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  “Anne,” said Bob without looking up. “Go watch TV.”

  Reluctantly, Anne went to the den, but there was no sound from the television set and Bob knew his daughter was probably eavesdropping.

  Bob shut off the water and dried his hands, then looped the towel around his fist as though he were preparing for a fight.

  We’re all in it, Tom had said, and Bob thought of the stole he’d removed from Joanie’s shoulders last night before they’d left the party, red fox and scented with Betsy’s perfume.

  “You bought it,” he said finally, nodding toward The Sex Cure.

  “One of the last copies,” said Joanie.

  “Really?” asked Bob, wishing he’d never met Stan and Betsy Cavett. He’d always been happy to go with secretaries in Oneonta or salesgirls he met after work on Water Street. If he worked late, stayed over at Charlie Stanwood’s house near the office, kept a change of clothes in his desk drawer, what could Joanie really know?

  Since he was a little boy—long before he’d taken Maud Corley up to his father’s hayloft—Bob had loved women. His mother, who’d pinched her cheeks in wintertime to bring out a flush in her pale skin; his teacher, Miss Gray, whose skirt had been just that much shorter in front; his cousin Sophie, from Buffalo, who’d pushed him into the tall grass during a walk in the back meadow when Bob was seven: his first kiss. Now, at the age of fifty-five, Bob still marveled at their endless varieties: the ones with the full lips and button noses; the leggy brunettes with no bosoms to speak of; the black-haired beauties whose grandmothers had been part Mexican or full Iroquois; their eager or hesitant kisses; their salty or sharp tastes; the looks in their eyes when it was over, because Bob was always clear on this point: he had a wife.

  But Bob and Joanie had never talked openly about his affairs; their marriage was a dance, a measure of closeness and distance, and when Bob sensed that he’d strayed too far, that Joanie was in turn pulling away, he would come bounding back with gifts of handpicked wildflowers or broken arrowheads from a field, visibly repentant if also unreformed. Now he’d let this get too close to home, and it seemed to have ignited a combative instinct in Joanie. She sat with her legs crossed knee over thigh, her forearms resting easily on the table, her right hand thumbing the pages of The Sex Cure as though she were testing the tension of a bowstring.

  Bob’s nerves were starting to fray. He wanted to ask Joanie if he was in the book—just get it over with—but that would suppose there was reason to think he might be. And so he started to assume he wasn’t, but then, what if he was? Bob couldn’t ask for forgiveness without admitting guilt, and he couldn’t presume innocence when he and Betsy Cavett had been going together since July, and with a dawning sense of fear, Bob realized that Joanie had already moved into checkmate.

  His attempt to minimize the book last night, his decision to flee the party, his willingness to do his chores today when normally he had to be asked three or four times—these had all been tacit admissions of guilt. Now, whether his name was on the page or not, it was too late.

  “Joanie,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  He glanced at the book on the table and Joanie tapped it with her index finger.

  “This?” she asked.

  Who was this woman, his wife of twenty-two years?

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded frightened, and he realized that he was.

  The author had used a pseudonym, Joanie told him, though Bob wasn’t asking about the author. It’d taken Joanie all of three seconds to deduce that “Elaine Dorian” was Isabel Moore, the forty-something writer from New York City who’d recently rented the house at the corner of Lake Street and Hoffman Lane. Bob was positive he’d never laid eyes on any Isabel Moore but Joanie said, “Oh, sure, you’d recognize her.” In fact, Mrs. Moore had been spotted that very afternoon at Danny’s Market, doing her shopping without a care in the world.

  “It’s all anyone can talk about,” said Joanie. In hushed voices and shocked whispers, at the First National bank and at the A&P, written covertly inside checkbook registers and on the backs of grocery-store receipts: cast lists were quietly being drawn up and filled in with real-life names.

  Bob felt light-headed; he needed to sit down, but Joanie hadn’t offered him a seat at the table, hadn’t offered him lunch or dinner, had instead polished off the last cookie on the plate. Was this what it would be like? Bob thought of twenty-seven-year-old Charlie Stanwood’s bachelor pad, the mismatched furniture, the cupboards with only three cups and two plates, the sharp smell of Pine-Sol that Charlie’s cleaning lady left behind. Bob didn’t want a divorce. He didn’t want Betsy Cavett. At that moment, he never wanted another woman in his life besides Joanie.

  “It’s all spelled out,” said Joanie. “Like Peyton Place.”

  Joanie had devoured the Gilmanton, New Hampshire, scandal six years before, while Bob had been appalled that anyone would write such a thing. Now it seemed Cooperstown was having its moment, and Bob realized with a jolt that if he were in the book, he would have to leave town. It would be too much to be talked about incessantly, to be looked at askance; even standing here in his own kitchen guessing at what Joanie was thinking was making him sick.

  “Is it that obvious?” asked Bob. “The who’s who?”

  “You certainly don’t need much of a road map,” said Joanie. Then, “You should read it.” She slid the book across the table and waited for Bob to pick it up. “Just make sure to give it back when you’re done.”

