On the third Saturday of August, 1969, half a million people worshipped bliss and marijuana on a farm near Woodstock, New York, while Los Angeles police arrested the Manson family on the other side of the country. The British Army descended on Northern Ireland to quash the Bogside Riots. Sons of the American working class waded through the Mekong Delta with machine guns; Otto Stern, the Nobel laureate, died of a heart attack at his home in California; and my husband’s overpaid New York City lawyer friends drank mint juleps on the veranda of our vacation house by Lake Placid, ignoring the earth-shattering events around us, doing nothing of any lasting value to anyone at all.
            Around an antique card table sat the four junior partners of Finch & Farrow, Attorneys at Law. Bob Younger had collected three-quarters of the poker chips. Carl Beck had drunk three-quarters of the juleps. My cousin Ruby Welsh perched on the knee of her husband Fred, playing Fred’s cards for him. Fred hadn’t glanced at his cards or said a word or touched Ruby in at least five minutes, just chain-smoked Marlboros and stared at the cedar siding of the house. My husband John chain-smoked too, leaving Fred to his thoughts, letting Bob sweep the petty cash, refilling Carl’s silver cup again and again, smiling at Ruby like an indulgent father.
            I stretched across the porch swing next to the table and kept out of the conversation. In violation of the unofficial resort-casual dress code, I wore frayed bellbottom jeans and no shoes, balancing my third-best box of oil pastels on my stomach. I hadn’t bothered to dye away the first gray strands in my elbow-length mop of wavy, disobedient chestnut hair. The underside of my pastel box had accidentally smeared two blotches on my sleeveless white turtleneck. Every time I glanced at Ruby in her pearls and her slim green sheath dress and her lipstick, I felt smug about my navy-blue blotches.
            I sketched the four men at the table, and I sketched the Woodstock-weekend sunset behind them. I sketched Ruby right out of the picture. Just four rich men through the eyes of the worst feminist in New York state. I blended colors with my fingertips: lavender, peach, olive, teal, cobalt, slate, wisteria. Honey and goldenrod for John’s hair. Plum and orange for his tailored paisley shirt, rolled up to the elbows. Rolled-up sleeves were John’s version of casual.
            “Any left in that pitcher?” Carl Beck asked too loudly. He raised his silver julep cup toward the drink cart under John’s elbow. Sweat dripped from Carl’s tight, sandy curls onto the collar of his silk golf shirt, even though the air temperature hovered in the mid-70s with a dry breeze.
            John glanced at the julep pitcher. “Not enough to wet a woodchuck,” he said. Carl laughed too loudly, and John set his own empty cup on the drink cart. “What do you say, Beck? Time to cut our losses? Reservation at the golf club for eight o’clock, wine bar for nine-thirty.”
            Bob Younger smirked. “I’d play another hand or two.” But Bob collected the cards and chips from around the table and shimmied them into their box, and he pocketed his winnings.
            Ruby lifted the cigarette from between her husband’s fingers. “That’s so generous, John. Freddy, isn’t John generous?”
            Fred glanced around as if he had forgotten anyone else was here. “Generous.”
            Ruby said, “We should get a lake house.” She took a slow drag on Fred’s cigarette with her eyes pointed straight at John. “Wouldn’t it be fun to return the favor? Have everyone for a weekend? Fred?”
            Fred retrieved another cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He gave Ruby a gaze so blank he looked blind. This past winter, Fred’s hair, once dark brown, had grayed around the temples and the nape of the neck. He was skinnier than last summer too. His cornflower-blue polo shirt and flared gray trousers hung from his frame. He said, “Remember, John inherited this place, he didn’t buy it.”
            Ruby’s mouth condensed into a single-stroke line. She stood but didn’t turn her eyes to Fred. She leaned over the card table, pointing her Jackie-O bosoms at John and Carl. “Johnny, you’ll have to give us the number of your tailor. Blue really isn’t Fred’s color.”
            I didn’t want to watch Fred crumble, but before I could bury my face in my sketchbook, I saw Fred’s eyes meet John’s. I could have talked all evening with Fred and John. I could have tolerated Carl’s drinking and Bob’s flirting. Ruby reminded me of my ex-husband.
