“Look, Phyllis, O.K., O.K., no argument, all my fault, I’m a stupid klutz, but it takes two to tango—”

“No! I won’t do it! You and she can go straight to hell! You can tango there and not a minute sooner!”

Her fury was in part a relief for him. Having Julia as his wife—that compact, finely shaped silky body, those clear undoubting eyes, so striking that sometimes she made a gesture of covering them with a hand, like a lush woman trying to minimize her breasts—had always seemed a bit too good to be true. And he was flattered by Phyllis’s wanting to fight for him; he couldn’t remember a comparable show of passion. But he was in too deep. Julia was already there, on the far side of the Red Sea, high and dry, free, in Old Lyme, where it was getting colder and the children were enrolled in new schools, and he still was thrashing around in his old kitchen under the glassy stares of his photographed children. “It’s gone too far,” he said weakly, while chill autumn sunshine drenched the world outside, in the wake of last night’s rain. He heard a fit of querulous birdsong and the swish of a car passing on the winding road.

Phyllis came gently to his side; her breath was hot, like a crazy woman’s. “You don’t want to go through with it,” she told him. “I can hear it in your voice. You got trapped, Owen. It wasn’t your fault, it’s just the way you are. You’re too nice to people. I’ll get you out of it, I promise. Don’t worry about her, she’ll be fine. You just sit tight. Maybe you should go away for a while.”

“No!” it was his turn to cry, his vision of a tidy, orthodox, normally sensual future swallowed up by this tall sandy-haired woman’s crazy confidence, not incorrect, that she was uniquely real to him. “I want a divorce. I really do.”