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caution and self-consciousness, emboldened by Aileen’s presence to completely ignore the curious and encouraging smiles of the food-committee members with their barbecue tongs who were uttering platitudes at him—“Welcome!” “We’re so glad to have you with us tonight!”—Lee piled his paper plate with the cold little burgers, with mayonnaised potatoes and cubed cantaloupe and peanut butter and oatmeal cookies. Aileen lagged along with him vaguely, but he could feel the precise contour of her presence, and he could tell that as much as she behaved like a stranger to the people around her, she was known to at least some of them. The food committee was composed of members of Gaither’s congregation; there was an almost audible quality to the quiet that surrounded Aileen, amid a sea of gregariousness, as she followed Lee down the length of the food table, taking only a cookie. The barbecue grills were just outside the shelter of the pavilion’s roof but still within the glare of its blinding fl uorescence; when they left the food table and strode just a few paces farther away, the night returned startlingly, tall and cold and the color of blue ink in the A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 25
    bottle, not yet flat black as it would be in an hour. With the pavilion light at his back, out of his eyes, Lee was dazzled by stars; the smear of them was doubled in the round little lake, which in darkness, denoted only by what it reflected, possessed a mysterious dignifi ed beauty entirely absent from the brown pond they’d glimpsed through the trees as they drove up. As his eyes adjusted, Lee made out the shapes of picnic tables like black nebulae against the shimmering lake, a few of them occupied by stargazing or less sociable Christians, but most of them empty. “You want to sit?” he asked Aileen, and his voice seemed awkward, and too loud. She led him to a table, both of them walking unsteadily although the ground was level, because of how little they saw. Then they sat down on the tabletop, with their feet on the bench to stay clear of the chill evening dew, facing back toward the pavilion, which glowed garishly like a UFO just touching down. Lee ate fiercely, almost vengefully, and as his plate emptied, he somehow grew more angry, more affronted, not less.
    “So you and Lewis,” Aileen began lamely, after moments of silence.
    Lee interrupted her.
    “If you were my woman,” he heard himself saying, “I wouldn’t bring you to garbage like this.”
    “Oh, you wouldn’t?” she said, as if she’d expected an outburst.
    “And I wouldn’t give a damn about God,” he concluded, feeling suddenly dizzy.
    “You don’t give a damn about God anyway,” she said. “Obviously.”
    “Neither do you.”
    “Again: obviously.”
    “Why are you married?” Lee said, with exasperation, and he never could have explained why he felt familiar enough with a woman he’d known barely an hour to ask such a thing.
    Aileen laughed a compact, brittle laugh. “That’s a pretty rude question.”
    “I don’t care about being rude,” Lee said, putting his empty plate down.
    “That must be why he likes you.”
    “Who?”
    “Who! That’s terrifi c. My husband . Your friend. He must like you because you don’t care if you’re rude. I think that’s why he likes me.” 26 S U S A N C H O I
    “Why do you like him?”
    “Because he’s a good man,” she said vehemently, but her vehemence did not seem aimed at Lee. “You are rude. You’re not much of a friend.”
    Lee didn’t dispute this. It was a realization that would have pierced him if it had occurred just an hour before.
    After a moment Aileen said, “I’m going to rudely suggest we go back to the shindig.” There was finality to her statement, but there wasn’t rebuke. Whether this was the end of that evening’s conversation, or of all conversations, Lee couldn’t have said, but the sense of finality was as absolute to him as it must have been to her;