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body on behalf of the guilty mind. It didn't work. His head was utterly clear, an acoustically perfect amphitheater for the voices of accusation. He told himself that it could have been worse; they hadn't closed the deal, those few minutes in the bedroom. But they might have. They were well en route when somebody came in looking for a coat.
    He took off his shoes in the hallway, eased the keys into the locks. The apartment was dark. He crept to the bedroom, which was empty. He tried to feel relief, told himself he had a second chance. He couldn't have faced Corrine tonight. She would have seen right through him.
    Russell was in bed when he heard the stealthy tick of keys and tumblers. With one eye half-open, he watched the door of the bedroom. The hallway remained dark. Eventually he heard her tiptoe into the bedroom; accustomed to the dark, he could see that she was carrying her shoes.
    He pretended to be asleep as she undressed and slipped into bed beside him. He wanted to take her in his arms.
    Corrine lay very still beside him. He waited for her rapid breathing to resolve itself into the rhythm of sleep; she could fall asleep on a dime. Instead, her breath became shorter, more irregular, until he realized that she was crying. Somehow she knew. Russell cursed himself for violating this intimacy, which over the years had become so finely tuned that she was able, even in the silent dark, to sense a change in pitch. Then he decided that was absurd. He began to wonder where she'd been all night.
    “Oh, Russell,” she said. “I'm sorry.”
    He lifted himself on an elbow and tried to see her face in the dark.
    “What do you mean, you're sorry?”
    She began to sob. Her back was heaving. She was trying to say something, but her words were muffled by the pillow.
    “What?” he said.
    When she finally spoke, it was in a dull, featureless voice that he had never heard before. “Tonight,” she said, “tonight I had a couple cigarettes.…”
    She said more, but the sound of her voice was already fading away as Russell lay back on his own pillow, feeling the chill blast of the air conditioner on his face, imagining himself henceforth as a wanderer of frozen landscapes, and in searching for a suitably tragic picture of himself, he came at length, unexpectedly, upon the image of Dino Signorelli, standing alone on a treeless prairie, hatless, leaning into the cold wind.

Invisible Fences
    So I come in the front door about one in the morning, after stopping to get some beer and cigarettes, and I hear these sounds from the living room. Two kinds, a low guttural growl that doesn't even sound human and a high-pitched chirping that some kind of distressed tropical bird might make but which I recognize as the love song of my wife, Susan.
    “Honey?” I call.
    I walk into the living room and this is what I see: Susan naked on the floor, entwined with an equally naked stranger.
    “Jesus, Susan.”
    The man lifts his head from between her legs and regards me with mild alarm.
    “You could've waited till I got back,” I say.
    “I'm sorry,” she says breathlessly. “I guess I got carried away.”
    Meanwhile, the man—I think he said his name was Marvin—puts his hand on the back of her head and directs her back to her task.
    Trying to get over my pique, I kneel down on the floor beside them.
    “You get those Newport Lights,” he asks, thrusting his hips into Susan's face.
    Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.
    It's amazing what human beings get accustomed to—how quickly the bizarre, the absurd and the perverse can become routine. People have become accustomed to torture, or so I've read, bonded with their tormentors, the wielders of pliers and electricity.
    It happens gradually. Maybe one day you get high with another couple and there's a certain amount of joking and talk, and the next thing you know, the guy's making out with your wife and you're kind of