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I can’t be held responsible.”
    Up to this point Reinhart had been paralyzed with embarrassment. He could not of course reveal his identity at this late date, and he doubted that silently hanging up the instrument would be more satisfactory: Grace might believe it was the work of a sullen Winona. He was trying here to put himself vicariously in these roles. As he had told his daughter, he was not a tyro in emotional entanglements, but he had two barriers to cross here: plain sex, of which they belonged to the opposite one, and then the deviation from that. Would it have been easier if he were gay as well?
    Fortunately Grace gave no indication that she would soon stop talking—she who had always been so terse when knowingly addressing him. But are we not all of us different folks from usual when in the grip of passion? Trying to be fair, Reinhart dredged up some of his own memories, most of them necessarily ancient, but a strange fact was that the more recent events seemed even more remote, e.g., he had had a funny sort of fling in the Sappy Sixties with a freaked-out young girl named Eunice Munsing. He thought he had spotted her at the wheel of a cab the week before, fat face like a red balloon, but that might have been a mirage: for romantic purposes he liked to think of her as deceased. The point was that aesthetics always called for the drawing of the curtain across what other people called love, and perhaps one’s own as well, which is why the audience for hard-core pornography must always be a relatively tiny cluster of stoics.
    Grace suddenly arrested her breathless rush of nonsense about ice cream and asked: “Should I call your dad and apologize?”
    Reinhart thrilled with horror, and then at once, magically, his problem solved itself. Grace answered her own question, and added obsequiously: “Shall I do it now?”
    He considered making a falsetto grunt or murmur, but thought better of it and merely lowered the receiver to the bedside table to simulate the sound Winona might have produced in putting down the phone to fetch him.
    He walked around the room and stared, for once not vacantly, at a little framed snapshot of himself in uniform, taken next to a pile of rubble in Occupation-era Berlin. He now liked the looks he had had then, though he had not at the time: these transformations in taste occur after one has passed fifty.
    He returned to the phone, into which, unconsciously imitating Grace as he had known her, he barked: “Yes?”
    “Oh, Carl,” Grace replied, “Grace Greenwood. I wanted to just say I’m sorry I had to run like that, but I guess Win has explained. It was unavoidable, I assure you, just one of those things, and shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on yourself. You’re a fine fellow.”
    Reinhart marveled at her change of tone. Once again she was in total command, without a weakness or a doubt. On the other hand, his own situation, if judged according to relative degrees of power, had changed.
    “Well, Grace, I might say the same for you! I just regret that you went without a meal.” And he couldn’t forbear from adding: “I wanted to introduce you to something you have probably never eaten. A classic, but not too much to take if your tastes are for simpler food. Not aïoli or eel with green sauce.”
    Grace grunted almost rudely. He suspected the regrets were all his own. But she spoke in a bright voice: “Listen, Carl, not even Winnie knows about this. I’m bifurcated like all of us: I really am interested in you.”
    For an instant Reinhart did not attend to her meaning: he was stuck on that “Winnie.” If there was one thing that Winona had deplored as a child (along with being hungry) it was hearing a diminutive of her name; not even her brother at his most malicious had easily resorted to this usage.
    But then he became aware of a new and even more beastly element in the woman! She was baldly confessing to be bisexual? She wanted to take on both father and daughter? Was