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response to some egomaniacal statement or other, “Everything isn’t about
you,
Joe.” How could she doubt the obvious now? He had called his girlfriend, his filthy-mouthed girlfriend, to ask if she was happy that he had received the recognition he felt he so richly deserved. He hadn’t asked
me
if I was happy, but then again, I guess he knew I was happy when I bounded into bed with him after the diner that morning. Recalling the tryst now, I realized that I had behaved like a senseless but affable puppy that morning, all wagging tail and lolling tongue, while Joe had assumed something resembling the manner of a dutifully indulgent master.
    “I just think we’re not leaving room for all the possibilities,” Beth said. “Maybe he was asking her if she was happy about something that was going on in her life that had nothing to do with him. What did she say next?”
    “She asked him where he was—as if they had plans to meet or something.”
    “Again, Julia, you’re making assumptions here. Lots of people want to know where everybody is all the time. She might just be nosy.”
    “Beth…”
    “Or who knows, maybe he was invited to something that she was also invited to and she expected to see him there. It doesn’t mean that they had made a plan.”
    “She kept calling him babe. And baby.”
    “Sometimes ‘babe’ is just an expression. You know who talks like that? My friend Liz who works for Virgin Records. She calls everybody babe.”
    “Okay, well, she wanted him to know how horny she was. ‘I’m horny as a…motherfucker’ is what she said. I mean, who talks like that? She sounded like a nineteen-year-old porn star.”
    Beth was nodding slowly. She was thinking. This part was hard to explain away, but I knew she was going to try. Beth considers herself the ultimate authority on just about everything, and now that I had asked her to help me with this problem, she was in her glory. Sitting with her now, I realized I hadn’t seen much of Beth since I’d had Sammy. Our lives had become at odds, as people’s lives do. Beth was a television producer. I was a mom. She booked guests for Anderson Cooper, spent her days looking for hard-hitting news stories and rarely left the studio for dinner and drinks before eleven. I tended to my children, sort of, and was usually in bed before she finished work.
    “She might be just a friend from the set. She might talk to him all the time about how lonely she is.”
    “Please.”
    “Okay, you tell me who
you
think it is.” Beth pushed herself away from the table and turned to me, crossing her arms slowly. It’s difficult for Beth to have to listen to other people’s mediocre ideas, but she knew how upset I was, and she was indulging me.
    “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure she works on the show. He doesn’t have time to meet anyone else, for one thing. And…”
    “And what?”
    “And the show was also nominated. Best Drama Series. So it’s possible that he called her to ask if she was happy about the show being nominated, you know, because she works on the show.”
    “That makes sense,” Beth said. “I didn’t know the show was also nominated. That explains everything.” She slapped her palms on the table and smiled, talking faster. “He probably called everybody in the cast and crew to congratulate them. Maybe she was just calling him back to say, ‘Yes, I’m happy.’ And then threw in the business about how horny she was as a funny aside. She might be some fat, ugly friend of Joe’s from the set who bellyaches all the time about how she never has sex.”
    “Beth, you had to hear the tone of her voice. It was sex talk.”
    “All I’m saying is this: You really don’t know what’s going on. Why don’t you tell Joe that you heard the message and ask him to explain it?”
    “I don’t know….”
    Beth turned and faced me again. “I think you don’t want to ask him because you know he’ll lie.”
    This is the thing that kills me about