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despairing. The architecture of his life began to look like lunacy.
    Affair: the word astonished him every time it appeared in his mind. All he had done was rediscover and fall for a small, dark-haired, scarred, slow-smiling woman. That she happened to be married wasn’t a part of the equation. That she happened to be married seemed simply strange. That she happened to be married to his boss seemed strange to the point of unreality.
    Sometimes Heather said that things needed to change. On a couple of occasions, she grew angry. ‘We all need to grow the fuck up!’ she cried. ‘I’ll just tell him it’s time for a divorce. It’s not a big deal. A divorce.’ She sounded very grim. It made him fearful . He wished he weren’t, but he feared to sabotage Boggs, feared Boggs’s reaction, feared the loss of his job, feared the end of his present life. He wished it could be done in some way that would not hurt Boggs. But she spoke of
soon
, and when
soon
might be remained undefined. He had decided that if she asked him to give up his job and his friendship with Boggs, he would. But finally she didn’t ask, and he wondered, what did she fear?
    The covert nature of the relationship amplified, he saw, its excitement. The sense that they were getting away with something, that they should be ashamed, that no one else knew the potent emotions flowing between them, that they created and inhabited a hidden world. When their relationship became public, it would become something different. So, after he’d been working for Boggs for six years and having sex with Heather for two, he still could not say when the situation would change. Shouldn’t he want an ordinary life with her? He did. He did. And he had an obscure trust that it would come. And nothing changed.
    And what was wrong with her relationship with Boggs? She said only that her husband had closed away the essential parts of himself. Ellis could see that being married to the man would be a different thing than being friends with him. There had been entire days on the road when Boggs didn’t speak a single unnecessary word. And when they examined the result of some inexplicable driver action – a driver who attempted to pass in a blind curve, or run a red, or pushed a grocery cart full of concrete mix down the street with the front bumper of an IROC-Z – Boggs often displayed a daunting misanthropy. ‘The only thing that makes humans different from animals,’ he said, ‘is that humans can be
creatively
stupid.’
    One night, on a nearly empty highway, returning to civilisation from an accident location a couple hundred miles into the plains, Boggs had hung behind a semi-trailer for several miles and then, without a word, began edging nearer and nearer, until the front bumper of their rental was just two or three feet behind the trailer’s blunt steel framework. At 75 mph, Ellis gazed in horror at the trailer’s glowing tail lights, close and large. When he glanced at Boggs , Boggs reached down and adjusted the volume of the radio. Ellis said, as gently as he could, ‘What are you doing?’
    Boggs backed away. He didn’t say anything.
    Ellis intended to bring it up sometime when Boggs seemed more calm. But it didn’t happen again, and nothing, really, had happened – there had been no collision, no physical evidence. It seemed almost as if he might have imagined the incident. And it was a tricky topic to raise with a man who was, after all, his boss.
    He met Heather in cars and motels and in the duplex where he lived, but most often in her father’s RV, in strip mall parking lots and highway rest stops. The RV’s little windows were always shut, the lemon-yellow curtains drawn, so nothing outside could be seen, and nothing outside could see in. Still, traffic always ran nearby making its ceaseless noise, rising to a roar when the semis passed, and Ellis could imagine the vehicles and their motion quite clearly. On the RV’s dining table lay Heather’s