“We’ll talk about it,” he said, bewildered when this stopgap of a reply sprang laughter among their friends.

Phyllis with her eerie dreaming appropriation of the child had created a tension. Only the infant did not feel it. Her blue eyes, darker than her mother’s abraded color, had closed. “Dear little Nina,” Phyllis told her. “You’re perfect. You’ll do wonderfully well.” She kissed the bulging red forehead, which rumpled with an eddy of a frown, and looked to the women nearest her. “Who wants to be next?” Phyllis asked benignly, and several pairs of hands quickly reached out to treasure little Nina in turn.

In the red Stingray going home, Owen dared tell her, “I’m not sure Alissa was quite ready for you to grab her baby like that.”

“She loved it,” Phyllis said. “All women want to have their babies admired. Alissa would have been hurt if we hadn’t begged her to hold it. Her.”

“I missed the begging part. Uh—I assume you were joking about another child. Eve is going to be seven, and she’s been the baby all her life. You don’t want to go back to diapers and being up at night and all that, do you?”

“Only if it will bring us closer together.”

“How could we be closer? My God, we’re practically welded together.”

She didn’t speak for a moment, then said, “Of course I was joking, Owen. You must be crazy, to think I’d have another baby with you.”

This was more absolute than he wanted—on the opposite end of the curve from her betranced party deportment. The real Phyllis was becoming harder and harder for him to locate. He offered, less able than she to tolerate silence in the car, “I thought with Eve off most of the day you could go back somewhere, maybe to Trinity or even Yale, for a course or two. Some kind of refresher, to get you back into your Ph.D. thesis.”

“Or I could go back to the ballet lessons I dropped when I was eleven,” she said, so serenely he didn’t realize for some seconds that she was being ironical.