a half more they carried on furtively, hardly believing their good fortune. Ian and Phyllis didn’t appear to know, and although the village knew—not just their set of friends but pedestrians who saw her smiling on River Street and the lady at the desk at the motel on the highway toward Willimantic—it isn’t a village’s way to tell. A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall. She and Owen might have gone on longer, meeting never more than once a week and in summers less than that, until the pressure of deceit deformed one of them beyond what the other could love; but Alissa became pregnant. Her wistful talk of naïvely expecting her menstrual flow to be admired had actualized into a panicky wait for the flow to recommence. Many hurried phone calls confirmed that it had not.