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cool.
    She skated over the notion that she was having her own affair with Giovana—flirting and fantasizing like deluded typers all over the world. (Did it matter, really, about her hidden quest or the murderous nature of her fantasies?) Far frombusting Mark, maybe she was actually backing him up. She was Mark; she was Thing 1; of course she knew how he felt. Sometimes, her interest drew mainly from her own side of the conversation—a challenging diversification for any columnist, who was, inevitably, something of a persona. And her Thing 1 was, if she said it herself, debonair. As Mark could be—an amalgamation of Christopher Plummer, Roger Moore just past his prime, with a pinch of revamped, upper-class Terence Stamp, whom Mark, with his bright pale eyes and wide brow, inescapably did resemble. This was more or less where she pitched it—she had a perverse wish for Mark to be worth having an affair with—and she was justly proud of her creation.
    Mark didn’t seem to notice her obsession, but her work was suffering. One column about healthy minibreaks hardly lifted above the industry standard, recommending, under a banner of “ecotourism,” short hikes and the reuse of hotel towels, while the next one promoted a seaweed cure-all of absolutely no use to her readers, none of whom lived within a thousand miles of a source of magic algae. And strangely, though no more strangely than a lot of other things these days, she missed Mark.
    What would he say if she let him in? Imagine getting beyond denials and the tawdry local phenomena of whens and wheres. He’d probably tell her that, if only she’d left things alone, been less proactive (“less American,” he would surely have said), he’d have been onto a leggy Swede before the original letter arrived in Christian’s sack, and finished with her, too.
    She wondered if he ever wrote to Giovana himself, from the St. Jerome Hotel where he went to play tennis and check his office e-mail. Certainly there’d been a few unexplained endearments: Bubischnudel was one that stuck in her mind, along with other Teutonic notes— bis bald —see you later—and tschüss! Maybe this was just the residue of his German projects, but it was new. Jean had heard the lovers on the phone—she’d walked in on them mid-conversation. She specifically heard him whisper “darling”—softly, as if he was talking to a child, one he was trying to jolly back from a tantrum. Thinking it must be a distressed Victoria calling for comfort, she’d waited, and was surprised when he abruptly hung up with a bizarre yet perfunctory “Got to run, Dan”—obviously some preestablished code. Mark called lots of people darling, men and women, including everyone whose name he couldn’t remember. But he didn’t whisper it.
    A feeling too good to last: Jean had been right about that. In the days and weeks following the discovery, she found herself soberly trawling through the past—hers, Mark’s, and theirs, plus the parents’—combing for any warning of impending calamity and, less hopefully, for any solution. In addition, Jean took on the hard work of cold-shouldering her panic. She weeded her garden and she yawned a lot, just couldn’t stop yawning.
    And though she didn’t know why, earlier desolations—newly revealed as practice panics—bubbled up to consciousness with seismic force: as when Jean was packing to go up to Oxford and her Anglophile mother, hot at the prospect of vicarious pleasures, presented her with a taffeta ball gown—immense, and yellow.
    Now, clad in her usual grubby gardening gear, Jean could hardly countenance the existence of such an item, let alone its place among her possessions.
    But this parting gift was exactly Phyllis’s idea of fun or, rather, fun in an ancient European setting. In her worldview, it was axiomatic that if you had the clothes, the experience would surely follow. At that moment, Jean, holding the bunched yards of dully shining silk with both