“He’s not. He’s a prick, and I should have his job,” Antoinette said, as if he hadn’t been listening at all. Yet they lay there another hour, side by side, their drying sweat chilling them so they pulled up the flimsy hotel blankets, then tossed them aside for trips to the bathroom. Her hard white buttocks gleamed in the strips of shadow and light that fell through the venetian blinds, at the window overlooking the silent lit courtyard, while Owen drowsily wondered if it was true, as she said, that women are always conscious of their asses. Returning, she nudged up against him, even stroking him where he was limp and silky-soft, as if to demonstrate to herself that he was there, a not-Eric, and that none of the grievances against Eric applied. She made an effort, as the red digits on the bedside clock radio jiggled through the minutes of the wee hours, to give him his due, a man who had stuck with her through all that tipsy tirade, processing Eric’s snubs, and who had made love to her, after all, praising her body and flexibility while keeping his reservations about her clitoral management to himself. But it was too late, the Association of Electronic Industries was striking its tent tomorrow, and they would be winging their way back to lives for which this interlude was no lasting solution.

No solution, but an event nonetheless, partaking of sublimity. When they met the next day, under the high metal roof of the exhibition shed, they took a break from their duties to share coffee in Styrofoam cups, in the back room set aside for workers, for exhibition insiders, with free crullers and disgustingly hi-cal Danish. Neither had enough to say, but as they fumbled sheepishly and sleepily for words they were acknowledging that, though they would not meet again, they had made a start, a stab at significance. There was a flavor to this, a taste, amid those of coffee and sugary fried dough, of sluggish animal ease and of mutually achieved knowledge—a swallowed mournfulness which lovers with a future avoid knowing. Two kinds of women existed in the world, Owen perceived: those with whom you have slept and those, a cruelly disproportionate but reducible number, with whom you haven’t.