“Yeah. A lot. But not just sleep with you. Talk to you. Listen to you. That was the difference.”

“Well, I guess that’s nice to know. I can cross that worry off my list now, twenty years later.”

Richard lit another cigarette and they sat there for a while, separated by a cheap old Oriental rug of Dorothy’s. There was a sighing in the trees, the voice of an autumn that was never far away in northern Minnesota.

“This is potentially kind of a hard situation, then, isn’t it,” Patty finally said.

“Yes.”

“Harder than I perhaps realized.”

“Yes.”

“Arguably better of me not to have sleepwalked.”

“Yes.”

She began to cry for Walter. They had spent so few nights apart over the years that she’d never had a chance to miss him and appreciate him the way she missed him and appreciated him now. This was the beginning of a terrible confusion of the heart, a confusion that the autobiographer is still suffering from. Already, there at Nameless Lake, in the unchanging overcast light, she could see the problem very clearly. She’d fallen for the one man in the world who cared as much about Walter and felt as protective of him as she did; anybody else could have tried to turn her against him. And even worse, in a way, was the responsibility she felt toward Richard, in knowing that he had nobody else like Walter in his life, and that his loyalty to Walter was, in his own estimation, one of the few things besides music that saved him as a human being. All this, in her sleep and selfishness, she had gone and jeopardized. She’d taken advantage of a person who was messed up and susceptible but nevertheless trying hard to maintain some kind of moral order in his life. And so she was crying for Richard, too, but even more for Walter, and for her own unlucky, wrongdoing self.

“It’s good to cry,” Richard said, “although I can’t say I’ve ever tried it myself.”

“It’s kind of a bottomless pit, once you get into it,” Patty snuffled. She was feeling suddenly cold in her bathing suit, and physically unwell. She went and put her arms around Richard’s warm, broad shoulders, and lay down with him on the Oriental rug, and so the long bright gray afternoon went.

Three times, altogether. One, two, three. Once sleeping, once violently, and then once with the full orchestra. Three: pathetic little number. The autobiographer has now spent quite a bit of her mid-forties counting and recounting, but it never adds up to more than three.

There is otherwise not much to relate, and most of what remains consists of further mistakes. The first of these she committed in concert with Richard while they were still lying on the rug. They decided together-agreed-that he should leave. They decided quickly, while they were sore and spent, that he should leave now, before they got themselves in any deeper, and that they would both then give the situation careful thought and come to a sober decision, which, if it should turn out to be negative, would only be more painful if he stayed any longer.

Having made this decision, Patty sat up and was surprised to see that the trees and the deck were soaked. The rain was so fine that she hadn’t heard it on the roof, so gentle that it hadn’t trickled in the gutters. She put on Richard’s faded red T-shirt and asked if she could keep it.

“Why do you want my shirt?”

“It smells like you.”

“That’s not considered a plus in most quarters.”

“I just want one thing that’s yours.”

“All right. Let’s hope it turns out to be the only thing.”

“I’m forty-two,” she said. “It would cost me twenty thousand dollars to get pregnant. Not to burst your bubble or anything.”

“I’m very proud of my zero batting average. Try not to wreck it, OK?”

“And what about me?” she said. “Should I be worried that I’ve brought some disease into the house?”

“I’ve had all my shots, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m usually paranoically careful.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

And so on. It was all very chummy and chatty, and in the lightness of the moment she told him that he had no excuse now not to sing her a song, before he left. He unpacked his banjo and plucked away while she made sandwiches and wrapped them in foil.

“Maybe you should spend the night and get an early start in the morning,” she called to him.

He smiled as if refusing to dignify this with an answer.

“Seriously,” she said. “It’s raining, it’s going to get dark.”

“No chance,” he said. “Sorry. You will never be trusted again. It’s something you’re just going to have to live with.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” she said. “Why aren’t you singing? I want to hear your voice.”

To be nice to her, he sang “Shady Grove.” He had become, over the years, in defiance of initial expectations, a skilled and fairly nuanced vocalist, and he was so big-chested that he could really blow your house down.

“OK, I’m seeing your point,” she said when he finished. “This isn’t making things any easier for me.”

Once you get musicians going, though, they hate to stop. Richard tuned his guitar and sang three country songs that Walnut Surprise later recorded for Nameless Lake. Some of the lyrics were barely more than nonsense syllables, to be discarded and replaced with vastly better ones, but Patty was still so affected and excited by his singing, in a country mode she recognized and loved, that she began to shout in the middle of the third song, “STOP! OK! ENOUGH! STOP! ENOUGH! OK!” But he wouldn’t stop, and his absorption in his music made her feel so lonely and abandoned that she began to cry raggedly and finally to become so hysterical that he had no choice but to stop singing-though he was still unmistakably pissed off by the interruption!-and try, unsuccessfully, to calm her.

“Here are your sandwiches,” she said, dumping them into his arms, “and there’s the door. We said you were leaving, and so you’re leaving. OK? Now! I mean it! Now. I’m sorry I asked you to sing, MY FAULT AGAIN, but let’s try to learn from our mistakes, OK?”

He took a deep breath and drew himself up as if to deliver some pronouncement, but his shoulders slumped and he let the big statement escape from his lungs unspoken.

“You’re right,” he said, irritably. “I don’t need this.”

“We made a good decision, don’t you think?”

“Probably we did, yeah.”

“So go.”

And he went.

And she became a better reader. At first in desperate escapism, later in search of help. By the time Walter returned from Saskatchewan, she’d dispatched the remainder of War and Peace in three marathon reading days. Natasha had promised herself to Andrei but was then corrupted by the wicked Anatole, and Andrei went off in despair to get himself mortally wounded in battle, surviving only long enough to be nursed by Natasha and forgive her, whereupon excellent old Pierre, who had done some growing up and deep thinking as a prisoner of war, stepped forward to present himself as Natasha’s consolation prize; and lots of babies followed. Patty felt she’d lived an entire compressed lifetime in those three days, and when her own Pierre returned from the wilderness, badly sunburned despite religious slatherings of maximum-strength sunblock, she was ready to try to love him again. She picked him up in Duluth and debriefed him on his days with nature-loving millionaires, who had apparently opened their wallets wide for him.

“It’s incredible,” Walter said when they got home and he saw the almost-finished deck. “He’s here four months and he can’t do the last eight hours of work.”

“I think he was sick of the woods,” Patty said. “I told him he should just go back to New York. He wrote some great songs here. He was ready to go.”

Walter frowned. “He played you songs?”

“Three,” she said, turning away from him.

“And they were good?”

“Really good.” She walked down toward the lake, and Walter followed her. It wasn’t hard to keep her distance from him. Only at the very beginning had they been one of those couples who embraced and locked lips at every homecoming.