  He considered refusing—if Joanie had found something in the book that she wanted him to see, she could go ahead and tell him—but Anne was lurking only a few feet away on the other side of the wall, listening to every word Bob and Joanie said. He couldn’t bear to have his infidelities cataloged aloud for his daughter. So he took the book and, without meeting Joanie’s eyes, told her he would read it.

  * * *

  That night Bob remained downstairs long after Joanie and Anne had gone to bed. At first Anne wouldn’t stop pestering him about the novel—was it any good? Did he know anybody in it?—but Bob told her to mind her own business and finally she went upstairs.

  The Sex Cure opened with the local rumor mill churning over the news that a young woman had been brought into the hospital, hemorrhaging from a botched abortion and naming Justin Riley, Ridgefield Corners’ favorite playboy surgeon, as the father. Stu Everett, OB resident extraordinaire, would have to operate to save the girl’s life. The questions remained: Would the young girl live, would the playboy surgeon be run out of town, and would Stu finally marry his longtime mistress, Olivia Riley, giving their biological son his legitimate name?

  Bob quickly turned the pages, his heart rate vaulting over every capital R, B, or C, then steadying when these letters turned out not to be the beginning of his own name. Bob had spent the summer with Stan and Betsy Cavett, Preston and Elva Hanson. He’d let them sign for his drinks and tour him around in their cars. He hadn’t initially understood when Stan mentioned that Bob would hit it off with his wife, Betsy, but it was Betsy who’d initiated the affair, and it’d quickly become clear that Stan and Elva were going together on the side, as well.

  Now here they all were: Olivia Riley and a spouseless Stu Everett and fifteen other people whose names were only slightly tweaked if at all. Bob’s neighbors, acquaintances, people who lived right here in town. Marlene Poynter, who ran the Community Chest raffle with Joanie every Thanksgiving, had been cast as a gossip, a floozy, and a drunk. Bob’s own name never graced the pages, thank God, and although he was weak with gratitude that publicly, at least, he had dodged the bullet, privately he knew Joanie was nowhere near finished with him.

  A white-hot knot of anger formed in his stomach and spread through his chest to his hands: it wasn’t right—Isabel Moore had no right. A book like this could ruin people’s lives, their marriages. Botched abortions, rapes, scandalous affairs—if the author had begun her story with grains of truth, she’d ended up with such a gross misr
epresentation of life in Cooperstown that Bob couldn’t see Cooperstown in it.

  When he finally went up to bed at a quarter after three he was only mildly surprised to discover Joanie awake and ready to chat, and Bob quickly found himself on the losing side of a moral debate.

  “It’s not like they didn’t know what they were doing,” said Joanie. Her position seemed to be that if the storied affairs were true to life, then the heels had gotten their just deserts.

  “Maybe,” Bob hedged, “but what gives the author the right to splash people’s private affairs all over town?”

  “It’s a cautionary tale,” said Joanie pointedly. “If this is happening in some houses, you can bet it’s happening all over.”

  “It’s not happening anywhere,” said Bob desperately.

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” said Joanie. Then, “You should hear the gossip.”

  Gossip hardly began to describe the furor that erupted over The Sex Cure as Anne began her eighth-grade school year, and Bob and Joanie were completely at odds as to how to handle the matter when it came to their daughter. Bob forbade Anne to read the book, but Joanie left her copy unattended throughout the house. He assured his daughter that the author would soon be brought up on charges, while Joanie took to scrapbooking—clipping and saving every Sex Cure–related article that the local press put out. No matter how irritated Bob grew with Joanie’s campaign to promote the book, there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop her. If he denounced Isabel Moore for writing it, Joanie accused him of defending the characters’ behavior; if he denounced the characters’ behavior, Bob was effectively condemning himself. In Joanie’s hands, the novel had become an instrument of torture that left Bob never wanting to have another affair in his life.

  It wasn’t until the last week in September that Bob finally heard from Stan Cavett. They hadn’t spoken since the lawn party—Bob had thought of calling Stan, but the talk on Main Street had been so damning he’d decided to keep to himself. Bob told his secretary to put the call through, then closed his office door.

  “Stan,” said Bob.

  Stan sighed irritably. “Did you hear Preston’s taking a sabbatical from the hospital? Not entirely his idea, of course, but with everything going on it can’t be helped. He and Elva and the kids are already making plans to spend the year with her family in Baltimore.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Bob.

  “Meanwhile, I’m paying our housekeeper a king’s ransom to stay on seven days a week and overnight. She does the shopping, takes the kids to and from school—Betsy won’t leave the house.”

  Bob wondered if Stan expected him to ask after Betsy. The last time they’d been together was at a country-club dance in late August, when Bob abandoned Joanie during the twist to lead Betsy to the seventeenth hole on the golf course overlooking Blackbird Bay. Now Bob couldn’t believe he’d gotten caught up with all that. Never in his life would Bob share Joanie with another man, although he wondered if in some way his hypocrisy made him an even worse husband than Stan.

  “It’ll blow over,” said Bob.