            John wrapped one broad hand around my foot, which I had propped on the arm of the porch swing. “Emily? How about dinner?”
            I met his eyes and bit my lip. I had no desire to go to anywhere with my cousin.
One tiny nod told me John understood. “Shucks. Emmy’s booked into a gallery in Boston in November with one of her old professors from Paris. She’s a little frantic. We’ll have to do without her.”
            I whispered, “I love you,” to which John patted my foot.
            Ruby flounced inside without a glance at anyone but my husband. Fred smoothed the fabric of his trousers and worked on his cigarette for another thirty seconds, expressionless. Bob Younger made noises about how sorry he’d be to miss me, and I knew he meant it, because three times already today, he’d opened doors for me and then patted my derriere as I walked through. The more Bob drank, the longer the pats lasted.
            As I marshalled my pastels back into their box and surveyed the pigment on my shirt, the men filed past John into the house. Fred was last in line, as always. John caught him by the arm to murmur some consolation I couldn’t hear. The two exchanged a few sentences in the doorway, and then they disappeared with the others. They were family, since they had both married Finch girls, and Finch & Farrow was a family firm. But they were pals from Yale Law too, class of ’57. Fred was in a bad way. John never met a lost soul he didn’t try to rescue.
            I leaned on the rough-hewn veranda railing for a moment and watched the last rowing team scull across the lake toward their club dock. Then I trudged through the main room to the kitchen, made myself a tray of bread, cheese, cola, and apple slices, balanced my dinner on top of my pastels and sketchbook, and mounted the broad oak stairs to my art studio on the top floor of the house.
            There was no place on this side of the Atlantic to compare with the palatial cottage John had inherited from his grandparents. The main room rose three stories high, with vaulted open-beam ceilings, red hardwood floors and walls, and a collage of antique Persian rugs on the floor, insured for more than we’d paid for our Manhattan flat. The kitchen and laundry and bedrooms and bathrooms and library and pantry stacked up around the front and sides of the main room in a U, leaving three stories of glorious living-room windows to face the lake.
            But the pinnacle of the house was the studio John had earmarked for me on the top floor, tucked away at the front of the house in a gable. It had been John’s boyhood bedroom every summer during the war. Some men might have reprimanded a wife who dripped paint on the floorboards of their childhood bedroom or left oily charcoal fingerprints on the light-switch plate or replaced good storm windows with stained glass that had turned out too sloppy to sell. But John just sandwiched a second-hand armchair between my supply shelves, cleared a space on the floor for a portable record player, and stretched out to research upcoming cases while I worked. No sense making himself a home office, he said, since he hated being alone. So when we were here together, we listened to Elvis and Ella Fitzgerald and Glenn Gould and Muddy Waters, and John read legal briefs while I painted.
            I climbed the staircase past the second-floor bedrooms. I set my sketchbook and oil pastels and dinner tray on the walnut table next to the studio door. Edith Piaf landed on the record player. In a fit of remorse, I tossed one of John’s old Oxford shirts over my turtleneck, as if a smock could do any good after I had already ruined my shirt. But the turtleneck ceased to matter as soon as I had squeezed paint onto a fresh palette and turned to my easel.
            I was working on a painting of my own naked body as it looked when I stared down at my toes in the shower—pudgy midsection and all. John’s grandmother had installed a green bathtub in the master suite of the cottage the year before she died, so I had mail-ordered two large tubes of celadon green for the background of the painting. My wet hair already swirled up from the bottom of the canvas in mottled soot brown, cut with five frizzy gray tendrils.
            I heard voices downstairs for a few more minutes, then our car engine motored away down the drive. With my cleanest two fingers, I turned up the volume on the portable record player. I sang along to “La Vie en Rose.” I accidentally smeared celadon green onto my face next to my ear. I pushed celadon green out to the edge of the canvas and added highlights in a salmon pink-brown.
            The LP finished. I bent to flip it to the B side.
            And there in the hallway, watching me, staring at me, was Fred Welsh. His bright blue eyes shone from gaunt eye sockets in the semi-dark.
