“I’m sorry about the two of you. You guys were together a long time.”

“We were and we weren’t.”

“Right, I know that, but still.”

He sat brooding while she set the table, tossed the salad, and carved the chicken. She hadn’t thought she would have any appetite, but once she took a bite of chicken she remembered that she hadn’t eaten a thing since the evening before, and that her day had started at five in the morning. Richard also ate, silently. At a certain point, their silence became remarkable and thrilling, and then, a while after that, exhausting and discouraging. She cleared the table, put away the leftovers, washed the dishes, and saw that Richard had removed himself to the little screen porch to smoke cigarettes. The sun was finally gone, but the sky was still bright. Yes, she thought, it was better if he left. Better, better, better.

She went out on the screen porch. “Thinking of going to bed now and doing some reading,” she said.

Richard nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“The evenings are so long,” she said. “The light just doesn’t want to die.”

“This has been a great place to be. You guys are very generous.”

“Oh, that’s all Walter. It didn’t actually occur to me to offer it to you.”

“He trusts you,” Richard said. “If you trust him, everything will be fine.”

“Oh, well, maybe, maybe not.”

“Do you not want to be with him?”

It was a good question.

“I don’t want to lose him,” she said, “if that’s what you mean. I don’t spend my time thinking about leaving him. I’m kind of counting the days till Joey finally gets sick of the Monaghans. He’s still got a full year of high school.”

“Not sure exactly what the point of that is.”

“Just that I’m still committed to my family.”

“Good. It’s a great family.”

“Right, so I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Patty.” He put out his cigarette in the commemorative Danish Christmas bowl of Dorothy’s that he was using as an ashtray. “I’m not going to be the person who wrecks my best friend’s marriage.”

“No! God! Of course not!” She was nearly weeping with disappointment. “I mean, really, Richard, I’m sorry, but what did I say? I said I’m going to bed and I’ll see you in the morning. That’s all I said! I said I care about my family. That’s exactly what I said.”

He gave her a very impatient and skeptical look.

“Seriously!”

“OK, sure,” he said. “I didn’t mean to presume anything. I was just trying to figure out the tension here. You may recall we had a conversation like this once before.”

“I do recall that, yes.”

“So I thought it was better to mention it than not mention it.”

“That’s fine. I appreciate it. You’re a really good friend. And you shouldn’t feel you have to leave tomorrow on my account. Nothing to be afraid of here. No reason to run away.”

“Thanks. I might leave anyway, though.”

“That’s fine.”

And she went inside to Dorothy’s bed, which Richard had been using until she and Walter arrived to kick him out of it. Cool air was coming out of the places where it had hidden during the long day, but blue twilight was persisting in every window. It was dream light, insane light, it refused to go away. She turned a lamp on to diminish it. The resistance fighters had been exposed! The jig was up! She lay in her flannel pajamas and replayed everything she’d said in the last hours and was appalled by nearly all of it. She heard the toilet’s tuneful resonance as Richard emptied his bladder into it, and then the flush, and the tuneful water in the pipes, and the water pump laboring briefly in a lower voice. For sheer respite from herself, she picked up War and Peace and read for a long time.

The autobiographer wonders if things might have gone differently if she hadn’t reached the very pages in which Natasha Rostov, who was obviously meant for the goofy and good Pierre, falls in love with his great cool friend Prince Andrei. Patty had not seen this coming. Pierre’s loss unfolded, as she read it, like a catastrophe in slow motion. Things probably would not have gone any differently, but the effect those pages had on her, their pertinence, was almost psychedelic. She read past midnight, absorbed now even by the military stuff, and was relieved to see, when she turned the lamp off, that the twilight finally was gone.

In her sleep, at some still-dark hour after that, she rose from the bed and let herself into the hall and then into Richard’s bedroom and crawled into bed with him. The room was cold and she pressed herself close to him.

“Patty,” he said.

But she was sleeping and shook her head, resisting awakening, and there was no holding out against her, she was very determined in her sleep. She spread herself over and around him, trying to maximize their contact, feeling big enough to cover him entirely, pressing her face into his head.

“Patty.”

“Mm.”

“If you’re sleeping, you need to wake up.”

“No, I’m asleep… I’m sleeping. Don’t wake me up.”

His penis was struggling to escape his shorts. She rubbed her belly against it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, squirming beneath her. “You have to wake up.”

“No, don’t wake me up. Just fuck me.”

“Oh, Jesus.” He tried to get away from her, but she followed him amoebically. He grabbed her wrists to keep her at bay. “People who aren’t conscious: believe it or not, I draw the line there.”

“Mm,” she said, unbuttoning her pajamas. “We’re both asleep. We’re both having really great dreams.”

“Yes, but people wake up in the morning, and they remember their dreams.”

“But if they’re only dreams… I’m having a dream. I’m going back to sleep. You go to sleep, too. You fall asleep. We’ll both be asleep… and then I’ll be gone.”

That she could say all this, and not only say it but remember it very clearly afterward, does admittedly cast doubt on the authenticity of her sleep state. But the autobiographer is adamant in her insistence that she was not awake at the moment of betraying Walter and feeling his friend split her open. Maybe it was the way she was emulating the fabled ostrich and keeping her eyes firmly shut, or maybe the fact that she afterward retained no memory of specific pleasure, only an abstract awareness of the deed that had been done, but if she performs a thought experiment and imagines a phone ringing in the middle of the deed, the state she imagines being shocked into is one of awakeness, from which it logically follows that, in the absence of any ringing phone, the state she was in was a sleeping one.

Only after the deed was done did she wake up, in some alarm, and bethink herself, and betake herself quickly back to her own bed. The next thing she knew, there was light in the windows. She heard Richard getting up and peeing in the bathroom. She strained to decipher the sounds he then made-whether he was packing up his truck or going back to work. It sounded like he was going back to work! When she finally summoned the courage to come out of hiding, she found him kneeling behind the house, sorting a pile of scrap lumber. There was sun but it was a dim disk in thin clouds. A change in the weather was ruffling the surface of the lake. Without all the dazzle and dapple, the woods looked sparser and emptier.

“Hey, good morning,” Patty said.

“Morning,” Richard said, not looking up at her.

“Have you had breakfast? How about some breakfast? Can I make you some eggs?”

“I had some coffee, thanks.”

“I’ll make you some eggs”

He stood up and put his hands on his hips and surveyed the lumber, still not looking at her. “I’m straightening this up for Walter, so he knows what we’ve got here.”

“OK.”

“It’s going to take me a couple hours to pack up. You should just go about your day.”

“OK. Do you need any help?”

He shook his head.

“And you’re sure no breakfast?”