He took a sleeping pill and turned off the bedside lamp. He liked this new way of seeing the house, as if the entire structure were female and he entered it to be at its center with Lydia; and she had made a place for him, his den, as she gave him a place in her body. A great tenderness welled in him. He regretted his rebukes of Lydia, through the years, and his infidelities when he was alone overseas. These were with prostitutes. He had acted in privacy and had never told anyone. Afterward, he had forgiven himself in the same way that, on hungover mornings, he had absolved himself for being a drunken fool: he sloughed off remorse as he shaved his whiskers; then he put on his uniform and went to work. He did not justify his adultery; he believed a better man would have been chaste; but he saw it as an occupational hazard of soldiering. He was an active man, and his need for a woman’s love was nocturnal, or it seemed to be. But during months of separation from Lydia, that need moved into daylight: a tender loneliness, a sense of being unattached, of floating near the boundaries of fear. Also, Robert Townsend loved women: a woman’s eyes could move his blood as the moon pulls the sea. It was neither easy nor simple for him to live for a year without the nakedness of a woman; he had done his best, and on more than a thousand nights he had prevailed.