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successful real estate developer, a yachtsman, and club champion several years running, he had never been one to take any kind of loss lightly. "You know," he had said to her on the only attempt he had ever made to start an affair between them, "there Page 12
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    are those like you-know-who, who are content to tiptoe along in Daddy's footsteps, and those who just grab life by the throat and do it. I'm a doer."
    The reference to Jared, even though prodded forth by far too many martinis, had left an aftertaste of anger that Kate knew would never totally disappear. When Carlisle sent the Samuels for Congress Committee a check for five hundred dollars, she had almost sent it back with a note telling him to go grab somebody's life by the throat.
    Instead, out of deference to her husband, she had invited the Carlisles over for dinner. Her hypocrisy, however honorable its purpose, continued to rankle her from time to time, especially when Carlisle, wearing his smugness like aftershave, was about to inflict yet another defeat on team Samuels/Bennett. At last she was beating the man. Not even a disagreement with her husband could dull the luster of the moment.
    Through the mirror of Jim Carlisle's stages of readiness to return serve, Kate pictured Jared's movements behind her. Feet planted: Jared had settled in at the line.
    Hunching over, knees bent: Jared was tapping ball against racquet, gaining his rhythm. Just before Carlisle began the quick bouncing which would signal the toss, she heard Jared's voice. "The of' high hard one," he said.
    Kate tensed, awaiting the familiar, sharp pok of Jared's serve and Carlisle's almost simultaneous move to return.
    Instead, she heard virtually nothing, and watched in horror as Carlisle, with the glee of a tomcat discovering a wounded sparrow, advanced to pounce on a woefully soft hit. The serve was deliberate--vintage Jared Samuels; his way of announcing that by no means had he forgotten their argument.
    "Jared, you bastard," Kate screamed just as Carlisle exploded a shot straight at her chest from less than a dozen feet away.
    An instant after the ball left Carlisle's racquet, it was on Kate's, then ricocheting into a totally unguarded corner of the court. The shot was absolute reflex, absolute luck, but perfect all the same.
    "Match," Kate said simply. She shook hands with each of their opponents, giving Jim's hand an extra pump.
    Then, without a backward glance, she walked off the court to the locker room. The Oceanside Racquet Club, three quarters of an acre of corrugated aluminum box, squatted gracelessly on a small rise above the Atlantic. "Facing Wimbledon," was the way the club's overstuffed director liked to describe it.
    Keeping her hair dry and moving quickly enough to ensure that Jared would have to work to catch up with her, Kate showered and left the building. The rules of their game demanded a reaction of some sort for his behavior, and she had decided on taking the ME, perhaps stopping a mile or so down the road. As she crossed the half-filled parking lot, she began searching the pockets of her parka for her keys. Almost immediately, she remembered seeing them on the kitchen table.
    "Damn!" The feeling was so familiar. She had, in the past, slept through several exams, required police assistance to locate her car in an airport parking garage, and
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    ipvss forgotten where she had put the engagement ring Art had given her. Although she had come to accept the trait as a usually harmless annoyance, there was a time when visions of clamps left in abdomens concerned her enough to influence her decision to go into pathology rather than clinical medicine. This day, she felt no compassion whatsoever toward her shortcoming. Testily, she strode past their car and down the road.
    The move was a bluff. Jared would know that as well as she. It was an eight-mile walk to their home, and the temperature was near