while listening to one of their teachers. They were paired as partners for a chemistry experiment once. It was early fall in their senior year and Connie had worn a sleeveless blouse. As she used a pipette to measure drops of sodium hydroxide into a beaker holding a copper wire, Edward Everett could see the slight curve of her breast and an edge of lace from her bra. He had no idea what the scent was that she gave off (her shampoo, some perfume) but he was certain that he would pass out from inhaling it. They’d almost gone out not long after, when he’d learned that she and her boyfriend, Lloyd, who played linebacker for the school with a vicious aggression, had broken up. The day he found out that they were no longer a couple—it was a Tuesday, he remembered—he’d gone to her locker to wait for her and while she stowed her books, they’d agreed to go see Fantastic Voyage. On Thursday, however, she told him she’d discovered she was pregnant and would be marrying Lloyd and before graduation she’d changed her place in the line of students, from somewhere in the middle as an “H” to the front, as an “Adams,” directly in front of her husband as they marched into the football stadium, Lloyd clowning, pointing at Connie, making a gesture above his own belly describing an arc in the air, and then giving a thumbs-up.
Walking toward Edward Everett’s car, Connie still had her girlish grace, absently taking a strand of her hair that blew across her face and tucking it behind her right ear, giving him a shy smile as she opened the car door and got in.
They’d had lunch at a tearoom in a hundred-year-old brick house that was a Victorian museum, not the sort of restaurant he would have chosen ordinarily, with its delicate sandwiches and meager salads, a restaurant that catered to women like his mother, who saw it as a bastion of finery in a town that otherwise offered taverns and corner diners. He had suggested it because he thought it was the sort of place Connie would prefer, but while they ate he realized they were, by twenty years, the youngest people in the place and that, aside from a rotund ruddy-faced man in a blue serge suit and a polka-dotted bow tie, he was the only male. Their conversation went in fits and starts, as if they could never land on a subject either had much to say about: her taking six and a half years to finish college because of her son, Billy; her ex-husband’s mocking her when she told him she wanted to become a teacher; Edward Everett’s expurgated stories of playing ball in towns not much larger than their own.
After they finished and were walking back to his car, he felt as if he’d been holding his breath for the entire hour they’d been there. He was unsure whether it was the restaurant or that, after almost ten years, he and Connie had nothing to talk about. He would take her home, make a polite comment about how they should do this again, and then not call her, but on their way back to her house, they’d passed the building where his apartment was and she’d said, “Don’t you live upstairs there?” He’d been surprised she’d known that. “I’d like to see it,” she said. Upstairs, he regretted inviting her in. He was not the best of housekeepers. The suit he’d worn the day before lay crumpled on the couch in the living room, and the can of Pabst he’d drunk while he was watching The Rockford Files was on its side on the floor beside his chair, still dripping beer. But she’d said, “This is actually charming.” Not long after that, he was kissing her.
Twice since then, she’d come to his apartment in the early evening, while her mother visited with Billy, and they’d made love. With the windows open and the sound of voices passing beneath his apartment, he felt as if they were having sex in a public place and wondered if the people whose conversations he caught pieces of could also hear the noises they made: his headboard banging against the wall, Connie’s whimpers when she had an orgasm, his groan when he had his own. “… the prices …” a woman’s voice said once. “… your schoolwork …” said another. “… liver and onions …” said still another.
The weekend after