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without another word they both stood and walked back to the pavilion, more quickly this time, because guided by its lights. They found Gaither backward on a folding chair, deep in conversation, but his face was unrestrainedly, unsuspiciously glad when he saw them approaching.
    Lee felt nothing at the sight of that face, no remorse whatsoever.
    “Hello,” Aileen said to her husband, and she bent down to kiss him. Then she stood behind him and held his hand, clasped against his large shoulder, as he continued to talk.
    The drive back late that night was just as silent and even colder, but this time it seemed over in minutes. No one told Ruth to put up the window. The stars made white streaks in the sky. Aileen was a shadowed, unreachable presence on the seat beside him, a stone sunk in the depths of a lake. And there was something exquisite in this, in her distance from him, and in measuring it, and in weighing how little he needed to bridge it—and then all the newly strange familiarities of their small town, its still streets and empty porches and shuttered storefronts, were upon them, and the weak pinkish light of the streetlamps bled into the car. They dropped Ruth off first, at a plain wooden two-story boardinghouse that in its drabness resembled her, and then although Lee’s boardinghouse was just a few blocks away Aileen got out of the backseat, requiring Gaither to leave the driver’s seat and hold the seat forward for her, so she could sit in the front. Then they were at Lee’s, and Aileen got out again, to release him. “I’ll walk Mr. Lee up,” she told Gaither, and Gaither, as he had done at the start of the evening, leaned across the front seat and waved.

    A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 27
    “Good night, Lee,” he said. “Thank you so much for coming along.
    I hope you had a fi ne time.”
    “I did,” Lee said. “Thank you.”
    He and Aileen mounted the steps together, and although Lee was certain Gaither was gazing straight ahead out the windshield, his eyes dazzled with stars, his spirit sated by fellowship, Lee still felt a gaze of some kind, branding him. He already had his key in his hand, and there was nothing to wait for; Aileen offered her hand, and he shook it, hardly looking at her.
    “Come over for coffee sometime,” she said. He scarcely managed to answer; she was already turning away to go back down the steps.
    “When?” he said.
    “Sunday morning,” she said. “At nine-thirty.” 4.
    LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER LEE BEGAN HIS AFFAIR WITH
    Aileen, she told him she was pregnant. “His, not yours,” she said, before he’d been able to speak.
    “How do you know?” he gasped then, feeling the words, with his breath, sucked from him too quickly, as if by a powerful vacuum.
    “Because I’m almost ten weeks,” she said. “And I was only sleeping with one of you ten weeks ago.”
    They would have been whispering, almost hissing at each other, in the drab, cluttered office of the professor of urban statistics whose papers it was one of Aileen’s jobs to refile, while the professor was in Rome on a working sabbatical. The office was, apart from being drab and cluttered, cold both in temperature and in overall atmosphere. A single fluorescent panel hung from the ceiling, which they tried to leave off. The single window, which looked out on the building’s parking lot from the height of only the third floor, was dressed with a dusty venetian blind, which they kept lowered and closed. The desk was university-issue gunmetal gray, as were the laden bookshelves.
    The absent professor’s papers were kept for the most part in overtaxed 28 S U S A N C H O I
    cardboard boxes, splitting at their seams, squeezed precariously on the bookshelves or stacked three or four high on the floor; the stench of dust and dry mold filled the room. There was a broken couch, also covered with boxes, which squeaked, and an Amish rag rug on the black tile fl oor. Aileen had brought the rug from her home. It