— I didn’t leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been for more than a year. He said it evenly, almost as if it had happened to someone else. It was my son’s tutor, he explained. I fell in love with her.

— And you began something with her? Morrissey suggested.

— Oh, yes.

There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even breathe.

— Within two or three days, he confessed.

— There in the house?

Phil shook his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was abandoning himself.

— I didn’t do anything in the house.

— He left his wife and children, Adele repeated.

— You knew that, Phil said.

— Just walked out on them. They’d been married fifteen years, since he was nineteen.

— We hadn’t been married fifteen years.

— They had three children, she said, one of them retarded.

Something had happened—he was becoming speechless, he could feel it in his chest like a kind of nausea. As if he were giving up portions of an intimate past.

— He wasn’t retarded, he managed to say. He was . . . having trouble learning to read, that’s all.