James didn’t know how he got separated from Ruth. Later, he pictured her forlorn expression, her stubbed-out half-joint gingerly placed in her wallet for later, her trudge inside the club to the tune of a slow morbid song, the organ and the saw. He was certain that she had reentered the bar, searching the crowd for Ana, nowhere to be found.

But James hadn’t tried to find her. He stayed in the alley, crushed against the body of a woman eighteen years younger, the scent of gutter urine absorbed by his ankles. He pushed her to the wall, and it all came back to him, what to say, the slow constant patter—You’re so beautiful, you’re so, so, so—and his hand, and then his fingers, all this with her coat on but opened and the feel of her soft bra, black, he thought, but even with his eyes open, he couldn’t see much, just shadows. But he had mapped the body in his mind so often that he knew where to go, and found her wet beneath her clothing, moving until she shuddered in his hand. Then she had her hand on his buckle and he thought of his belly hanging over the edge of his jeans, but it wasn’t repulsive enough to stop her sliding down the wall, getting on her knees. He could no longer hear the music then—they were far away—just the white noise in his head, a string between the noise and the feeling of her warm mouth around him, her tongue and a slight nibble that he found both painfully self-conscious and unbearably good, so much so that James put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her mouth off him just in time, the wet mess remaining on his pants, far from her face looking up at him, the chewed lipstick on those thick lips. He looked upon the strangest grin, a smudge of destruction and shame and pride.

James backed away, the two of them returned to their own bodies, their hands doing snaps and buckles and putting themselves away as easily as they had served themselves up just a few minutes before.

James wanted to be heroic, to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to swear it off forever, but he said nothing, only felt the walls around him tilt and whirl ever so slightly. They walked back to the club together, but a half block before it, still in the shadows of the alley, Emma stopped.

“I’ve got to meet some people,” she said. James wondered if he should kiss her. Before he could decide, she reached into her pocket, and James felt a tingle of curiosity: What else did she have to offer? Was it not over? Then she pulled out her phone and ran her fingers over its face. She backed away, typing and waving.

The club was still full. James felt he had been away for days, but it had been less than a half hour from the air to the joint to the girl’s mouth around his cock.

Ana appeared beside him, carrying two plastic cups of beer. What surprised him was the calm he felt and how recognizable it was. He had almost forgotten, in his time with Ana, that he had always been a liar, that he had gone from bed to bed in one night on several occasions and looked women in the eye with ease. Just washing a few key body parts and carrying a toothbrush in his backpack had been enough to get him through university. He was good at this.

What he wouldn’t consider (until morning, oh, morning) was how refined Ana’s sense of him was. What did she know, or fear, about this part of James, that had been lying dormant for all those years?

“Were you smoking a joint with my subordinate?” Ana shouted over the music, smiling, passing him the beer. James relaxed. Her face was dancing with drunkenness. He had not seen her so loose in weeks, or longer. If he was honest with himself, that static between them had been crackling long before Finn arrived. James took the beer and drank it in one sip, washing away Emma’s taste. Then he grabbed his wife by the waist and kissed her. Those hipbones against him; her familiar mouth, welcoming, and a wave of loss smacked him, broke his grip on her. The band was louder than it had been, but sadder, too, filled with urgency.

“Careful,” she said, as he lurched apart from her, brushing the droplets of beer that had splashed on her wrist.

“What about Finn?” Ana asked suddenly.

“What about him?” shouted James.

“We should get home.”

Both of them drained the plastic cups. James made a gesture to throw his on the ground, but Ana intercepted, depositing them both in a recycling bin as they pushed through the crowd.

They were close enough to walk home, through city streets full of people shouting for no particular reason, into phones, at each other, at cabs roaring past.

“I need to go in here,” said James, under the glow of the 24-hour drugstore sign.

“Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m so tired,” said Ana, realizing how true that was, how she felt that her skin had separated from her flesh. Inside, the aisles were painfully bright, but quiet. Ana followed James silently.

“Here,” he said, pulling a small brown stuffed dog from a rack of animals. “What kid doesn’t want a dog?”

“That’s what we came in here for? It’s two in the morning.”

“We’re a block from home,” said James, paying in a great clattering shower of coins.

“Yes, but I’m tired,” said Ana, the drink thickening her voice. Back outside in the cloud of yelling youth, she added: “And where the hell did you go anyway? I was waiting for you. Your little girlfriend looked crushed that you left her.”

James gripped the dog tightly by the neck. “What girlfriend?”

“Ruth. Why, is there another one?” Ana laughed, and the arrogance of James’s question seemed to distract her from her irritation. She put an arm through James’s as they turned on to their block, toward the brothel house, where candlelight flickered in an upstairs window. As they got closer, Ana realized it wasn’t candlelight, but the blue flutter of a television set.

“It’s nice you got him that dog,” she said. “You’re a good doggy. A good daddy, I mean.” And she was laughing like a lunatic again when James unlocked the door of the house. There was Ethel sleeping on the living room couch, a magazine and a green throw blanket covering her body, and the quiet hum of a house in order singing along beneath his wife’s drunken laughter.

* * *

Ana felt the burn move down from her head to her fingers where she clutched the car door handle. She closed her eyes as if to keep every possible orifice sealed, afraid of what might escape.

“I’m sick,” she moaned.

“You’re just hungover,” said James.

“Ana sick?” asked Finn from the backseat. The high pitch of his voice felt like a letter opener inserted into Ana’s ear, cleanly slicing her head in two.

“No, I have a fever,” she said. James placed a hand on her forehead, which was slick, warm.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said. Then, to Finn: “It’s when you don’t feel good because you drank too much.”

“Does he need to hear that?” asked Ana.

“Drink juice?” asked Finn.

“Grown-up juice. Ana’s sick today.” He beeped the horn. “Isn’t that what Michael Jackson called it, when he drugged those kids? Grown-up juice?”

Ana swallowed; steel wool taste.

“Jesus Juice!” said James. “Jesus Juice! Can you imagine? Bringing Jesus into that shit?”

They were in the very center of the highway, surrounded on all sides by cars, lane after lane of indistinguishable noise and speed. The scenery beyond the cars repeated: mall, massive concrete industrial building with a parking lot as big as the building, then another mall. There were no mountains, no sign of water. Any trees they passed were as trim and contained as if they had been unwrapped from cellophane yesterday. The highway continued like this, without a rise or a curve, on and on for almost an hour.

James had considered his actions, all through the night, his drunken sleep broken by waves of possibilities. What shape would he lend to this transgression? He composed a partial confession in his head, a general unburdening without detail: “Something happened last night. I stopped it before it went too far.” He couldn’t imagine Ana seeking more information. She was not a woman who needed to know. And how would it make him feel, what would it relieve him of, really, this rubbery admission? And then there was the possibility of silence, which was sitting with him this morning like a gray, furry egg in the pit of his stomach. In exactly the way of love songs, he found himself unable to look at his wife. He could not meet her eye.