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What’s all this about, Andrew? I want to know. And don’t lie. I want the truth. I can take it.”
    There was a silence. There were voices in the corridor as people came out of the elevator. There was silence again.
    And then suddenly, Andrew raised his head. He looked straight back at Cynthia. “You said you wanted the truth. Well, what you feel—well, you’re right.”
    All her nerves jumped. One, at the corner of her temple, shot a single, dreadful pain, and she had to sit down.
    “It’s probably best that I admit it, that I tell you the worst. Then you’ll believe me when I say that I’ve never done it before.”
    She began to sob. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
    He spoke humbly. “I never have done it,Cynthia, I promise. I must have been crazy tonight.”
    “Why? Why? Were you drunk? You’re never drunk.”
    “I had a few glasses of wine, but I won’t blame it on that. It simply happened. I’m so sorry, Cindy. I wish to God it hadn’t.”
    “ ‘Just did.’ You bastard. What would you say if I had done it?”
    “I would be furious. Frantic.”
    “No doubt. The mother of your children. Your dead children.”
    “It was crazy. I don’t know how else to say it, it was crazy. Because I love you, Cindy, and I always will.”
    She saw that his eyes were filled with tears. He moved to the chair as if to touch her hand or caress her head, asking pardon. She picked up her white evening purse and hurled it at him. It fell on the floor, breaking the fancy little frame. She was inflamed, burned alive with outrage, the image of him lying on the grass—with whom? A glittering dress and a raucous laugh.
    “I hate you,” she screamed. “After what we’vebeen through, you can do this—after what we’ve been to each other—or so I thought.”
    “Cindy, please. Nothing’s changed. I’ve done an awful thing. But can’t you forgive an awful thing, an aberration, a crazy moment?”
    You never know about men. They all swear they don’t do it, even the best of them
.
    “I admit it was inexcusable. But you have been so cold to me—”
    “Cold! When my heart’s been crushed! What sense are you making? Don’t you hear yourself? No, you don’t. You don’t have the faintest idea of anything that—”
    “And
my
heart? It’s you who haven’t the faintest idea of what it means to come together and comfort each other. I tried so, I tried all these months. I needed a little human warmth. That’s all I needed.” He stopped, and wiped his eyes. “I’ll keep trying if you will, Cindy. Please. I’m so damned sorry about everything.”
    An actor, he was. Walks back to the table nice as you please after he’s dusted the grass from his trousers.
    “I can’t look at you,” she said. “You sickenme. Go inside and get a pillow for yourself. You’ll sleep here on the sofa.”
    “If it’ll make you feel better tonight,” he began.
    “Tonight, you say? Don’t bother counting the time until I let you back in any bed with me.”
    Never. Oh, God, never. Period. I’m looking at someone I don’t recognize. I wish I were dead. God, let me die.
    He had wrecked everything. Just when they were starting to see light, he had turned the light off. How would she ever trust a human being again? The world that had once been decent and rational made no sense. Hatred solidified into a hard mass around her heart. She floundered among moods, among sobbing grief, fury, and despair.
    “But I’ve apologized over and over,” he kept saying all through those first awful days. “I tried to explain something that’s probably unexplainable. I beg you, Cynthia. I beg you now.”
    “A wife sitting at the other end of the table, and a man calmly walks off into the bushes. No. Beg all you want. I’m deaf to it. I don’t want tohear you or see you. In fact,” she said one morning after another bitter session, “the sooner you leave here, the better. Let me alone. Leave now.”
    “You can’t mean that,