“What time is it?” She yawns. “Is it six-thirty?”

Arthur nods. “I thought we should get an early start. We can stop for lunch at that place in Northampton.”

“Not there.” She shakes her head. “Do you remember the last time? Please. Let’s stop someplace else.”

Arthur shrugs; he doesn’t remember what was wrong with the restaurant. “I thought it was all right,” he says. “We can try that place across the street. Or we can pack a lunch.”

Miriam rises, dumps her mug of coffee down the sink, and begins to make the pot she has promised herself. Arthur watches his wife, full of a great, sad love for her; he knows this day will be hard. Not the drive, which they have made many times; not seeing O’Neil, their son. Arthur understands it is the girl she dreads. She tries to like the girls he likes, but it is always difficult for her.

“We have to be nice, you know.”

Miriam stops rinsing the pot. “Quit reading my mind.”

“Okay. But we do.” Arthur rises and goes to where she is standing, her hands resting on the edge of the sink. He wraps his arms around her slender waist and smells the beginnings of her tears-a sweet, phosphorescent odor, like melting beeswax.

“It’s stupid, I know.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid at all. Why is it stupid?”

“I feel like someone in a play,” she says. “You know, the mother? That old bitch, can’t let go, nobody’s good enough for her boy.”

“And you’re right. Nobody is. And you’re not like that at all.”

A heavy sigh. Still, Arthur holds on.

“She’s just somebody he met in class. We’ve been through this-how many times?”

“They’re probably sleeping together.”

Arthur nods. “Probably.”

“God, listen to me.” She shakes her head and resumes cleaning the pot. “You probably think it’s just great.”

Arthur doesn’t answer. The cat comes nosing into the kitchen and coils first around Arthur’s feet and then around Miriam’s, asking to be let out.

“That goddamned cat,” Arthur says. He kisses Miriam’s neck, still warm with sleep and the sheets of their bed. “You know, I had the strangest dream,” he says suddenly.

Still facing away, Miriam tips her head against his. “I think I did too. So. Tell me about yours.”

Arthur lets his eyes fall closed; in this interior darkness, his wife’s body pressed against his, her hips and his hips meeting-always the old rhythm implied, the metronome of marriage-he imagines he is asleep and tries to return to his dream, following it down a long hallway, a trick he has used before.

“I’m not sure,” he says after a moment. “I’ve already forgotten.”

“Was it a bad dream?” She is stroking his hair. “I heard you muttering.”

“I don’t know.” Arthur draws air into his chest. “Some of it.”

“What else?”

Arthur thinks. It is her voice he is following now; below him, without warning, he suddenly feels the tug of blackness, a yawning chasm as vast as a stadium. And something else: the smell of baking bread. He has never had a dream like this before, of this he is certain. The memory of it makes him feel strangely happy. He opens his eyes.

“I think you were in it.” He shrugs at nothing; already the information is gone, as is his memory that she, too, has dreamt, and meant to tell him what. “I think you saved me from something, as usual. So it was a good dream.”

She turns to face him then; her eyes still moist, she kisses him quickly and smiles. Up close he sees that her face is tired, and newly thin: his fault. Regret slices through him, and then, filling its wake, a pale and luminous awe. How many times has she performed this duty? He searches her gray eyes with his own. How many times has she been awakened from a sound slumber by a distant cry and made her fumbling way down a darkened hall, to wrap herself around a son or daughter whose arms flailed at nothing, saying, No, no, there’s nothing to fear, none of it was real? He asks this, and for an instant he imagines that the children are asleep upstairs; but of course this is an illusion, a trick of time, like the pea that darts from shell to shell unseen, and so is in both places at once and also neither. No: it is morning in their kitchen, the children are grown and gone, O’Neil at college waiting for their visit, his sister, Kay-moody, mysterious Kay-married now and living her life in New Haven. The passage of years is amazing, a thing of wonder. He stands before it as, in the past, he stood outside the children’s doors, listening to Miriam deliver the comforts he could not: a glass of water, a fresh blanket, Miriam holding the child’s hand in hers to say, squeezing, See? This is real. How many times? A thousand? A thousand thousand? Count the stars in the heavens, Arthur thinks, and you will know that number.

“You’re welcome,” she tells him.

And their day begins.

Each of them has a secret. Here is Arthur’s:

His secret is a letter, which he has delayed writing until this morning, at the office where he works-a letter he will never send. It is a letter to a woman not his wife.

Dear Dora, he writes.

How did it come about? Even Arthur doesn’t know; could not say, precisely, how it is that on this morning in November he, Arthur, age fifty-six, a devoted married man for twenty-nine years, has fallen in love (is he? in love?) with Dora Auclaire. But he has; he does. Confusingly, he loves his wife no less because of it; he dares to think, knowing it to be a kind of arrogance-something terribly, destructively male-that he loves her even more. To think of Miriam is to think of himself, the span of his life and his children’s lives, and to know what is meant by a common destiny. He is human, and therefore weak, but his weakness is for Miriam. He cannot look at her and not feel love, or the fear that comes with love: that someday one of them will be alone.

But Dora Auclaire: he has known her-how long? Ten years? Fifteen? Did they know one another when their children were small? Arthur allows himself the pleasure of thinking of her, and what she might be doing now, at ten-thirty in the morning on a Friday in fall at the busy clinic where she sees her patients: the young girls in trouble, the old men wheezing from years of smoking, the tiny babies who have cried, mysteriously, through the night. He sees her, moving from room to room-neither gliding nor marching, her stride merely purposeful-wearing her clean white coat with jeans and a sweater beneath (not much jewelry; earrings, perhaps, to complement her heart-shaped face, and a single silver chain), touching, advising, jotting notes on a chart in her fine, square print, before excusing herself to telephone the hospital in Cooperstown to reserve a bed for the teenage boy in the examining room whose two-day stomachache is almost certainly not caused by drugs, as his mother claims, but acute appendicitis. Arthur, at his desk four blocks away, sees it all. (And before he knows it, there is Miriam too: plunking a due-date card into the stamper at the checkout desk, refiling spools of shiny microfilm, pushing a cart of books, heavy with facticity, through the quiet, dusty aisles.) She is a lonely, spirited woman in her mid-forties, a physician and a widow with two young sons-a woman who could chop a cord of wood one minute and swab a toddler’s throat the next-and Arthur loves her. He loves her strong, thin hands, and her gleaming stethoscope, and her sadness, which she does not wear around her like a shawl-some garment of mourning-but inside, in a deep place he cannot see but feels: the same grief that he would carry if Miriam were gone. Her husband, Sam, was a carpenter who restored old houses, and it was an old house that killed him; six years ago, on a bright morning in May (Arthur remembers reading of it in the papers), he stepped from the window of a fourth-story cupola of a falling-down Queen Anne on Devereaux Street, placed his weight on a ledge that turned out to be rotten with moisture, and down he went in a rattling rain of tools and equipment, forty feet to the packed-dirt yard.