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yet.’
    His coat and overcoat felt a shade queer, a bit slithery and light, but as he walked down the length of the corridor, space seemed to adjust snugly around him. At his side, Joan kept an inquisitive and chastened silence. They pushed through the great glass doors. A famished sun was nibbling through the overcast. Above and behind them, the King of Arabia lay in a drugged dream of dunes and Mrs Henryson upon her sickbed received, like the comatose mother of twins, their identical packets of blood. Richard hugged his wife’s shoulders and as they walked along leaning on each other whispered, ‘Hey, I love you. Love love
love
you.’
    *  *  *
    Romance is, simply, the strange, the untried. It was unusual for the Maples to be driving together at eleven in the morning. Almost always it was dark when they shared a car. The oval of her face clung in the corner of his eye. She was watching him, alert to take the wheel if he suddenly lost consciousness. He felt tender toward her in the eggshell light, and curious toward himself, wondering how far beneath his brain the black pit did lie. He felt no different; but, then, the quality of consciousness perhaps did not bear introspection. Something surely had been taken from him; he was less himself by a pint. Yet the earth, with its signals and buildings and cars and bricks, continued like a pedalled note.
    Boston behind them, he asked, ‘Where should we eat?’
    ‘Should we eat?’
    ‘Please, yes. Let me take you to lunch. Just like a secretary’
    ‘I do feel sort of illicit. As if I’ve stolen something.’
    ‘You, too? But what did we steal?’
    ‘I don’t know. The morning? Do you think Eve knows enough to feed them?’ Eve was their sitter, a little bony girl from down the street who would, in exactly a year, Richard calculated, be painfully lovely. They lasted three years on the average, sitters; you got them in the tenth grade and escorted them into their bloom and then, with graduation, like commuters who had reached their stop, they dropped out of sight, into college or marriage. And the train went on, and took on other passengers, and itself became older and longer.
    ‘She’ll manage,’ he told her. ‘What would you like? All that talk about coffee has made me frantic for some.’
    At the Pancake House beyond 128 they give you coffee before you even ask.’
    ‘Pancakes? Now? Aren’t you jolly? Do you think we’ll throw up?’
    ‘Do you feel like throwing up?’
    ‘No, not really. I feel sort of insubstantial and gentle, but it’s probably psychosomatic. I don’t really understand this business of giving something away and still somehow having it. What is it – the spleen?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Are the splenetic man and the sanguine man the same?’
    ‘God. I’ve totally forgotten the humors. What are the others – phlegm and choler?’
    ‘Bile and black bile are in there somewhere.’
    ‘One thing about you, Joan. You’re educated. New England women are educated.’
    ‘Sexless as we are.’
    ‘That’s right; drain me dry and then put me on the rack.’ But there was no wrath in his words; indeed, he had reminded her of their earlier conversation so that, in much this way, his words might be revived, diluted, and erased. It seemed to work. The restaurant where they served only pancakes was empty and quiet this early. A bashfulness possessed them both, and a silence while they ate. Touched by the stain her blueberry pancakes left on her teeth, he held a match to her cigarette and said, ‘Gee, I loved you back in the blood room.’
    ‘I wonder why.’
    ‘You were so brave.’
    ‘So were you.’
    ‘But I’m supposed to be. I’m paid to be. It’s the price of having a penis.’
    ‘Shh.’
    ‘Hey. I didn’t mean that about your being sexless.’
    The waitress refilled their coffee cups and gave them the check.
    ‘And I promise never never to do the Twist, the cha-cha, or the schottische with Marlene