            “Mother of Christ!” I brought my paint brush to my chest before I could stop myself. Salmon pink swabbed the collar of my smock. “You’re at dinner.”
            Fred blinked as if he hadn’t expected to be visible. His face had a slow quality, as if every time he formed an expression, his muscles were discovering the shape for the first time. “I thought you heard me on the stairs. I’m sorry. I should have said something.”
            I shook my head and lowered my paintbrush into a cloudy Mason jar of paint thinner. I puffed out a lungful of air to calm myself. “Jesus and Mary.”
            “The doctor has me on pills for my nerves, so I can sleep. But then I can’t eat much,” he said.
            I laid two twitching fingers on the table for support. “Have you thought about changing doctors?”
            Fred nodded yes, then craned his neck to look at the ceiling. “This is paradise up here. I bet it looks like the walls are on fire when the sun hits that stained glass.”
            “Don’t look too close. I lined up the joints in that window wrong.” I wiped my fingers on a rag and then lifted the needle arm to silence the staticky record player.
            Fred said, “I’m sorry. I’ve disturbed you.”
            “No. You’ve surprised me.” With the rag, I blotted pink paint off the collar of my smock.
            “You’ve got—” Fred reached a hand toward me, but changed his mind and dropped his arm. “There’s paint in your hair.”
            “Most days.” I pawed through my jar of paintbrushes for a thin brush.
            Fred looked as if he wanted to smile but couldn’t figure out how. “Will you mind very much if I talk to you?” he said.
            “Fred. Honestly.” I squeezed a tiny blob of copper-brown paint onto my palette. “How many years have we known each other, and you ask me that?”
            Fred lowered himself onto the couch like an old man, although he was only 41. “But John is usually…well…well, have you seen the news? That music festival down in Bethel? That crowd is really something else.”
            I used the copper-colored paint to add rust detail around the shower drain. “I wanted to go, but John had already planned to have everyone here this weekend.”
            “They’ve closed the whole State Thruway. People are abandoning their cars on the road.”
            “Sounds wild. I should’ve gone. I would’ve liked to hear Joan Baez. But I heard a rumor Joni Mitchell might put a couple of her paintings in a gallery show with me in Montreal in January. She might show up in person.”
            “Sounds like a charmed life,” Fred said. “Music stars and art galleries.”
            I lifted my head to look him in the face. I kept my expression neutral and stared at him. He stared back. His sunburned cheekbones almost seemed to poke through his skin. His gelled hair was two inches long on top, but the sides blazed so razor-close to his temples I could see freckles on the sides of his head. It was a haircut out of the 1940s, as unfashionable as unfashionable could be on Woodstock weekend. It suited him.
            “You’re always invited to my shows,” I said when I couldn’t bear the silence.
            “Thank you anyway. Ruby would make a scene if I brought her, and she would make a scene if I left her home.”
            I leaned my face close to the canvas to dot in specks of rust. “It’s just an art gallery.”
            “Emily, this…may I ask you a personal question?”
            My back stiffened. “Oh, lord. What did my cousin do now?”
            “No, it’s not Ruby this time, it’s…John said the oddest thing to me a few minutes ago. I can’t get it out of my head. He said to me, ‘If my wife agrees to sleep with you, do yourself a favor and don’t ask her about the scars until after.’”
            My knees didn’t give out, exactly, but I sank onto my heels in shock.
            “Now, please don’t think…this is not precisely…Emily?”
            I felt like I was suspended in the air. Buried. I couldn’t speak. My vision exploded with tiny rust-copper dots of light.
            “John told me you needed someone. But John loves you.”
            This wasn’t part of the deal. I closed my eyes. This isn’t part of the deal, John. I shoved hair off my face. My fingers tangled around a knot of wet paint and smeared it against my cheek. My entire bloodstream felt like it had been replaced by adrenaline, or maybe with paint. I liked Fred. I liked the evenings when he came to our apartment for supper to discuss cases with John or ask me for advice about Ruby. I liked his strange eyes and his old-fashioned haircut and his wide jaw. I didn’t want to feel awkward across the dinner table from him for the next thirty years.
