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riotous at heart, had—physically, at least—returned to normal. Sunshine, traffic jams, shopping and commuter crowds, and floods. Floods are normal here: the usual flooded passages and
streets along the riverbanks, the flooded underpasses and the flooded gutters where, as usual, the drains had let us down. The city had been overwhelmed by rain.
    Mouetta and Lix had stopped for breakfast at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House on their way back home. She held his arm across the tabletop. She pinched his hand. She wanted to inflict some gentle pain. “Come on,” she said. “The truth.” The coffeehouse—a converted botanic conservatory—was chockablock with unsuspecting women for her husband to choose from.
    Lix, as usual, misread her mood. He took her question as a kind of erotic afterplay, a sign that she was still stimulated by their recent lovemaking and wanted to continue it, not physically perhaps, but somewhere else inside her head, some secret fold. A female thing. Men recovered after sex more speedily. For women—he had said as much onstage (a play by Palladino)—intercourse was just the overture. But for a man an orgasm was—the playwright’s metaphor again—“the final, rushing note.” The music stopped—and now he could embrace the wider world again. For men (another common metaphor) lovemaking pops the champagne cork. The captive gases dissipate. The pressure is released. The pressure he was feeling now was of a different kind.
    Here, for breakfast, Lix was happy to indulge his wife. He liked her question. It also made him wonder if, on their return back home, the as yet untested stairs might earn themselves a second chance. “You really want the honest truth?” Again she dug her nails into his palm.
    Lix thought he understood the boundaries and rituals of her now familiar game. He’d made mistakes before—thinking, possibly,
that her invitation to search the restaurant, the bar, the hotel lobby, the departure lounge, the cast of a film, and, on a couple of occasions, the pages of magazines, for someone he would like to make love to was her way of testing his fidelity. In which case, the only answer was the reassuring, diplomatic one, that out of all the women he could see Mouetta was the only one for him. That was clearly not the answer she was seeking, though. He’d tried it out before—and it had irritated her. She truly wanted him to look around. And choose. And tell the truth.
    â€œCome on! Which one, if you were free?”
    â€œBut I’m not free.”
    â€œYou’re free to choose. You’re just not free to act.”
    â€œI see. I am your prisoner, then. At liberty to think and look but not to move.”
    â€œExactly so. Like through binoculars.”
    â€œAnd no parole.”
    â€œNot till I’m dead. And, anyway, wives nearly always outlive the men. So I’ll be free before you are.”
    There was another lesson Lix had learned, through his mistakes. Mouetta would not welcome it if he showed too much ardor in his choice. He should not seem aroused. He should not lick his mouth or breathe too heavily. He should not need to touch himself or rearrange his trousers. She would not welcome any vulgarity either, though he was always tempted by vulgarity. He had to be dispassionate and analytical, but not too coldly scientific. “It’s just my private chemistry,” he’d said on one occasion previously, when he’d been free to choose amongst the women at a reception they’d attended and had selected someone Mouetta
had dismissed as “short and plain.” By chemistry, he’d meant a little more than just the dopamine and oxytocin, or any other agents of libido. He’d meant the chance and random fusions that could occur in the test tubes of two strangers. She’d been disappointed and upset—and evidently baffled—for reasons that he never really