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of this stuff.” It was quiet for a long while, then, “Oh sweetheart, I am so sorry. It’s all my fault. We’ve got to get you relaxed. I’m so sorry. We should have taken a honeymoon, a big fancy hot-weather honeymoon. I did this all wrong. All wrong. Here, there’s a little more wine left. What can I do? Let me give you a back rub. God, you are all clenched up like a big fist.”
    When he left the room, he no longer cared if they heard him. He didn’t even try to be particularly quiet. His mother was lying on her stomach, her arms bent beneath her like tiny wings. Tom’s big arm lay on top of her. Defeated soldiers. He’d never known sex was such a battle, and that people who wanted to win could lose. He slid out the door. The glow of the TV, like moonlight along the living room wall, and the murmur of voices, Stuart and Fran’s, and the smell of something warm like toast or muffins, all seemed like things from another era of his life. His legs were stiff.
Stuart was sprawled on the floor. “Holy shit, where have you been?”
There was no hiding where he’d been. There was only that one room down the hallway he’d come from. “I got trapped. In the bathroom.”
“No way.”
“I did.”
“We thought you’d gone to bed,” Fran said.
“I wish I had.”
“They didn’t know?”
Peter shook his head.
“That’s fucked up.” Stuart chuckled.
“Yeah, it was.” At the sound of Stuart’s chuckle, he felt suddenly a huge well of laughter inside. “It was really fucked up.”
One after another they began laughing, and their laughter fed upon itself and slowly became that airless, throat-clicking, stomachaching kind of laughter Peter had imagined only in the very best of his Belou dreams.

THREE
    ON MONDAY MORNING VIDA WOKE UP ALONE. TOM HAD LEFT AT FIVE , off to some fabric sale in Massachusetts. She’d pretended to be asleep while he rose, took a shower, and returned to the bedroom to dress in the dark. The towel fell from his waist. It was like being in sudden possession of a horse, having this tall firm naked man beside her bed. What thin light there was fell on his pale buttocks and upper thighs, and she wished she could reach out and stroke them without him noticing and wanting to stroke her in return.
The loud nearly debilitating question that had pounded through her body like a pulse since the wedding reception—what have you done what have you done—subsided once he was gone, and she was able to fall back asleep until seven. She stretched her limbs in the enormous bed, her left arm and leg venturing across to Tom’s side, still slightly warm. She rolled over into his impression, and put her head just beside where his had lain. She thought of the grisly iron-gray hair at the end of “A Rose for Emily.” She would learn how to do this properly. “I promise,” she said into Tom’s absent ear.
The odor of food slipped through the cracks in the door: toast, bacon, something sweet but burned. Then voices, Fran’s and Caleb’s, not Peter’s, and the clatter and ping of utensils. All these voices, all this commotion, after years of waking to a silent house. Peter is fine, she told herself.
In the bathroom water hung in the air and smelled like Tom.She could see where he had swiped at the mirror to shave. The basin was clean of stubble but on the glass shelf above it a few tough bristles of his mustache were caught in a scissors’ bill. If only she were the girl she had once been. He deserved that. He deserved someone who would walk into this bathroom, breathe him in, and cave to her knees with joy and thanks.
But the sorry truth was she was eager to get to school where her life would resume its familiar course after this aberration of a weekend. Her body felt strange, like she might be coming down with something. The what have you done hammering was back. A shower and her school clothes would snap her out of it.
But her nakedness beneath the weak drizzle of water only reminded her of failure