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sound of comprehension, like “Aaah.”
    We both gazed respectfully at the purple whorls.
    “Is she from around here?” I asked.
    “Well, she has a studio in Red Hook, but these days”—he smiled and shook his head with a clearly unresolved mix of disdain and awe—“she’s living on Long Island. She’s married to a rich older guy …”
    He hesitated for an instant, perhaps unsure whether it was chivalrous to say “older” to someone as old as I.
    “They have a mansion,” he confided.
    “A mansion?” I repeated, wowed in the coolest manner I could muster.
    “It has a stable!” he said. “And he gave her a five-carat diamond ring. Like, is that a statement or what? Not that any of those things would make a dent in Ryn’s consciousness. You know? She’s like almost overly ethereal. But so real. I mean, when I spoke to her after she first saw the place, you know the only thing she mentioned? The quality of the light.”
    “So she works out there?”
    “Well, right now she’s not working.”
    “Taking a rest after this?” I inquired, waving my hand toward Purple Opinion and Green Certainty.
    “Getting ready to have a baby. She’s due any second. I mean, when we had the opening two weeks ago, we were all praying she wouldn’t …”
    He shuddered as if envisioning a pool of amniotic fluid on the gallery’s polyurethaned oak floor.
    I thanked him and, price list neatly folded in my handbag, hurried off to catch the 4:18 back to Shorehaven.
    It wasn’t until eleven that night—defeated by the lower left-hand corner of the Sunday Times crossword puzzle—that it occurred to me that when Stan Giddings married Ryn, she had been close to six months pregnant. A pregnant piece of information, but what did it mean? Having spent twenty-eight years married and only two widowed, I still wasn’t used to having some late-night question pop into my head and not be able to ask, What do you make of this? Even if the reaction was the usual, mumbled, nocturnal I dunno, or even an antagonistic What business is it of yours, Judith?—it was a response. I could then begin either to start silently speculating or to think, Beats the hell out of me, and drift off to slep.
    Plainly, Bob would not have taken well to my inquiring into the death of Vanessa Giddings. Like the last time around, twenty years earlier, when I got involved in investigating the Fleckstein murder: At his best, he’d been exceedingly aggravated with me. At his worst, enraged and downright nasty. For him, my business was to be his wife. A historian? Why not? He lived in an era in which powerful men’s wives did not churn butter. They held jobs, the more prestigious the better. A PhD in history lacked the cachet of a doctorate in neuroscience, but it was, on the whole, an asset. But a wife who fancied herself a gumshoe? That was barely a step above whoredom.
    But even if I couldn’t have asked Do you think Ryn’s six-months-pregnant marriage means anything? without getting a snide rejoinder, I still couldn’t bear the loss of him. Late Sunday nights hurt the most. I yearned to be a wife, to hear Bob’s sleepy voice murmuring “G’ night” as he turned over, to sense the warmth of his body across a few inches of bed, to smell the fabric softener on his pajamas. Of course, if I’d have left Bob and married Nelson? He and I would be riveted, sitting up discussing … Stop!
    Over the years, I’d become my own tough cop, policing myself from crossing the line from the occasional loving or lustful memory of Nelson to hurtful fantasy: What is he doing now? Still married? Is he happy? Would it be so terrible to call him and offhandedly say, “You just popped into my head the other day and I was wondering … Stop!
    The next morning, on my way to Saint Elizabeth’s, I dropped by the house of my semi-friend Mary Alice Mahoney Hunziger Schlesinger Goldfarb—the woman who talked more than any other in Greater New York and said the least. Annoying?