            Finally, when I couldn’t think of a single other thing to do, I looked up. Fred perched on the front of the loveseat with his back straight, both feet square on the floor in brown dress socks. He ran an unlit cigarette back and forth across his lower lip, then clenched it in the corner of his mouth. His irises were clear, eerie, almost colorless, blue like window glass. I couldn’t break his gaze once my eyes had found him. I swallowed.
            John had no right to say that.”
            “Clearly.” Fred flipped a lighter out of his pants pocket. He cupped his hand around the cigarette in his mouth and lit it without breaking eye contact. “But say it he very much did.”
            “And then you said it to me.”
            The Fred Welsh I saw on the weekends, tethered to my horrible cousin, smoking himself hoarse and drinking himself unconscious, had nothing to do with the crystal-eyed dragon who watched me from Fred’s skull now. Here was the trial lawyer, the lance corporal who had left two toes in Korea, the star swimmer, the point.
            “Send me away,” he said, “and I will go.”
            I breathed long and slow, then raised myself back to my feet. My fingers fumbled at my smock buttons like wooden blocks attached to my hands. “But I’m not a whore.”
            “But?” Fred said. “You’ve shown a painting at the god-almighty Sidney Janis Gallery. Your father owns two-thirds of the firm I work for. You’re the most terrifying woman I’ve ever met. If you think I’m asking for some blowjob I could get any afternoon in Times Square for twenty dollars…just why did John tell me that?”
            An ill feeling crept up my windpipe, muggy and swollen. Fever sweat collected in the small of my back. The smell of paint suddenly made me want to vomit. “I can’t talk about my marriage.”
            Fred sucked in smoke, exhaled, and tapped his ashes into John’s ashtray. “So I’m right.”
            Speechless with terror, I manhandled my smock onto a nail on the wall.
            “John Farrow never looked at Playboy when he lived with me and Carl in law school. I never saw him go on a date. He barely even looks at you now, not the way Bob and I…well. I just got to wondering.”
            I said, “That kind of wondering gets people hurt.”
            Fred reached out his empty hand and touched the tips of my fingers. “Your marriage isn’t any of my business, unless it is.”
            My painting session was over for the evening, whether Fred stayed or not. I needed a drink. “Can I show you something nice about this house?”
            “Better than this studio?”
            “No. Just nice. And it’s near the liquor cabinet.”
            Fred took a last drag from his cigarette and rubbed it out. He followed me down two flights of stairs and back through the main room to the veranda. I gulped fresh air on the stairway, trying to quell my nausea. I switched on the bare lightbulb outside over the veranda door.
            Using a square support post, I hoisted myself onto the broad veranda railing. I stood on the beam with my back to the lake.
            “What are you doing?” Fred asked in a rush.
            I let go of the post and tipped myself backward off the wooden beam with my arms spread wide.
            “Emily?”
            Cool air whistled through my clothes. I free-fell a story and a half until I hit the lake, where John’s grandparents had dredged out a twelve-foot-deep swimming hole. I just had time to see Fred’s head appear in silhouette over the railing before I hit the water.
My muscles clenched at the cold shock. For two or three seconds, I couldn’t even kick toward the surface. My jeans felt like chain mail. But when I resurfaced, gulped oxygen, and wiped my hair out of my eyes, the nausea was gone, and the look on Fred’s face above me was worth it. I shivered and treaded water.
            “Em? Emily?”
            “I dare you.”
            “You scared me half to blazes.”
            “I dare you.”
Fred’s head disappeared from the light, and I heard a shuffle and clunk on the veranda. He pulled himself up onto the railing, socks and all. On his face was savage determination. “To hell with you if you think I won’t.”
            “Let’s see it, then.”
            Fred gave the most graceful, practiced swimmer’s leap I had ever seen. But at the last moment, he crossed his legs into a colossal cannonball. The splash knocked me underwater.
            I came up sputtering. By the time I could open my eyes, Fred was shaking water out of his hair, Labrador-retriever-style.
            And then, shadowed from the veranda light, in the water, in his clothes, Fred Welsh actually laughed. Even in the shadows, his hollow face filled with life.
            So I took his jaw in both my hands and kissed him.
