“At night I get dopey,” Phyllis said. “By the day after next I’ll have forgotten what it’s all about.”

“What is it all about?” he asked her.

“That I love you?” she offered shyly.

He turned her question into a statement: “And I love you.” To himself he thought, I am ruining this woman’s life.

“It’s this damn town,” she said, petulantly. “Everywhere you turn, it’s there, interfering.”

“It’s just a town,” he said.

“No, Owen. It’s not. Its people don’t have enough to do, except make mischief.”

“Well, that’s prosperity,” he told her. “You’d rather have Communism?”

For some time Owen had been thinking he must break with Vanessa before that affair exploded and repeated the mess after Faye. He couldn’t look far into the Slades’ strange marriage but believed that, like his own, it would not accommodate open infidelity. This was no hippie commune, no rock-ribbed Republican swap club in the snowbound fastness of the upper Midwest. A tactful skein of attraction and undeclared liaison lay over these Easterners. Owen had lately been attracted to Imogene Bisbee, a significant drinker with a raucous whiskey-cracked voice and graying raven hair pulled back strictly from a central parting, as in a daguerreotype of an ancestor. She had blue blood, and an injured grace. Her family had the money that supported Roscoe’s ineffectual little lawyering in town, a matter of friends’ wills and a slight grip, won through long-term residence, on Town Hall’s business. In the late stages of a party Imogene had begun to bump up against him. Once she had blearily grabbed one of his thumbs and asked, with that affecting crack in her voice, “What don’t you like about me, Owen?”

“Nothing,” he had answered. “I mean, there’s nothing I don’t like. How is Roscoe’s new snow-blower doing?”

Trish Oglethorpe came up to them, intruding possessively, though he had not slept with her and his visions of enlisting her in a threesome with Vanessa had ebbed. But some afterimage of his flirtation, and some faint resonance from his masturbatory fantasies, carrying across town at night through all the sleeping television aerials, drew her to him, hovering at his side attentively, as if waiting for his next move. Both women looked at him with a kind of vexed expectancy. He said, “I’ll let you two talk tennis,” and backed away and sought Phyllis in the kitchen, perched high on a beechwood stool, talking with Ed and Henry Slade as in the old MIT days he would find her ensconced in a smoky Chinese eatery with Jake Lowenthal and Bobby Sprock.