He ran a hand through his hair. He put the letter down and ran both hands through his hair. That punched, gasping feeling was still there in his chest. The feeling that his heart was pumping air instead of blood. He felt fright and pain and confusion. But of the three, the dominant feeling, the overriding emotion, was terrible fright.

The letter glared up at him and shouted:

I ENJOYED FUCKING THE SHIT OUT OF HER

Now it was this line his eyes fixed upon, not wanting to leave. He could hear the drone of a plane in the sky outside, leaving the jetport, heading up, heading out, making for points unknown, and he thought, I ENJOYED FUCKING THE SHIT OUT OF HER.

Crude, that's crude. Yes sir and yes ma'am, yes indeedy. It was the hack of a blunt knife. FUCKING THE SHIT OUT OF HER, what an image that made. Nothing fancy about it. It was like getting a splash in the eyes from a squirtgun loaded up with battery acid.

He tried hard to think coherently and

(I ENJOYED)

just couldn't

(FUCKING THE SHIT OUT OF HER)

do it.

Now his eyes went to the last line and that was the one he read over and over again, as if trying to cram the sense of it somehow into his brain. That huge feeling of fright kept getting in the way.

DO YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS?

Yes. All of a sudden he had all kinds of questions. The only thing was, he didn't seem to want answers to any of them.

A new thought crossed his mind. What if Roger hadn't gone home?

Often he poked his head into Vic's office before leaving if there was a light on. He might be even more likely to do so tonight, with the trip pending. The thought made Vic feel panicky, and an absurd memory surfaced: all those times he had spent masturbating in the bathroom as a teenager, unable to help himself but terribly afraid everyone must know exactly what he was up to in there. If Roger came in, he would see something was wrong. He didn't want that. He got up and went to the window, which looked down six stories to the parking lot which served the building. Roger's bright-yellow Honda Civic was gone from its space. He had gone home.

Pulled out of himself, Vic listened. The offices of Ad Worx were totally silent. There was the resonating quiet that seems the sole property of business quarters after hours. There was not even the sound of old Mr. Steigmeyer, the custodian, rattling around. He would have to sign out in the lobby. He would have to Now there was a sound. At first he didn't know what it was. It came to him in a moment. It was whimpering. The sound of an animal with a smashed foot. Still looking out the window, he saw the cars left in the parking lot double, then treble, through a film of tears.

Why couldn't he get mad? Why did he have to he so fucking scared?

An absurd, antique word came to mind. jilted, he thought. I've been jilted.

The whimpering sounds kept coming. He tried to lock his throat, and it did no good. He lowered his head and gripped the convector grille that ran below the window at waist height. Gripped it until his fingers hurt, until the metal creaked and protested.

How long had it been since he had cried? He had cried the night Tad was born, but that had been relief. He had cried when his dad died after fighting grimly for his life for three days after a massive heart attack struck him, and those tears, shed at seventeen, had been like these, burning, not wanting to come; it was more like bleeding than crying. But at seventeen it was easier to cry, easier to bleed. When you were seventeen you still expected to have to do your share of both.

He stopped whimpering. He thought it was done. And then a low cry came out of him, a harsh,- wavering sound, and he thought..

Was that me? God, was it me that made that sound?

The tears began to slide down his cheeks. There was another harsh sound, then another. He gripped the convector grille and cried.

Forty minutes later he was sitting in Deering Oaks Park. He had called home and told Donna he would be late. She started to ask why, and why he sounded so strange. He told her he would be home before dark. He told her to go ahead and feed Tad. Then he hung up before she could say anything else.

Now he was sitting in the park.

The tears had burned off most of the fear. What was left was an ugly slag of anger. That was the next level in this geological column of knowledge. But anger wasn't the right word. He was enraged. He was infuriated. It was as if he had been stung by something. A part of him had recognized that it would be dangerous for him to go home now ... dangerous for all three of them.

It would be so pleasurable to hide die wreckage by making more; it would (let's face it) he mindlessly pleasurable to punch her cheating fact in.

He was sitting beside the duckpond. On the other side, a spirited Frisbee game was going on. He noticed that all four of the girls playing - and two of the boys - were on roller skates. Roller skates were big this summer. He saw a young girl in a tube top pushing a cart of pretzels, peanuts, and canned soft drinks. Her face was soft and fresh and innocent. One of the guys playing Frisbee flipped her the disk; she caught it deftly and flipped it back. In the sixties, Vic thought, she would have been in a commune, diligently picking bugs off tomato plants. Now she was probably a member in good standing of the Small Business Administration.

