EVA recalled that time, the Tuesday when he came home from the woman and said about his fellows at the squash court where he hadn’t played with them — Sorry, Mr Tate is not here tonight — he was getting bored with the club, ‘All my contemporaries working out. Most of us past it.’
Past it.
Too late. In middle age the schoolboy adventure of Flight Hadeda, even that night in unadmitted faltering, and threatened by the national carrier he had no means to counter. Inside Eva, sometimes softening; the failure accepted, perhaps he had been too tired, stressed’s the cover-all word, to make love.
What other way to reassure, restore himself. Not past it; proof of the engendered male power of life, arousal to potency: by another woman.
Eva never confronted Michael with the smell of the woman scented on him. She did not know whether he saw the woman some other time, now that he had given up the Tuesday night squash club; when or whether he had given up the affair. She did not know, nor return by the means she and the dog possessed, for evidence.
acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following publications, in whose pages these stories first appeared:
Daedalus: “Tape Measure.” Granta: “Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black.” The Guardian: “Gregor” and “A Frivolous Woman.” Harper’s Magazine: “History.” New Statesman: “Dreaming of the Dead” and “Mother Tongue.” The New Yorker: “Alternative Endings: The Second Sense,” “A Beneficiary,” and “Safety Procedures.” Playboy: “Alternative Endings: The Third Sense.” Salmagundi: “Allesverloren.” Virginia Quarterly Review: “Alternative Endings: The First Sense.”