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awkward new meaning. "If she's serious about her music she should go somewhere serious with it, a city. It's a terrible waste, a conservatory graduate playing fiddle for a bunch of deaf old biddies in a dilapidated church."
    "She feels safe here," Sukie said, as if they didn't.
    "She doesn't even wash herself, have you ever noticed her smell?" Alexandra asked, not about Jane but about Greta Neff, by a train of association Sukie had no trouble following, their hearts were so aligned on one wavelength.
    "And those granny glasses!" Sukie agreed. "She looks like John Lennon." She made a kind of solemn sad-eyed thin-lipped John Lennon face. "I sink sen we can drink ouur— sprechen Sie mass? —bev-er-aitches neeoauu." There was an awful un-American diphthong that came out of Greta Neff's mouth, a kind of twisting of the vowel up against her palate.
    Cackling, they took their drinks into the "den," a little room with peeling wallpaper in a splashy faded pattern of vines and fruit baskets and a bellied plaster ceiling at a strange sharp slant because the r oom was half lucked under the sta irs that went up to the atticlike second floor. The room's one window, too high for a woman not standing on a stool to peer out of, had lozenge panes of leaded glass, thick glass bubbled and warped like bottle bottoms.
    "A cabbagy smell," Alexandra amplified, lowering herself and her tall silvery drink onto a love seat covered in a crewelwork of flamboyant tattered swirls, stylized vines unravelling. "He carries it on his clothes," she said, thinking simultaneously that this was a little like Monty and the zucchini and that she was evidently inviting Sukie with this intimate detail to guess that she had slept with Neff. Why? It was nothing to brag about. And yet, it was. How he had sweated! For that matter she had slept with Monty, too; and had never smelled zucchini. One fascinating aspect of sleeping with husbands was the angle they gave you on their wives: they saw them as nobody else did. Neff saw poor dreadful Greta as a kind of quaint beribboned Heidi, a sweet bit of edelweiss he had fetched from a perilous romantic height (they had met in a Frankfurt beer hall while he was stationed in West Germany instead of fighting in Korea), and Monty... Alexandra squinted at Sukie, trying to remember what Monty had said of her. He had said little, being such a would-be gentleman. But once he had let slip, having come to Alexandra's bed from some awkward consultation at the bank, and being still preoccupied, the words "She's a lovely girl, but bad luck, somehow. Bad luck for others, I mean. I think she's fairly good luck for herself." And it was true, Monty had lost a great deal of his family's money while married to Sukie, which everyone had blamed simply on his own calm stupidity. He had never sweated. He had suffered from that hormonal deficiency of the wellborn, an inability to relate himself to the possibility of hard labor. His body had been almost hairless, with that feminine soft bottom.
    "Greta must be great in the sack," Sukie was saying. "All those Kinder. Fü nf, yet."
    Neff had allowed to Alexandra that Greta was ardent but strenuous, very slow to come but determined to do so. She would make a grim witch: those murderous Germans. "We must be nice to her," Alexandra said, back to the subject of Jane. "Speaking to her on the phone yesterday, I was struck by how angry she sounded. That lady is burning up."
    Sukie glanced over at her friend, since this seemed a slightly false note. Some intrigue had begun for Alexandra, some new man. In the split-second of Sukie's glance, Hank with his lolling gray Weimaraner tongue swept two Wheat Thins off the crab platter, which she had set down on a much-marred pine sea chest refinished by an antique dealer to be used as a coffee table. Sukie loved her shabby old things; there was a kind of blazonry in them, a costume of rags affected by the soprano in the second act of the opera. Hank's tongue was coming