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mysterious.
    â€œWhere were you all weekend?” I demanded. “I was frantic with worry.”
    â€œYour fantasies are better than anything I can tell you,” he said aloofly. It was my problem, in other words. I was the neurotic, the daydreamer, the inventor of imaginary adulteries.
    â€œWho is she?” I asked over and over again, but Bennett was mute. He smugly repeated the line about “my fantasies.” But in my bones I knew I was right.
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    Woodstock.
    We ride up in virtual silence. Something is brewing between us. Some marital thunderstorm. I try to make conversation and pretend I’m having a good time. I feed Bennett fruit I’ve brought. I try to draw the words out of him as I feed the fruit in. But he is hard to talk to. Every conversation ends on the second exchange. We are like two ill-matched tennis players, unable to maintain a rally. Finally, I pull out a book and begin to read. Side by side but apart, we drive to Woodstock.
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    Once there, we simulate companionship. We stop at an antiques fair, a hamburger joint, an old quarry. We walk in the woods.
    â€œDid you ever fuck in the woods?” I ask him.
    Bennett smiles secretively.
    â€œWell, did you?”
    â€œNot with you,” he says, putting his arm around me.
    â€œI know that. We never did anything romantic like that.”
    â€œI think this is romantic,” he says.
    And I think, Yes, everything is romantic but the way I feel.
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    At six, we decide we’re hungry. We have walked and browsed and shopped, but time hangs heavy on our hands. We drive back to the main drag and ask a local hippie about restaurants. He recommends one nearby, an outdoor pub, with tables on the grass.
    Just as we are about to sit down, a young girl comes up to me and asks tentatively, “Are you Isadora?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI loved your book! I think you’re so brave!”
    I blush, half pleased, half embarrassed. Part of me wants to hug her and the other part to shrink away.
    â€œThank you. I know that’s hard to say. Thank you so much.”
    We sit down at a table. After salad and wine, our attention wanders to another table where four adults are sitting with two children. The children are about five and seven and they are both very restless. They finally nag the adults into letting them go play on the grass. But Bennett and I can’t seem to figure out which are the parents and which the parents’ friends. We make a game of it. Not having children ourselves (and both longing for them), we always make much of other people’s children, theorize about them, discuss them, philosophize about child-rearing. It is a shoddy substitute for parenthood, like nursing the myth of one’s unhappy childhood.
    â€œI think the woman in the Mexican shawl must be the mother, because she seems so blase about the kids. The other woman keeps humoring them—obviously an aunt or friend ...” I say this, thinking of my own nieces and nephews, whom I adore. How stupid it is of me to deprive myself of children. I’d probably love them. I vow to myself to get pregnant as soon as possible.
    â€œYou know, when Penny broke up with Robby, she let her kids decide which parent they wanted to stay with. That’s important. That way the kids don’t feel powerless and pushed around ...”
    I look at Bennett. Penny. Penny was an army officer’s wife we knew in Heidelberg seven years ago. Why bring up Penny at a time like this? And Bennett is always so tender and concerned when he mentions her. He never sounds like that when he speaks of me.
    A flash. Suddenly it all comes together. Penny, Woodstock, Heidelberg, now.
    â€œBennett, did you have an affair with Penny?” My heart is pounding. I seem to know the answer already.
    â€œDo you really want to know, or ...”
    â€œYes, I really want to know.”
    â€œ Well—I did ...” A knife twists in my heart with the