            I watched Fred’s face clench and relax as he treaded water. Without a word, he wrapped one arm around my ribs and towed me to the shore with a lifeguard’s easy sidestroke. He pressed my breasts against him. As we picked our way over the slick rocks and crossed the lawn in the dark, we held hands to steady ourselves.
            I rattled open the side door to the laundry room and switched on the light next to the towel rack. My white sleeveless turtleneck, already smeared with navy pastel, was now covered in soil and sand too. Watery green oil paint had dripped onto the shirt from my hair. My jeans dribbled lake water onto the threadbare floor mats, which John’s nanny had sewn on a foot-pedal Singer thirty years ago. Fred’s clothes clung to him, betraying exactly how much weight he had lost over the winter.
            I peeled off my shirt and jeans and dropped them onto the floor, hoping to silence Fred’s questions. My sopping white bra and panties had gathered almost as much lake silt as my shirt—and the wet underwear had turned translucent. “You want to jump again?” I asked.
            Instead of answering, Fred ran his fingers over the four visible scars on my abdomen, paused, then trailed his thumb down my left leg to the front of my upper thigh.
            You have a tattoo?”
            I turned my eyes to the line of ocean waves inked across my leg. “Did it myself. I was drunk. It was a dare. Party in Paris.”
            “How…?”
“Charcoal and vodka in a blender, and you’ve got ink. Sterilize a needle and attach it to the end of a pencil. Poke, poke, poke. Easy.” I raised my jiggly thigh to show Fred the tattoo in the light. “Used to be my calling card, giving tattoos at parties. Art student. You know how it is.”
            “There’s so much I never asked you about.” He touched the tattoo again with one finger—traced it up and down in the wave pattern. “So you and John are—.”
            I interrupted him. “I’ll give you one.”
            “What?”
            “A tattoo. I dare you.”
Fred looked up at the ceiling and laughed, not the same ecstatic way he’d laughed in the water, but the laugh of a chess player who’d lost a match. He stripped out of his shirt and slacks, leaving only his briefs and socks. I could see his ribs. “Here.” He tapped his bare chest over his heart. “Waves. Like yours.”
            I nodded.
            “Will it hurt?”
            “Yeah.”
            He glanced in the direction of the front door. “What if everyone comes back early?”
            I bent and collected the wet clothes from the floor. For a moment, I turned away from him to fill the washing machine. “What if they come back late?” I said.
            Fred’s hand prodded my fleshy, bare shoulder, urging me to turn back toward him. I let his hand guide me, but I trembled. He pinned me against the washer with his hips. “I don’t know who you are,” he said, staring down at me. “I know you so well, but…”
            I wanted to vomit again at the thought of losing my friend Fred. In an ocean wave pattern, I traced one finger across his bare chest over his heart. “I’ll put charcoal in the blender.”
            He nodded and released me from against the washer, and I realized I had been clenching my shoulders. He flicked lake water off his neck with one hand. Like a skeletal shadow, he disappeared upstairs to change out of his sodden underwear, leaving me to measure charcoal and vodka into the kitchen blender, place a needle in a pot of boiling water on the stove, and towel-dry my impossible hair in the bathroom of the master suite. I swept sand off the bathroom floor out of courtesy to John, even though John grew up with lake sand underfoot every summer of his life. I used paint thinner to work the last celadon green out of my hair.
            I waffled in front of my bureau for a moment, wondering what to wear, before I slid into a pair of pink cotton pajama shorts and the black silk robe I had brought back from Paris. No brassiere. If everyone came home early, they came home early. I assembled materials from my art studio upstairs, then returned to the kitchen to check on my charcoal ink in the blender.
            If the main room was the focus of the house, the kitchen was an afterthought, barely big enough to prepare a decent meal, with chipped linoleum countertops and a stained tile floor. I loved it almost as much as my art studio. I found Fred sitting at the yellow Formica table with yesterday’s Washington Post, smoking. In front of him were two balloon glasses from the liquor cabinet and a bottle of Couprie hors d’age cognac.
            “It was going to be a thank-you gift for you and John tomorrow,” he said, gesturing to the bottle as I turned off the blender and the boiling water on the stove. “Something French.” He was still bare-chested, but he wore a pair of olive-and-beige-striped pajama pants cinched at the waist with a drawstring.
