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freedom of movement and to her unhappiness with her husband, Wendell, and her financial problems although we liked to believe then that we were in love with each other, and often said it: I love you, I love you, oh God, how I love you. That sort of thing; playing a role. We did talk that way then. We don’t anymore.
    But it was a lie, and I think we both knew it. I surely did. I still loved my wife, Lydia, and I don’t think Risa loved anyone except her son, Sean. Nevertheless, we were both lonely and both burdened with strong sexual natures. But neither of us had the ability to say that to the other in a way that would not be hurtful. So, instead, we said, I love you, and let it go at that. I have the benefit of hindsight now, of course, and at the time maybe I half believed the tender words I whispered in her ear after we had made love and I was still inside and surrounding her, covering her body with mine in the darkness of the motel room.
    We used to meet like that, in Room 11 at the Bide a Wile, after Wendell had gone early to bed alone, which he had been doing for several years, except when there was a Montreal Expos ball game on TV Wendell adored the Expos; probably still does. I would leave my kids with a baby sitter, usually Nichole Burnell, who took care of the house and kids from after school two days a week until eleven at night, when her father, Sam, drove over from Bartlett Hill and picked her up. The drill was for me to kiss the twins good night, the ll Nichole that I was going down to the Rendezvous or the Spread Eagle for a few beers or to Placid for a movie, and a few minutes later, with the key that Risa had given me, to let myself into Room 11 and sit in the darkness and wait for Risa to arrive.
    It sounds sordid, I know, but it didn’t feel cheap or low. It was too often too lonely, too solitary, for that. Many nights Risa could not get away to Room 11, and I sat there by myself in the wicker chair beside the bed for an hour or so, smoking cigarettes and thinking and remembering my life before Lydia died, until finally, when it was clear that Risa could not get away from Wendell, I would leave the room and walk across the road to the lot next to the Rendezvous where I had parked my truck and drive home.
    On those nights when Risa did arrive, we spent our time together entirely in darkness, for we couldn’t turn on the room light, and we barely saw each other, except for what we could make out in the dim light from the motel sign outside falling through the blinds: rose colored profiles, the curve of a thigh or shoulder, a breast, a knee.
    It was melancholy and sweet and reflective and of course very sexual, straightforwardly sexual, for both of us.
    Our meetings were respites from our real and very troubled lives, and we knew that. Whenever I saw Risa in daylight, in public, it was as if she were a wholly different person, her sister, maybe, or a cousin, who only resembled in vague ways the woman I was having an affair with.
    I’m not sure that’s how I appeared to hermen and women see each other differently. For instance, a man generally doesn’t even know how small a woman really is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her night gowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child’s and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem. Women almost always appear larger to us than they actually are, and we don’t have much opportunity to observe how small and delicate their bodies are in comparison to ours.
    They know our size, of course, know it thoroughly, for they have felt our weight on top of them smaller people always know the size of people who are larger than they. But we men have usually taken the physical measure of the women in our lives only with our eyes, and because we are secretly afraid of them, we tend to see women as having bodies that are at least as large as our own. I think that’s one reason why a man is so often