He and Roger used to come down here to eat their lunches sometimes. That had been in the first year. Then Roger noticed that, although the pond looked lovely, there was a faint but definite odor of putridity hanging around it ... and the small house on the rock in the center of the pond was whitewashed not with paint but with gullshit. A few weeks later, Vic had noted a decaying rat floating amid the condoms and gum wrappers at the edge of the pond. He didn't think they had been back since then.

The Frisbee, a bright red, floated across the sky.

The image that had provoked his anger kept recurring. He couldn't keep it away. It was as crude as his anonymous correspondent's choice of words had been, but he couldn't ditch it. He saw them screwing in his and Donna's bedroom. Screwing in their bed. What he saw in this mind-movie was every bit as explicit as one of those grainy X-rated pictures you see at the State Theater on Congress Street. She was groaning, sheened lightly with perspiration, beautiful. Every muscle pulled taut. Her eyes had that hungry look they got when the sex was good, their color darker. He knew the expression, he knew the posture, he knew the sounds. He had

thought - thought - he was the only one who did. Not even her mother and father would know about that.

Then he would think of the man's penis - his cock - going up inside her. In the saddle; that phrase came and clanged in his mind idiotically, refusing to die away. He saw them screwing to a Gene Autry soundtrack: I'm back in the saddle again, out where a friend is a friend....

It made him feel creepy. It made him feel outraged. It made him feel infuriated.

The Frisbee soared and came down. Vic followed its course.

He had suspected something, yes. But suspecting was not like knowing; he knew that now, if nothing else. He could write an essay on the difference between suspecting and knowing. What made it doubly cruel was the fact that he had really begun to believe that the suspicions were groundless. And even if they weren't, what you didn't know couldn't hurt you. Wasn't that right?

If a man is crossing a darkened room with a deep, open hole in the middle of it, and if he passes within inches of it, he doesn't need to know he almost fell in. There is no need for fear. Not if the lights are off.

Well, he hadn't fallen in. He had been pushed. The question was, What was he going to do about it? The angry part of him, hurt, bruised, and bellowing, was not in the slightest inclined to be

'adult', to acknowledge that there were slips on one or both sides in a great many marriages. Fuck the Penthouse Forum, or Variations, or whatever they're calling it these days, that's my wife we're talking about, she was screwing someone

(out where a friend is a friend)

when my back was turned, when Tad was out of the house The images began to unreel again, crumpled sheets, straining bodies, soft sounds. Ugly phrases, terrible terms kept crowding up like a

bunch of freaks looking at an accident: nooky, hair pie, put the boots to her, shot my load, I-don't-fuck-for-fortune-and-I-don't-fuck-for-fame-but-the-way-l-fuck-ya-mamma-is-a-goddam-shame, my turtle in your mud, bank for the gang, stoop for the troops Inside my wife! he thought, agonized, hands clenching. Inside my wife!

But the angry, hurt part acknowledged - grudgingly that he couldn't go home and beat the hell out of Donna. He could, however, take Tad and go. Never mind the explanations. Let her try and stop him, if she had cheek enough to do it. He didn't think she would. Take Tad, go to a motel, get a lawyer. Cut the cord cleanly, and don't look back.

But if he just grabbed Tad and took him to a motel, wouldn't the boy be frightened? Wouldn't he want an explanation? He was only four, but that was old enough to know when something was badly, frighteningly wrong. Then there was the matter of the trip -

Boston, New York, Cleveland. Vic didn't give a goddam about the trip, not now; old man Sharp and his kid could take a flying jump at the moon for all he cared. But he wasn't in it alone. He had a partner. The partner had a wife and two kids. Even now, hurting as badly as he was, Vic recognized his responsibility to at least go through the motions of trying to save the account - which was tantamount to trying to save Ad Worx itself.

And although he didn't want to ask it, there was another question: Exactly why did he want to take Tad and go, without even hearing her side of the story? Because her sleeping around was wrecking Tad's morals? He didn't think so. It was because his mind had immediately seized upon the fact that the way to hurt her most surely and most deeply (as deeply as he hurt right now) was through Tad. But did he want to turn his son into the emotional equivalent of a crowbar, or a sledgehammer? He thought not.

Other questions.

The note. Think about the note for a minute. Not Just what it said, not just those six lines of battery-acid filth; think about the fact of the note. Someone had just killed the goose that had been - pardon the pun - laying the golden eggs. Why had Donna's lover sent that note?

Because the goose was no longer laying, of course. And the shadow man who had sent the note was mad as hell.

Had Donna dumped the guy?