            For only the third time since I had known him, he was sockless, displaying the mangled and missing toes on his right foot.
            I examined the cognac bottle. “From you, not from Ruby, I assume, since it’s thoughtful,” I said. I used a teaspoon to fish the sterilized needle from the hot water on the stove. With singed fingertips, I shoved the eye-end of the needle into a pencil eraser, then fastened it in place with adhesive tape.
            “Correct.” Fred poured us each a drink. He pushed one glass across the table toward me and looked me in the eyes. “Here’s to thinking of others.”
            I raised my glass. “Here’s to dares.”
            He cocked an eyebrow, but he sipped. We drained our glasses in silence.
            “You’ll have to imagine the Paris-art-student-party atmosphere,” I said after I finished, setting my glass down. I wiped the area over Fred’s heart with a cotton ball and rubbing alcohol from the first-aid kit above the stove. “Picture someone playing Bob Dylan on an out-of-tune guitar and five people shouting at each other in French about abstract expressionism.”
            “I’m sorry I never got the chance.” Fred pulled out a second chair for me as I placed a dish of charcoal ink next to his elbow.
            I pushed the extra chair back under the table. Instead, I settled myself in his lap, needle in hand, one thigh on either side of his hips. Only one of my feet could reach the floor, so most of my weight rested on his knees. I hoped he would ask me easier questions this way.
            Fred—fiery prosecutor Fred—gave me a look so startled I almost pitied him. “Do you give all your tattoos sitting in men’s laps?”
            I dipped my needle into the ink. “How do you think I met my first husband?” I said.
            And then I jabbed his chest.
            Fred squawked and gasped.
            “Stay still.”
            He obeyed but squeezed his eyes shut. “You had a first husband?”
            “Étienne. I did a cross on his forearm. He didn’t squirm this much.”
            Fred exhaled and opened his eyes to stare at my hands.
            “You want to know a trick?” I said. “You think about something that makes you angry, and I poke you, and you yell. It’s like psychotherapy, but it’s free.”
            He nodded and closed his eyes again, breathing carefully, squeezing his nails into his palms.
            “For instance, why did you marry my cousin?” I asked.
For a moment, Fred was silent. Then he howled, long and raw. I jabbed
            him over and over. He screamed again and again. He bellowed beyond any physical response to the needle, keening, overflowing. His hands found my hips and tangled in the pockets of my robe. I ignored the pain in my ear and let him wail. He had tears in his eyes, although he fought them. He snuffled, gulped, yowled, coughed, sweated, screamed. I was listening to a hurricane.
            “There,” I said finally. I wiped blood from his chest with rubbing alcohol. “Not so bad, was it?”
            Fred gave one last violent exhale. “That was unbelievable,” he said. He leaned his damp forehead on my shoulder and panted as if he had run a mile.
            “Can I bandage it?” I whispered. I ran a hand down his cheek.
            He nodded and watched while I taped a sterile gauze pad and a square of Saran Wrap over the tattoo to protect it. With an unsteady hand, he poured more cognac into each of our glasses, then drank his portion in one gulp. “You know…well, John knows. Only John. Ruby and I have been trying for a baby for eight years. I’ve been to three different urologists to puzzle out what’s wrong. I talked to the minister at my parents’ church about it too. Ruby said maybe I wasn’t man enough to be a father. I was starting to think she was right. But she left a letter from her gynecologist on the kitchen table last week. She had an appointment to check on her IUD. She’s been on birth control this whole time, telling me there’s something wrong with my plumbing.”
            “Oh, God.” I lifted my hand toward my mouth, then reconsidered and beckoned for Fred’s cigarette. He handed it over. I coughed when the smoke hit my lungs, but the gesture seemed right. “What did Ruby say?”
            “I didn’t want to hear her justify it. I didn’t mention it to her.”
            I handed the cigarette back. Careful not to bump the new tattoo, I pulled Fred into an embrace, cradling his head on my chest. Tears welled onto his cheeks for a moment before he straightened and brushed them away. “That’s why John told you about my scars,” I said, “isn’t it?”
