To this he made no response of any sort.

There came to her, with curious vividness, a kind of PowerPoint list of names in descending order of their owners’ goodness, topped naturally by Walter’s, which was followed closely by Jessica’s and more distantly by Joey’s and Richard’s, and then, way down in the cellar, in lonely last place, her own ugly name.

She took coffee to her room and sat listening to the sounds of Richard’s organizing, the rattle of nails being boxed, the rumble of tool chests. Late in the morning she ventured forth to ask if he might at least stay and have some lunch before he left. He assented, though not in a friendly way. She was too frightened to feel like crying, so she went and boiled some eggs for egg salad. Her plan or hope or fantasy, to the extent that she’d allowed herself to be conscious of having one, had been that Richard would forget his intention to leave that day, and that she would sleepwalk again the next night, and that everything would be pleasant and unspoken again the next day, and then more sleepwalking, and then another pleasant day, and then Richard would load up his truck and go back to New York, and much later in life she would recall the amazing intense dreams she’d had for a couple of nights at Nameless Lake, and safely wonder if anything had happened. This old plan (or hope, or fantasy) was now in tatters. Her new plan called for her to try very hard to forget the night before and pretend it hadn’t happened.

One thing the new plan can safely be said not to have included was leaving lunch half-eaten on the table and then finding her jeans on the floor and the crotch of her bathing suit wedged painfully to one side while he banged her into ecstasy against the innocently papered wall of Dorothy’s old living room, in full daylight and as wide awake as a human being could be. No mark was left on the wall there, and yet the spot remained clear and distinct forever after. It was a little coordinate of the universe permanently charged and altered by its history. It became, that spot, a quiet third presence in the room with her and Walter on the weekends they later spent alone here. This seemed to her, in any case, the first time in her life she’d properly had sex. A real eye-opener, as it were. She was henceforth done for, though it took some time to know this.

“OK, so,” she said when she was sitting on the floor with her head against the spot where her butt had been. “So, that was interesting.”

Richard had put his pants back on and was pacing around for no purpose. “I’m just going to go ahead and smoke inside your house if you don’t mind.”

“I think, under the circumstances, an exception will be granted.”

The day had turned fully overcast, with a cold breeze moving in through the screens and the screen door. All birdsong had ceased, and the lake seemed desolate. Nature waiting for the chill to pass.

“What are you wearing a bathing suit for anyway?” Richard said, lighting up.

Patty laughed. “I’d thought I might go for a swim after you left.”

“It’s freezing.”

“Well, not a long swim, obviously.”

“Just a little mortification of the flesh.”

“Exactly.”

The cold breeze and the smoke of Richard’s Camel were mixing like joy and remorse. Patty started laughing again for no reason and then found something funny to say.

“You may suck at chess,” she said, “but you’re definitely winning at the other game.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Richard said.

She couldn’t quite gauge his tone of voice, but, fearing that it was angry, she struggled to stop laughing.

Richard sat down on the coffee table and smoked with great determination. “We have to never do this again,” he said.

Another snicker broke out of her; she couldn’t help it. “Or maybe just a couple more times and then never again.”

“Yeah, where does that get us?”

“Conceivably the itch would be scratched, and that would be that.”

“Not the way it works, in my experience.”

“Well, I guess I have to defer to your experience, don’t I? Having none myself.”

“Here’s the choice,” Richard said. “We stop now, or you leave Walter. And since the latter is not acceptable, we stop now.”

“Or, third possibility, we could not stop and I could just not tell him.”

“I don’t want to live that way. Do you?”

“It’s true that two of the three people he loves most in the world are you and me.”

“The third being Jessica.”

“It’s some consolation,” Patty said, “that she would hate me for the rest of my life and totally side with him. He would always have that.”

“That’s not what he wants, and I’m not going to do it to him.”

Patty laughed again, at the thought of Jessica. She was a very good and painfully earnest and strenuously mature young person whose exasperation with Patty and Joey-her feckless mom, her ruthless brother-was seldom so extreme as not to seem comical. Patty liked her daughter a great deal and would in fact, realistically, be devastated to forfeit her good opinion. But she still couldn’t help being amused by Jessica’s opprobrium. It was part of how the two of them got along; and Jessica was too absorbed in her own seriousness to be bothered by it.

“Hey,” she said to Richard, “do you think it’s possible you’re homosexual?”

“You ask that now?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes guys who have to screw a million women are trying to prove something. Disprove something. And it’s sounding to me like you care more about Walter’s happiness than you do about mine.”

“Trust me on this one. I have no interest in kissing Walter.”

“No, I know. I know. But there’s still something I mean by that. I mean, I’m sure you’d get tired of me very soon. You’d see me naked when I’m forty-five, and you’d be thinking, Hmm. Do I still want this? I don’t think so! Whereas Walter you never have to get tired of, because you don’t feel like kissing him. You can just be close to him forever.”

“This is D. H. Lawrence,” Richard said impatiently.

“Yet another author I need to read.”

“Or not.”

She rubbed her tired eyes and her abraded mouth. She was, all in all, very happy with the turn things had taken.

“You’re really excellent with tools,” she said with another snicker.

Richard began to pace again. “Try to be serious, OK? Try hard.”

“This is our time right now, Richard. That’s all I’m saying. We have a couple of days, and we either use them or we don’t. They’re going to be over soon either way.”

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t think it through. I should have taken off yesterday morning.”

“All but one part of me would have been glad if you did. Admittedly, that one part is a fairly important part.”

“I like seeing you,” he said. “I like being around you. It makes me happy to think of Walter being with you-you’re that kind of person. I thought it would be OK to stay a couple of extra days. But it was a mistake.”

“Welcome to Pattyland. Mistakeland.”

“It didn’t occur to me that you would sleepwalk.”

She laughed. “That was kind of a brilliant stroke, wasn’t it?”

“Jesus. Cool it, OK? You’re annoying me.”

“Yeah, but the great thing is it doesn’t even matter. What’s the worst that can happen now? You’ll be annoyed with me and leave.”

He looked at her then, and he smiled, and the room filled (metaphorically) with sunshine. He was, in her opinion, a very beautiful man.

“I do like you,” he said. “I like you a lot. I always liked you.”

“Same back at you.”

“I wanted you to have a good life. Do you understand? I thought you were a person who was actually worthy of Walter.”

“And so that’s why you went off that night in Chicago and never came back.”

“It wouldn’t have worked in New York. It would have ended badly.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

Patty nodded. “So you actually wanted to sleep with me that night.”