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again.
    “Wait a couple seconds before you come out,” Fred said to Patty as he started to go. “I’m coming!” he shouted back to the kitchen. “That was beautiful,” he said in a throaty desperate voice to Patty and then quickly kissed her on the lips. His eyes were shining. “Thank you,” he said fervently (to her astonishment), and then walked briskly toward the living room.
    “Tony!” Fred said as he entered. His voice was full of enthusiasm, an unconscious parody of Tony’s somewhat affected and theatrical speech.
    “Hi, Fred!” Tony boomed back at him, his teeth showing, a cigarette waving in the air, with his wrist cocked backward, “it’s good to see you. I was just explaining to Marion that Betty couldn’t make it.”
    Fred pouted. He meant his exaggerated facial response to show genuine disappointment and sympathy. “Yeah, I heard. Her mom’s not feeling good, huh?”
    Tony shook his head. “Betty’s mother is young to be widowed. What am I saying? I’m thirty-two, it’s time I considered a woman of fifty young for anything, not merely widowhood.”
    “Yeah, it’s rough.” Fred said, and continued, his compassion depleted: “Do you want something to drink?”
    “Love it. What’s available?”
    “We have everything.” Fred had spent a hundred and twenty dollars that morning to make sure of his boast.
    “What are you going to have? I’ll go along with you.”
    “I was going to have red wine. Okay?”
    “Terrific.”
    Fred made his way into the kitchen. His heart raced, he was sweaty, and his stomach felt both light and cramped. His whole system seemed to be under attack by a virus, except for his groin, which was warm and stimulated. He couldn’t look Marion in the eyes. This is terrible, he lectured himself. I love my wife. Marion stood at the counter, her hair up (the way he liked it), dressed just like the wife he always wanted: sensible, potentially maternal, and profoundly middle-class. Fred’s mother was a hysterical immigrant. Marion never shrieked or wailed or turned beet-red, as did his mother with tedious regularity. Marion, when faced with defeat or despair, simply crawled into bed and slept, as if frustration and depression were a flu that merely required rest and plenty of fluids. However, sex with Marion was boring. And Fred was bored with her body, despite Marion’s newly trim figure. Her lovemaking was too passive. She never touched him with any enthusiasm and certainly never serviced his body with anything like the diligence and seriousness with which Fred treated her physical needs.
    Those were Fred’s polite words for his love life: passive, needs, servicing. They were new. Actually, his old vocabulary was more honest, though crude, when he thought privately: she doesn’t give good blow-jobs.
    Lately he had tried to censure even his private feelings about Marion in bed. He now thought to himself in the jargon of popular psychology: servicing, needs, caring, experimentation, spontaneity. The last, spontaneity, was Fred’s new favorite for lunches with male friends. Marion and I aren’t spontaneous in bed anymore, he’d say, hoping, while honestly confessing how bad it was now, to give the impression that he and Marion used to screw in various rooms, in tortured positions, using exotic objects, playing roles. Thus Fred aggrandized his past sexual history while telling the truth about the present. He was glad to have so clever and handy a line available and there wasn’t a friend invited to tonight’s dinner who hadn’t heard him say, “We aren’t spontaneous in bed anymore.”
    The line occurred to him now as he pulled the cork out of a new bottle of wine. “I didn’t mean to yell,” Marion said in a whisper. “I just don’t like Tony sitting alone in our living room. I can imagine him making up witticisms about our furniture.”
    Tony called out to them while Marion was whispering to Fred. “Who’s coming tonight?”
    “David Bergman, my buddy