            Fred placed my cognac glass in my hand. His voice was sad and gentle. “Will you please explain it to me? You and John.”
            I brushed my free hand through the silver hair on the back of his neck. “I can’t.”
            “I’m closer with John than my actual brother. I’ll never hurt him.”
            “I can’t.”
            Fred’s lips twitched. I could swear he smiled for a tenth of a second. He said, “Emily Farrow, I dare you.”
            Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ. My tear ducts stung and my nostrils flared before I could control them. I struggled up off Fred’s lap and plastered my back against the kitchen cupboards, wild-eyed. I downed the Couprie in two gulps and slammed my glass onto the lemon-yellow countertop. With the back of my hand, I wiped excess cognac from my upper lip. “Go to hell,” I said.
            “Already there.”
            “I can’t.”
            He extended one sweet hand to read the tattoo on my thigh like Braille. “I dare you.”
            I slid down the cupboard door until I was sitting on the floor, staring up at him.
            “You won’t even whisper this in your sleep.”
            “I promise.”
“You don’t blab it to Jesus Christ when you’re down on your knees. Not nobody.”
            Fred’s dragon eyes fixed on me.
            “I was with Étienne for seven months in Paris, and then he tried to stab my womb out.”
            “What?”
I shrugged. “He missed. No surprise. He failed his anatomical drawing class. He hit my intestines. I got away by jumping out a second-story window onto the sidewalk, and someone called an ambulance from the cafe next door. I lost five inches of intestine. Broke my ankle.”
            Fred’s hollow chest heaved. “How did I never know?”
            “Would you tell your husband’s colleagues, if you were me? Hello, I’m Emily, and I’m divorced?”
            Fred tilted his head to acknowledge the point. “Impolitic, fair,” he said. “But what does that have to do with John?”
            “I’m getting to John,” I said. “Étienne came to the hospital and tried to take me home four hours after the anesthesia wore off. He told the doctors I was crazy, I was suicidal, I needed pills. Nobody at home even knew I was married. I didn’t know what to do until I thought of telephoning John. And John showed up. He actually came. He flew to Paris that day. I’ll never forget. Suddenly, the police listened to me. You’ve heard how John speaks French with hardly any accent? He told Étienne I would drop charges in exchange for a divorce. It was a miracle.”
                        “So then you married John out of gratitude?”
            I laughed without smiling. “You said you knew about John and women.”
            “I said I wondered.”
            “John needed help, Fred,” I said. “Two ladies from his parents’ church spotted him coming out of a gay bathhouse near Washington Square, and there had been some scandal about him and a court clerk the year before, and people were talking. Our fathers wanted to let him go from the firm.”
            “Oh, I remember that clerk. Renzo Frisina. He and John were friendly for a while, and then they weren’t, but I never…ah, boy, Johnny.”
            “Renzo. Exactly. So John said I could do what I wanted, see anyone I wanted, he just needed to play house with someone he could trust. I told him I wanted a husband who wouldn’t stab me. He said all right.”
            “Then…have you and John never been intimate?”
            I shook my head no. I reached up to the counter for my balloon glass and held it out to Fred, who refilled it. I swirled the cognac and stared into it. “You remember those riots in June at that gay bar in the Village?”
            “That Stonewall Inn mess?” Fred said. “One of the rioters signed on with a friend of mine at Birnbaum-Mathisson. I think they’ll win their case. What a bloody unamerican overstep of the First-Amendment right to free—.”
            “Yeah, well, John doesn’t say much about it, but he’s been different since June,” I said.
            Fred fell silent.
“Maybe that’s why he said what he said to you. Maybe he’s ready to talk to his father. Maybe the timing’s better now.” I sipped from my glass. An alcohol flush had risen on my cheeks. “This is really beautiful cognac.”
            Fred avoided my eyes. “For everything you and John have done for me, it’s the least I could…well…Emmy, if I were to ask you about your lovers, you’d…”
            “I’d ask you about your girls in Times Square.”
            “Shit.” Fred laughed and blinked away tears. “You should do cross-examinations.”
            It’s not hard to have affairs in my line of work, if that’s what you’re asking. Gallery parties. Collectors who like lady artists.”
