"It's important to me, too," he had said, sitting down at her kitchen table, and it was. Having left her very early Friday morning in the still darkness so as to spare her attentive early-rising neighbors the effort they surely would have made to deduce the implications of the presence of what she called his 'flashy car' in her driveway in the sunrise on his way home he had gradually begun to understand that he didn't know what he ought to do next, how to act or what to say the next time he saw her; arrive with an armload of roses or act as though nothing remarkable had taken place. He was slightly flustered to find that mattered to him. As it hadn't mattered, he realized, in the aftermath of what had become a fair number of other sexual friendships he had enjoyed over the course of what he was now somewhat startled to notice had somehow turned into quite a number of years.
"Thirty of 'em, in fact, give or take," he said to Hilliard. "And I have to say it's been quite a while since I can remember being actually concerned the next day about how the lady actually felt about the fun we had last night. Not since Sunny went and died on me, I guess. What was there to get all concerned about? All it was was just getting laid now and then. That's how the grown-ups have fun. And if we should run into each other again, or maybe call up and make sure we did that, well, maybe wed fuck again. Or then again, maybe not. If the time ever came then when we hadda new chance, wed see how we felt. "Inna meantime, many thanks, I hadda good time. Appreciate you lookin' out for me like that."
"That was the way that it worked. There was this one woman I got so I knew pretty well at the New England Regional Meetings one year, and she was just real hot to trot. So we connected, and for the whole three days of that conference there up at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, that is what we did: we fucked our brains out.
She had her regular steady boyfriend back home in Portland. He was a lawyer and she had no complaints at all; he took as good care of her as he possibly could good swift dash inna bloomers two or three times a week. Regular as he could be, but that hadda be his limit. He was married, and either his wife wasn't dumb enough so she would actually let him pack a change of clothes and get out of her sight for an overnight trip for fear he might not come back at all or else he didn't feel he could neglect his practice for three days at a stretch, I'm not really sure. Whatever it was, I wasn't complaining. She wanted her cookies and I wanted mine and we found we could make a deal. A loose woman at loose ends: I take her as a gift from God.
"She was back the next year, and the year after that, and so was I, naturally, and both times we picked up like wed never left off. The year in-between conferences, there's been nothin', no phone calls, no letters, no nothing; it's like for each other we don't exist except up in New Hampshire in June. But that once a year when we came back for the meetings, we came back all of the way. It was just the goddamnedest thing.
"The fourth year she didn't come back. I don't know what happened to her. Maybe the lawyer's wife finally found out and shot her or something like that. Or he divorced the bride and they got together. I was kind of afraid to start asking' around; thought it might look funny, you know? But it seems kind of strange, when you think about it: During those three years inna course of nine days I prolly fucked her thirty times. We were young; we did it like there was no tomorrow.
And today I don't know if she's alive or dead, and she's the same way about me, and I bet she's no more upset than I am. It was straight sex, no more'n that.
"Well except for Sunny, that's how all of them were for me; that's how I looked at it, and I've been happy. I've been a contented man. Now it seems like I'm not looking at it that way any more. Something here seems to've changed."
"See, I don't belong here, like you do," Diane said. "In this town. In this valley. Even though I've been here, more'n quite a while, it's not like I belong here. Or I didn't belong here, at least, when I first came. I just sort of settled in for a while, and at some point after that discovered I had stayed. As though I'd gone to sleep and when I woke up, here's where I was. Where else would I open my practice? And after that Walter was here. So when I decided that I was with Walter, I also realized that I'd probably be here for the rest of my life. I was at rest; where I belong became irrelevant.
"Now I'm not at rest anymore. I'm not saying I don't like it, not that, but I am confused. When I started thinking Friday morning about what we did Thursday night, I had kind of a hard time keeping my mind on my patients' problems which is what they're paying me for."
"Wait a minute," Merrion said. "What is this you "don't belong here"?"
