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her response was abstract, far away. Still, she excited me. I touched the collar of her expensive blouse, kissed her again and tasted the drawl in her mouth.
    “I’m so tired. It was a long trip.”
    “Don’t worry. I’ll let you be.”
    We went inside. Despite what I said, I wanted to reach for her. I watched her take off her blouse. She had a black bra on underneath. I watched her take off that, too, and then she slipped away from me, into the tub, and shut the door behind her.
    Elizabeth was a glamorous woman in many ways, sophisticated in her manner and her ideas. In some ways, though, she’d never gotten over her first divorce. Her first husband had been a writer—an alcoholic, a womanizer—and the break-up had come not long after her father’s death. She was vulnerable when she met me, not long divorced. We’d driven down to Stinson Beach, on the other side of Mt. Tamalpais. I’d been quiet and shy and kept my hands to myself. A bit of an act, though there are times, around certain women, that I feel this way. I’d studied her age lines, the fine web about her eyes, and smelled her cosmetics, the silk blouse faint with sweat. We’d sat in the open convertible beneath the Monterey Pines in sight of the ocean. I’d been pursuing her and she’d been pursuing me, and people were talking, we both knew this. I’d liked her convertible, I admit, and her father’s money. In the end it wasn’t those things, no. There were other women with those things.
    It was the smell of her maybe. Something in her eyes, at once vulnerable and haughty, a glance that cut to the quick, full of presentiment, a suggestion there was something waiting ahead for us.
    We kissed. I touched her all over.
    If I could have lost myself inside her then, that moment at the beach, if I could have crawled inside her and disappeared, I would have done so.
    Who am I?
    I yearned now to be one of my other selves. One of those other Jakes. The earnest psychologist, perhaps, in love with his college teacher wife. The faithful husband.
    I went away from Elizabeth into the living room. The little Buddha was there, with his mouth twisted into a smile. I found a copy of the Examiner and went through it. There was a story about Angela Mori. Details about the murder. There was more on the inside page. Information unearthed by the defense and leaked out to reporters. Angela’s sex life, the many men she had slept with; rumors, unsubstantiated, about secret liaisons in a hotel in Novato. An unidentified man—a man in a blue suit, the paper said. A search of the hotel records turned up nothing. The story made me uneasy.
    Angela was reckless, it was true. I remembered how she’d leaned against me and put her tongue in my ear. There were always rumors about a girl like that. There was even one rumor—a joke, really, muttered in the courthouse halls—tying her to Minor Robinson.
    No one believed it, though. He was too concerned with his image to risk himself like that. Too much the prig.
    I laughed thinking about it, clutching the newspaper in my hand, a laugh that was a bit forced, I realize now, clumsy and awkward, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time.
    I didn’t hear Elizabeth finish her bath. When I went into the bedroom, the lights were out, and she was on the edge of sleep. I put my arm around her. She was in her pajamas, white silk. She moaned softly in the dark, and I lay a little while like that, thinking about Angela Mori and also about Sara and the episode from a few days before. Lying in the dark as I was now—inside our house, on this narrow point of land, extending into the bay—it seemed to me for a moment that everything else in the world was nothing but a dream, all the events of the world, the news, the daily buzz. There was in reality nothing but this dark, and all else was illusion. I put my hand up over Elizabeth’s breast, on the outside of her pajamas, and pushed myself against her from behind. “No,” she moaned,