            Fred fixed his eyes above my head. “I hated the brothels in Korea. All I wanted was a nice wife and some kids. The boys in my unit made a bit of sport about it. I would’ve walked into a bayonet if I’d known I’d spend my thirties paying women to smile at me.”
            We stared at each other for a moment. “Then tell me what you want from me,” I said finally.
            Fred puffed out his cheeks and gave a laugh that turned into a smoker’s cough. I expected him to proposition me, but instead, he said, “Right now, I’d mostly love some food, if there’s anything in the Frigidaire. I haven’t been so hungry since October.”
            Fred had clearly been hungry since long before October. My stomach was complaining too—I had abandoned my dinner upstairs in the art studio. I sliced a fresh baguette and another block of cheese on a cutting board, set it on the table, and reached for the empty dining chair next to Fred.
            With a firm hand, Fred slid my chair back under the table. He pulled me into his lap. Emaciated as he was, his limbs still had power. He ran three fingers through my wild, damp hair before we munched on bread and cheese, sipping expensive cognac, nose to cheek, wordless.
            “I think I’ll have to quit the firm,” Fred said when most of the cheese and all the bread had gone. “Ruby won’t be a cheap divorce. It’ll take time.”
            “You won’t stab me?”
            He pressed his nose into my collarbone. “I won’t.”
            “And you’ll come to Montreal with me?” I asked. “In January?”
            “Well, I heard Joni Mitchell might be there.”
            I actually giggled then, as if I were fifteen years old and Fred was Frank Sinatra.
“I’ve never seen you smile like that before,” Fred said. “You have the most beautiful—”
But instead of finishing the thought, he took my jaw in both his hands, and he kissed me. He kissed me and didn’t stop. He kissed me as we stood. He kissed me against the kitchen cupboard, so we nearly knocked over the blender of leftover charcoal ink. He kissed me as I pulled him by two fingers to the loveseat in the main room.
            And that’s where we still were, re-clothed and basking in sweat, when John’s car motored up the driveway at eleven o’clock. Fred was thunking out “Peace in the Valley” on John’s old classical guitar. He hadn’t touched a guitar since Korea, and his voice was shot with twenty years of cigarettes, and we both giggled every time he missed a chord. As he played, I attempted to sketch him in charcoal, except he jostled my sketchpad anytime he moved.
            Ruby lost her mind, of course, as soon as she saw us. She lunged at Fred’s chest and ripped at the tape and cling film. “Freddy! What happened to you?”
            John met my eyes from the door and gave a tiny nod and a smile. Carl stumbled against the wall, oblivious. Bob just gaped.
            “Don’t touch that!” Fred said, but it was too late.
            Ruby’s manicured fingers froze at the sight of ink under the bandage. “You put your hands on him,” she said.
            “Far out,” Bob said. “Is that a real tattoo?”
            “You touched my husband’s bare chest.” Ruby raised her button nose and glared at me, the way she glared when our grandmother gave me Great-Grandma Charlotte’s gold necklace for high-school graduation.
            Fred set the guitar down. He glanced at me. “What happens if a new tattoo gets wet?”
            “I’ll probably have to go over it with the needle again.”
            “I can handle that.”
            Ruby leaned her drunk face toward me and shrieked. “You got into your little pajamas, and you put your hussy hands on my husband, and you marked him?”
Fred plucked the sketchbook out of my hands and set it on the loveseat cushion. “A moment of your time, please, Emily?”
            Ruby tried to push Fred backward, but he stood. Ruby almost fumbled her footing. My panicked chills returned. As I followed Fred to the veranda, Ruby scrambled after us, still yelling. I wanted to retch.
            Then Fred climbed up onto the veranda railing and extended a hand to me. “I dare you,” he said, and he smiled, and I understood.
            “What the hell are you doing?” Ruby said from the doorway when she saw me next to Fred on the wide wooden beam, my hand in his.
            From behind her came John’s voice. “Looks like last one in the lake is a rotten egg.”
            Fred and I hit the water laughing.

Kirsten Dyck has published poems, a monograph, journal articles, and book chapters. She works as an English Language Fellow with the U.S. State Department in the Philippines, where she teaches English literature, writing, and pedagogy