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no control and about which, it seemed to English, they weren’t entitled to have any opinions, or anyway, it began to seem to him, not such stupid ones; and they traded lies and passed judgment on their colleagues and rivals endlessly, until he believed he would get up and go over and tip someone’s eggs into his lap, just to see.
    He was getting to be a creature of the night, spying till the zero hour, and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays working a shift at WPRD from two until six in the morning. His employment wasn’t going all that happily. At the station they had only those two four-hour shifts for him, and he’d been doing next to nothing as Ray Sands’s assistant investigator. His one investigation, in fact, still involved tracking Marla Baker—who turned out to be older than she’d looked at first, a middle-aged divorcee—from her apartment to her lover’s house and back again, several times a week.
    On these occasions the lovers had dinner together, and English recorded their conversations with a mike taped to the window glass. They lay together on the living-room couch till midnight or so, these two bland middle-aged women, and talked, and embraced, and massaged one another with scented oils, and he recorded all this, too, with the same mike taped to the glass of a different window. It was the kind of thing he’d sworn never to be reduced to, but he couldn’t remember when, exactly, this oath had been pledged. Everything was softened in the candlelight of their romance, and unknown to them, he skulked outside with the clouds of his breath, adjusting the volume knob with frozen fingers. His ski mittens dangled by little clips from the sleeves of his black leather jacket, two limp, flabby hands that wrung themselves helplessly while their owner went around doing things he disapproved of.
    One night Marla Baker and her lover, whose name was Carol, had a visitor. It was the woman he’d spoken to in church his first day in this town and then pitifully invited to dinner—Leanna.
    The three of them held a kind of conference in the kitchen. All English witnessed, through a slim parting of the living-room curtain that gave him a view of the archway to the kitchen, were the stove, which slowly developed a face out of its dials and seams, and the torso of Marla Baker, with sweater sleeves pushed back to her elbows. He saw her hands put an orange kettle on the flame and then saw them take it away when it steamed. Under his blue knit watch cap he wore small Walkman earphones, and he heard everything they said. But it was the length of the silences, those clutching lulls in talk, that spoke the clearest.
    English had never realized, until he’d listened to recorded conversations, how much time people spend saying nothing, thinking about what they’ve heard and preparing what they have to say. But in this little gathering, made excruciating by Leanna’s presence in a way never quite specified, these three women started and stopped a lot more than usual, agonized through their remarks about the tea, and choked up when they talked about the weather, as if they were making terrible confessions. English pressed his palms against the window to quell miscellaneous distorting vibrations.
    After that night, Marla Baker and Leanna started sleeping together occasionally at Marla’s apartment. The first time it happened, English climbed a tree and put the mike on a fishing pole, nudging it close to Marla’s bedroom window, and he listened. The two women undressed after a while and went to bed. They slept together as sisters might have, giving one another not so much pleasure as comfort. Marla and Leanna, Marla and Leanna—it had a nice sound to it. They’d been lovers once, but it hadn’t worked out the way they’d planned. They certainly knew how to let themselves weep.
    English spent that evening straddling a branch, the tendons in his thighs at first uncomfortable and then, after a while, really on fire, wondering who