— To the end of privacy and the life of dignity, he said. He was with a dampened woman who had recently found out that her husband had been having an affair with a black woman in Cleveland, an affair that had somehow been going on for seven years. There may even have been a child.

— You can see why coming here is like a breath of fresh air for me, she said.

The women were sympathetic. They knew what she had to do—she had to rethink completely the past seven years.

— That’s right, her companion agreed.

— What is there to be rethought? Phil wanted to know. He was answered with impatience. The deception, they said, the deception—she had been deceived all that time. Adele meanwhile was pouring more wine for herself. Her napkin covered the place where she had already spilled a glass of it.

— But that time was spent in happiness, wasn’t it? Phil asked guilelessly. That’s been lived. It can’t be changed. It can’t be just turned into unhappiness.

— That woman stole my husband. She stole everything he had vowed.

— Forgive me, Phil said softly. That happens every day. There was an outcry as if from a chorus, heads thrust forward like the hissing, sacred geese. Only Adele sat silent.

— 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.

— He pretends he can’t help it, she said. I’ve had the same thing happen. I was going by Bergdorf’s one day and saw a green coat in the window that I liked and I went in and bought it. Then a little while later, someplace else, I saw one that was better than the first one, I thought, so I bought that. Anyway, by the time I was finished I had four green coats hanging in the closet—it was just because I couldn’t control my desires.

None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.

— I talk to her, he admitted.

— And your first wife?

— I talk to her. We have three kids.

— He left her, Adele said. Casanova here.

— Some women have minds like cops, Phil said to no one in particular. This is right, that’s wrong. Well, anyway . . .

He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life.

— Anyway there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.

— It’s right up there, he gestured. It doesn’t look like anything, just like another small star. It’s that extra one, by the Pleiades. He knew all the constellations. He had seen them rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts.

— Come on, you can look at it tomorrow, she said, almost consolingly, though she came no closer to him.

— It won’t be there tomorrow. One time only.