“Everybody knows, you silly.” Her mannish voice became gruff. “Don’t put me on, or we won’t get anywhere.”

“You mean Faye?”

“After Faye, more. Faye was a starter. We all need a starter.”

“You too?”

Vanessa said nothing, just inhaled smoke and let it cascade from her nostrils, above her slow smile. He began to see her—her small neat cat’s nose; her thick dark eyebrows, unplucked, level above her eyes; the crowded mouth tweaked at the moment by a smile in spite of herself. He felt abruptly admitted to a too-large intimacy, in which he was in danger of merely rattling around. He said, to say something and seizing on what lay uppermost in his mind, “I suppose you wonder how could I have ever looked at anybody but Phyllis, who’s so lovely.”

“We know you think she’s lovely, it’s rather touching. And I suppose she is, but she’s not my type, frankly—too bluestocking. She never left school. But nobody around here wonders about what you mentioned. She doesn’t give you shit. Or anybody else, really, except her children, up to a point. She is about the most insulated person I’ve ever seen.”

“Insulated.”

“Wrapped up in herself.”

This was fascinating to Owen—a road map out of his guilt, being offered by a woman he hardly knew. Other people, seeing by their faces that their conversation had reached a heated depth, avoided approaching them. He said rapidly, “O.K., let’s have lunch some time. Way out of town, and not in Hartford. What does Henry think?”

“About what, dear?”

“About Phyllis and me and whatnot.”

“Henry and I don’t talk about anything. That’s the beauty of it.”

“I’ve often wondered,” Owen admitted, “what the beauty of it was.” He liked his so quickly, dryly saying this; he felt that, in a few furtive minutes, he was learning to dance with this woman.

“Likewise,” Vanessa said, tapping the ash from her Pall Mall, as the music stopped and their spouses approached. Henry and Phyllis were laughing in relief that that was over and squinting blindly, out of the flickering strobe lights that the Oglethorpes, overanxious to please, had installed for the evening.