Naturally A had not meant what she had said, when they were lying together in bed. It had been a gambit on her part. She had said, You don’t have to do that for me, when what she wanted more than anything was for him to do that for her. Yet there were limits to what or how she could ask. Obviously she could not request his fidelity outright. She would be overstepping her prerogatives as his lover. They had been together only for a matter of weeks, and while she might have drawn future credit on the relationship, she would have risked jinxing the relationship. What’s more, she might have come across as presumptuous, possessive, jealous; and if she made him feel at all claustrophobic, he was liable to take up a lover on principle (whether or not he even realized—consciously—that that was what he was doing). On the other hand, her current stratagem was not without its own risks. Namely, that B would take her at her word: that he would pursue a lover, or lovers, without guilt, because that was what she had encouraged. But she trusted B not to take her at her word. He was smart enough, she knew, to detect the double meaning in her message: You don’t have to do that for me meant Please do this for me. In this way, her so-called permission put B at a moral disadvantage: because he was free to pursue lovers, it was out of the question for him to pursue lovers; because there was no need to feel disloyal (for he had every right), he would succeed only in feeling selfish (for exploiting those rights). That was the double bind A had placed him in. She knew this, and she knew that B knew this. What she did not know—what she could not determine—was whether B knew she knew. Because for the stratagem to work, it must not seem like a stratagem. A had to seem undesigning, self-sacrificing; her position had to seem like a plea, as opposed to a ploy. Only then would B feel tenderness toward her, and make it a point of pride to remain faithful. His constancy would even take on an erotic quality: he would derive pleasure from denying himself pleasure. Whereas if he ever suspected that she was playing on his feelings—that she was the one denying him pleasure—he would begin to feel claustrophobic. Then they would be back at square one. It was all a matter of how many moves ahead B thought A was thinking.

However matters stand now, B’s email gives nothing away. Whether he has met someone else, or hasn’t—it does not say. It is almost conspicuously indirect. It is as if he is trying to tell her something, by not telling her anything. That description of the Scrabble game is so long, and so beside the point, that it has to be making some kind of hidden point. For example, the detail about the cell-phone coverage. Why had he included it? Was this the reason he hadn’t called? And his caricature of the woman. She is the only player at the table whom he bothers to describe in any detail. But why? Why, after a two-week silence, write to A about her?