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"Why is nobody ordering country ribs?" Denise asked Rob Zito. "Why are the waiters not pushing my phenomenally delicious and unusual country ribs?"

"Americans don't like sauerkraut," Zito said.

"The hell they don't. I've seen my reflection in the plates coming back when people order it. I've …

And part of Denise was thinking, as the tea went cold: Shit, she's really into me now. This part of her considered, as if it were an actual threat of harm, the exhausting circumstance: She wants sex every day. This same part of her was thinking also: My God, the way she eats. And: I am not a "lesbi…

When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn't take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now. In hindsight, the week and a half she'd waited before…

Between movies, after midnight, they drank whiskey on the living-room sofa, and in a voice that even for her was unusually squeaky Robin asked permission to ask Denise a personal question. "How often, in, like, a week," she said, "did you and Emile fool around?"

"I'm not the person to ask about …

Robin ended Denise's moratorium with a phone call. She was screeching mad. "Do you know what Jerry Schwartz's movie is about?"

"Uh, Dostoevsky in Germantown?"

"You know it. How come I didn't know it? Because he kept it from me, because he knew what I would think!"

"We're talking about a Gi…