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with Phoebe while his wife ministered to a mouse. Upstairs in the guest room Isabel was squeezing milk onto the pink knob’s face or its anus—drowning what was already dead? He confessed it saddened him that he and Isabel were past caring about appearances.
    “Stop fretting,” Phoebe said. “Come with me. You haven’t had the tour.”
    Phoebe walked him through the oldest parts of the manse she had married; a bricked-up fireplace accounted for one of the chimneys in what could have been a breakfast room off the summer kitchen— Imagine, two kitchens! —so many rooms and so many of them unused. No, Phoebe had never thought of marriage in terms of sets of china; she was a bit overwhelmed. “But I love it,” she said. “More of everything—look!” He pressed against the old glass and saw the barn from the workroom window. “Yes,” she said, “the barn.” But first the summer kitchen and its narrowing to the fix-it room made greasy as a pipe for all its use.
    “Not here,” she whispered. Her lipsticked lips against his ear. “Here,” she said, and the newly married Mrs. Benjamin Chester-Harris threw up her arm as she might toss away a hat, and she was his old flame again, Phoebe, a sly shepherdess—hardly dumb—in Ned’s arms in yet another room of indeterminate use but for chairs and windows and there, as abruptly situated as a closet, a bathroom only big enough for elves.
    “My God!” The sink—for a child?—came to Ned’s knees.
    “Quick,” Phoebe said.
    *
    Sometime in the middle of a dreamless night, Ned woke to Isabel crying into a towel she held over her face. He thought he had been gentle enough, wishing her good night, and quiet enough when he finally came to bed, so that to see her awake now—“What’s the problem?”—awake and at the jagged end of crying, trying to catch her breath, to speak, to say, “Nothing, nothing’s the matter.” She yawned and yawned until, visibly composed, no longer out of breath, she said, “I’m not crying over you if that’s what you think. You can do as you please.”
    If the rodent wasn’t dead then, it was dead by morning. It was gone from the room, the bedside table cleared, and the lamps returned to their rightful places; Isabel, fully dressed, sat composed in a chair, reading a book on terror. Breakfast with the host and hostess was equally sedate. The New York Times was on the table, a bowl of grapes, cheeses, salami, hard-boiled eggs, and bread.
    “I’m still in Italy,” Phoebe said.
    In the car, Isabel remarked on Phoebe’s ass. Salami and cheese are not the breakfast foods she should be having. So the cheerless drive home began.
    *
    Why not compound defeat was Ned’s response two weeks later, when he came home to a blind dog of uncertain age, a shih tzu mixed with something, so sick upon rescue, Isabel had thought to return him, but it was too late now with the dog in her lap and the loft’s lights dimmed. She was smiling in the corner near her desk where she had made up a crate. She had sprayed her own perfume onto the fleecy mat, so the dog might know her.
    “If it makes you happy,” he said. Met with a dog less alive than a stuffed one and just as pliable, Ned could only say, “If this is what it takes, if it makes you this happy.”
    She said it did make her happy although she did not sound convinced. Isabel held the dog close—spoke softly to him about going to bed. The scene was dismal, and Ned sighed to see the dog let himself be fitted into the crate. Then for a while it seemed the dog was awake. Hard to tell. Ned had yet to get too near the crate.
    “I almost forgot. Doggie bag!” he said and held up the dessert he had ordered over lunch. “I didn’t eat it and Carol never finishes hers.” Carrot cake, wrapped separately, and crème brûlée, skidding in its container: two of Isabel’s favorite sweets.
    “I thought you just had lunch with Carol,” she said. “Why were you having lunch with Carol?”
    “Why do I