He betrayed no feeling, simply hugging Phyllis tighter and saying, “Really? Well, I love you. Maybe you love me but don’t know it yet.” At the same time he felt his own body drifting away, washed backwards by the thought that he should not be directing his life to flow through this other, alien body.

“Maybe,” Phyllis ambiguously agreed, in a voice thickened by regret that she had revealed so much. Her face was inches from his in the shadows of the room, which in his memory of the moment he felt to be on a high floor, perhaps her brother’s room in her parents’ house. He had been kissing her, those lipstickless numb lips, as if to press blood to their surface, while individual strands of her mussed hair tickled his face with the exasperating persistent delicacy of flies’ feet on a muggy day. Sometimes it seemed that she was the one being tickled; more than once, as a spasm of love drove him to a flurrying multiplication of kisses on her lips, and her high blushing cheekbones, and her fadeaway eyebrows, and her lids with their squirming pulse, the whole marvellous silverpoint precision of her, she laughed aloud, disconcertingly, deflatingly. He read these moments of rejection as his clumsy, premature rupture of the delicate barriers she had erected in twenty-one years of being so fine, so solitary. He tried to imagine what motion within her, what minute climate change, would persuade her that she loved him. She had let slip, at moments in their courtship which stuck in his mind as illuminations of her obscure inner life, that she and another girl at Browne & Nichols used to hold hands and that the unspeakable boyfriend that her parents agreed would never do had been, in a way that made her hands fly apart in memorial measurement, “enormous.” He had been a creature of summer camp and perhaps had acquired for her the mythic stature of the mountains, the great rough-barked pines, the distant granite outcroppings, the thunderheads on a still summer day blazing white above the dark evergreen ridge. Hank—his name, which she let slip—had been head of maintenance at the camp, captain of the battered pickup truck, master of the trash dump and the pine-needle-covered roadways, and though he had spent a few semesters at the University of New Hampshire, he professed no ambition but to continue in Nature, hewing and hauling and spraying DDT on mosquitoes and black flies. His lack of ambition had included placing no claim on her, though they knew each other through several summers. Perhaps she had been the suitor, the shy aggressor, like Owen setting up the Monopoly board for Buddy Rourke. Phyllis’s face, when she thought of Hank, shed its absence, its indolence, and somehow steeled itself, though she tried to hide her feelings behind a pensive moue. Owen comforted himself that, if he was less intelligent than she, Hank had not even competed.