Afterward she lay on top of him, both of them bundled together like piles of rope, and listened to the lick of the river. “What about…?” he asked. She put one finger over his lips to hush him. “Don’t worry,” she breathed, and for some reason he didn’t.

Sometime much later Dennis was awakened by the old man yelling his wife’s name. Dennis tried to leap up and grab his clothes, but Elizabeth held him to the bed. She mouthed, “Shhh,” and slid back into her bathing suit. She paused a moment before she opened the door, gathering herself. And then she went up to her husband, saying-too cheerfully for Dennis’s taste-“Yes, darling.” Dennis heard him say, “Where’s Dennis?” and Elizabeth replied, “Taking a nap.” Dennis had his shoulder against the door at that point, fearing that the old man was going to rush below deck in a rage and beat him senseless.

Instead, Dennis heard a splash-someone diving in. And then a second. He put on his trunks and returned to the world. The sun had moved while he slept, and now the cove was almost completely in shadow. When the old man saw him he playfully called, “Jump in!” So Dennis did, and the three of them swam together into the evening, as if nothing had happened.

Now Dennis could not get her off his mind. Her body, her name, her-rhythm. She was so different from the unlearned, clumsy Savannah Kleppers. Savannah wanted the lights off and the stereo on, so that others in the house wouldn’t hear them. She wanted Dennis on top or else it burned. She cried after sex, whether it was good or bad, and her tears would run in streams down his shoulders and chest and he was always afraid to ask her what was wrong, why was she crying, because he was afraid that her answer would somehow have to do with him.

With Elizabeth Orman, though, there was nothing of the sort. Nothing private, nothing emotional, nothing of substance except the raw thrust of pleasure. And so here he was, looking up at his ceiling in the Tau house, thinking of nothing else.

When he couldn’t take it anymore, he called her at home, on her private line that she had slipped him on their way back to campus Sunday. At the sound of her voice Dennis almost sank to the floor, his knees weak and his gut hollowed.

“I have to come over,” he sighed.

Then he was out on campus, late on a Monday night, walking Montgomery Street. He knew he should have been studying for an economics quiz, but what was done was done. He could no more dam this feeling than he could stop time.

After a weekend with temperatures that topped eighty degrees, the first hint of fall was now descending on Winchester. The wind was sharp, autumn cool, and the autumnalis trees were turning a fierce pink. The first leaves were falling, drifting down in front of the statue, The Scientist, which had been dedicated in honor of Dean Orman’s lifelong friendship with Stanley Milgram. Dennis walked by the fountain outside Carnegie, which was choked with fallen leaves. A few students were around, their words blasted away by the harsh wind, but none of it registered with Dennis. Not a thing. He could see the lights of the Ormans’ from here, their cottage-style home on Grace Hill. Normally he would have driven, but she had told him to come in the side door and cut his headlights in the drive. Screw it, he’d thought, I’ll walk. He didn’t trust himself to make it up their steep drive with no light. He imagined himself losing control of the wheel, veering onto the grass, crashing through the old man’s front window. What a scandal! It sort of intrigued him, the danger of it all. Dennis the Menace was finally living up to his name.

She let him in the side door. The house was dark; Dennis assumed that the old man had an early bedtime. They tiptoed through the kitchen and stood for a moment kissing in the living room. She was wearing a robe, and she smelled like bathwater and fingernail polish. He felt under the robe, groped her feverishly as if he were in junior high, but she turned away and led him up the stairs. They made their way through a hall, and halfway down she jabbed her red fingernail at a closed door. The old man.

Into the guest bedroom then. Another cramped bed. Another solitary, lonely pillow. She didn’t so much toss him on the bed as she unfolded him there, and again she disrobed. She was glistening in the moonlight that came in through the curtains. He would have come immediately, had she just touched him. It was the same routine: Elizabeth straddling him, pressing down on him, her head thrown back, those red-nailed hands cupping her tits. Too quickly Dennis felt the roil of his body. And then everything was crashing forward and she softly covered his mouth so that he could not cry out.

Later, when she was asleep, he dressed and left the room. The house was creaking, still. He went downstairs, into the dark of the living room. He made his way back the same way he had come, down the stairs and toward the kitchen, and when he turned the corner by the wood burning stove he saw it: a light. Dennis froze, crouched, tried to find another way out, another door.

And then: “Who’s there?” It was the old man’s voice.

Dennis stayed still, low to the ground, below the light. Strangely, he was calm. It must have been the calm of a soldier, the ease before battle. He did not move until he saw the man’s head peeking out at him. “What are you doing there, son?” Dean Orman asked.

“I’m trying to figure out how to escape your house, sir,” Dennis answered. He had found that the most brutal honesty worked in these situations much better than embarrassing, fantastical lies. Not that he had ever been in a situation quite like this before.

“Come in here.”

Dennis went into the kitchen. The old man was eating a sandwich in the nook. He had pulled out a bar stool and had a magazine open on the counter before him. “Know this,” he said almost dismissively, his eyes down on the magazine. “You’re not the first.”

Dennis didn’t say anything. He could only stand there, shamefully, and listen. The old man was wearing boxer shorts and a dingy T-shirt, what the Taus might call a “wife beater.” He was just an old man; he was supposed to be vulnerable, weak, maybe even halfcocked-but here he was interrogating Dennis.

“There was the boy from England,” Dean Orman said ruefully. “The soccer player. There was the kid from California that she was taken with last year. There have been lecturers and such. And now you.” He took a bite of the sandwich, licked his fingers, and turned a page in the magazine. “It’s just something we do. We agreed on it a long time ago. There is no love in this marriage. There never is at our age. My age. Do you think that those vows are still applicable?”

“I don’t…,” Dennis began.

“Of course not,” Dean Orman cut him off. “That’s absurd. You get to the point where you can’t stand the way she walks, the way she sits on the toilet, the way she mismatches your goddamned socks. This is the way of the world, son. Get used to it.” Another bite of the sandwich, another turned page. Dennis wondered if he was done, if that was all there was. But the old man went on: “Of course I have my own…debilitas. There are two young secretaries that come over on occasion, and Elizabeth watches us although she doesn’t like it. She says it’s unbecoming. What she really means, of course, is that it’s unbecoming of a man my age in the same space, in the same vicinity, as two young beauties. Ah yes. Ah well.”

Dennis went to the door. He opened it onto the night, and the sharp wind hit him in the face, chilling him to the bone. “Do you love her?” the dean asked.

“No,” said Dennis. Too quickly.

“The boy from England did. It was a messy, messy thing. Just awful. The boy crying on the couch, Elizabeth standing there breaking his heart, bringing him Kleenex like some caring mother. It was a scene. I watched it all from the balcony upstairs.” He laughed at the memory, shook his head as if to clear it from his thoughts.