Trish had a new, tousled hairdo; sparks flew from its cedar-red strands in the sunlight. Her polka-dot dress was short with an old-fashioned daring; her skinny legs descended into big-buckled duckbill-toed pumps of white patent leather. She looked like an escapee from a comic strip, and Owen had always had a fondness for comic strips. “What brings you here?” he asked.

“Didn’t you know? Vanessa got me to sub for someone on her Special Donations Committee who resigned. She’s a slavedriver, I can tell you.”

“So people say.”

“But she’s also a mother hen. It really is remarkable, how she does all she does.”

“Yes,” he agreed, trying to imagine just what she meant. Recalling their conversation at the Bisbees’ last fall, which Trish seemed to be resuming with an enthusiasm she had withheld at the time, Owen told her, “Speaking of women prison guards, now we have a woman party head.”

“Yes,” she said. “Too bad she’s such a conservative.”

“You’re against conservatives, now.”

“Only when they’re boring grocers’ daughters,” Trish said, turning her head to show him her profile, underslung and sexy. Her upper lip looked almost prehensile. Her style of talk, at least, had been loosened up.

“Speaking of boring conservatives, poor Ford. It’s just about over in Vietnam,” Owen said, not quite knowing how to stimulate this new, subtly radicalized Trish.

She ignored this offering. “Owen,” she said, poking his chest sharply. “You must see a movie called Shampoo, with Warren Beatty. Dwight and I loved it. It’s so outrageous!”

This was more like the stiff, herky-jerky old Trish. Yet she gave off the natural perfume, the easy animation, the sense of a deftly resumed connection, that a woman you have slept with gives off. Had he slept with her in a dream? Had his fantasies of a naked threesome somehow travelled to her through the village’s veins? She seemed in her dolly outfit to explode with self-delight, and to verge, shiny-eyed, on teasing him, like the girls on the walk to elementary school. He had to back off and consider this new factor in his life-complicating sexual equations. Had Vanessa, seeing his feeble initiative fail, seduced this coltish newcomer herself, and were the two of them waiting, glowingly nude yet primly upright, like the de Poitier sisters in Clouet’s double portrait, for him to find them? Villages have inglenooks, root cellars, attics where mattresses covered with striped ticking quietly wait for the orgy to begin.