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selflessness on her part would encourage love on his. Or for that matter, what form of love he intended. Their specific perspective on love anyway was for the most part horizontal.
    He could say all he wanted that he’d finally abandoned himself to opportunity and long desire, but there would have been other factors, personal to just him, or to him and Nora, hard to say. Just as there were factors personal to just Sophie. Anyway, there is something to be said for knowing a good deal about reduced expectations. Phil was wary that Sophiemight have what he supposed to be higher hopes. “You should know, I can’t see leaving Nora. I’ve been through that,” because indeed he had left one wife in favour of Nora, years ago when they were young. “I don’t think I want to go through it again.”
    “That’s fine,” Sophie said. “Fair enough.”
    When Nora said,
Where there’s smoke
, what did she mean? Wouldn’t revelations at this point be ironic? At best, ironic?
    People have died before overnight in Sophie’s experience, but mostly their hands were reaching out to receive, they were ebbing, demanding, panicking hands. Phil’s hands were enthusiastic and generous. In how he perfectly fitted together pieces of wood from his own designs, in the way he undid what he saw as mistakes and started again, in the way a particular wood of particular grain had to be chosen and shaped to become a particular sideboard or sofa or chair—that was exactly the minute way he understood Sophie’s body. To watch him run his hands over potential upholstery, regarding texture and colour with a view to how it suited a specific design, to see him so engaged he said he could hear how one fabric would sound when it encountered another, that was the same care he took with Sophie’s tentative skin. Even boisterous, he was paying attention. His hands spoke of delight that was infinite.
    So she felt.
    She must have been quite a challenge, a woman to whom touch was acidic, but Phil’s rough, hammering, carving, nailing, precise hands were scrupulous. She supposes with Nora as well, and for all she knows, over the years maybe others. Not Beth, of course. “No, I can’t imagine going to bed with her,” he told Sophie, laughing. “It’d be like making love to a garden rake.” Which meant, actually, that he could imagine it,just not in a pleasing way, not the way he could burrow deep into Sophie and come out gasping.
    At least he did not die in Nora’s arms, only in the same bed. Enough that Nora’s the widow, that she possessed the bed from which he could slip away at dead of night. It would have been an awful mess if he’d died in Sophie’s arms, which is the sort of thing that does sometimes happen. Of course, if he’d been with Sophie, he would not have been sleeping, he would have been active, alert to the very last second. With Sophie, he didn’t sleep. The opportunity did not arise.
    Imagine the sensation, the appearance, of a man tremoring overhead, growing rigid and remote, imagine feeling him, watching him, die in your hands—Sophie has never had people die in her hands in such a stupendously personal way.
    Real flesh covers real people. There is such a thing as real smell, and real touch. Nora, who illustrates flesh, is a step removed from all that, and her model Beth must be at least two steps from any skin but her own. But Sophie, Sophie grew careless, or was forgetful, or hungry, and now look what’s happened.
    Soon Phil will be not solid or sheltering or precise but in a state to flow through her fingers, be tossed about by a breeze. People take on new forms periodically. Sophie has. Now it’s his more radical turn.
    There might be sympathy, if also a tinge of contempt, for a well-intentioned woman shattered by far-away sorrows as seen on TV, but there’d be none for a snake-hearted woman sneaking through hallways, skulking across the backyard, taking advantage of silent moments, now left holding a bag of huge