  “I guess,” said Stan. “No one in New York seems to know about it yet. Maybe Betsy and the kids can go there for a while. You can’t imagine it,” said Stan, “opening a book and seeing your own name written there. You know the author is John Moffat’s mother-in-law? What was he thinking?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t know,” said Bob, who had never exchanged a word with the man, owner of Cooperstown Stables, the thoroughbred-horse farm on Beaver Meadow Road. Bob didn’t jump horses or play bridge at the country club or keep an apartment in Manhattan or any of the other highfalutin things Stan and his friends did, which was no doubt why Bob had been spared. He wasn’t rich enough; he wasn’t an interesting character. No one in town cared what Bob got up to—except his wife.

  “Well, he should’ve known,” said Stan, and Bob agreed that a man in his own house ought to have a measure of control. Stan sounded defeated and Bob wanted to offer him some comfort, so he asked if there was anything he could do.

  “Actually,” said Stan, and it seemed to Bob that, with that one word, what Stan had really said was I’ve done a lot for you. “Tom and I can barely show our faces in town without starting the talk all over again, but no one’s watching you,” said Stan.

  Bob thought of Maud Corley’s father, who had sabotaged his father’s livelihood in retribution for Bob’s imprudent night with Maud—his father hadn’t done a thing to fight the cooperative’s decision; he’d simply accepted that he was out and tried to make do with what he had left, which was next to nothing in a few years’ time. Bob fundamentally believed that Stan and Tom had a right to avenge themselves, and, frankly, Bob, who felt as if he were on probation himself, was also eager to get even.

  So when Stan asked him to buy a few cans of spray paint and a small can of kerosene, Bob agreed and didn’t ask what else this plan might entail. He went to a hardware store in Oneonta, where he wouldn’t be recognized, and took his time selecting the paint, finally settling on the brightest, the most stigmatic, the most enduring color and type he could find: three cans of Kerpro automobile paint in cherry red.

  At home, Bob ducked into his shed and was hastily arranging the paint cans on a low shelf above his worktable when Anne suddenly walked in.

  “What’s that for?” she asked, a stack of library books in her arms.

  “Nothing,” said Bob. Thankfully, the kerosene was still hidden in its paper bag.

  “Are you painting the Buick?”

  “No.” But his cheeks were beginning to roast.

  “That’s automobile paint,” Anne pointed out, reading the label. They regarded each other for a moment and finally Anne shrugged and said, “Maybe you can return it.”

  For her part, Joanie continued to report on every new tidbit of the unfolding scandal: the thrice-divorced author had gone to Barnard, or maybe Columbia; had an apartment in Yorkville, or was it Hollywood; and counted as her friends Cary Grant and even the late Marilyn Monroe. After church one morning, Bob lost his temper and slammed her scrapbook into the garbage can, but Joanie just waited until he’d stormed upstairs to retrieve the volume and brushed it off.

  Then one Saturday in the car on the way to a high school football game, Joanie announced right in front of Anne that Isabel Moore was working on a sequel about how a small town persecutes an author.

  “That’s enough,” said Bob, anger pressing vertiginously behind his eyes so that all he could see were his hands clutching the steering wheel.

  “I agree,” said Joanie. “It’s just that she has so much material in town to work with, I guess she feels there’s enough for another book.”

  “Another?” asked Anne from the backseat. “I read it, and I don’t think she should’ve been allowed to write the first one.”

  Bob braked in the middle of Walnut Street and turned around to face his daughter. “What do you mean, you read it?” he asked.

  Anne shrank toward Joanie’s side of the car. “Mom said I could.”

  “Joanie,” said Bob, turning his gaze on his wife. “We talked about this.”

  “You talked about it,” said Joanie evenly, and suddenly Bob felt as if he had two teenage daughters. Without hesitation, he grabbed Joanie’s upper arm and when Joanie tried to twist away, Bob held on.

  “You’re hurting me,” said Joanie, but Bob wouldn’t let go.

  When another car pulled up behind them, Bob reached through the open window with his free hand to wave the driver by. He let go of Joanie’s arm only as the car passed, but he could still feel the strain of the grip in his fingers, his digits ghosting the shape of his wife’s arm.

  “This can’t go on,” said Bob.

  “It can,” said Joanie, meaning, Bob supposed, that she had found a weapon, a tool to curtail his behavior, and if Bob thought she would easily relinquish it, he was wrong.

  Joanie pressed herself against her window, cradling her left arm in her right hand, tears start
ing to fall, and Bob considered opening his car door and simply walking away. There seemed to be nothing he could say now except that he was sorry, and he was sorry, but he didn’t say it.

  Bob looked in the rearview mirror and caught Anne’s eye. “You’re not to read that book again,” he said. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s not going to be another book,” said Bob. “People have had enough. Pretty soon, someone’s going to take care of her.”

  Anne’s face appeared at his elbow. “Take care of her how?” she asked.

  “Good grief,” said Bob. He hadn’t heard from Stan in nearly three weeks; for all he knew there was no plan. “Run her out of here!” he said.

  “Can you just run someone out of town?” asked Anne.

  Bob shrugged. Right now he felt capable of anything.

  * * *

  On October 21, Bob was finally summoned to Tom Halloway’s hunting cabin, twelve miles outside town. As the only one of the three men to have served during wartime, Tom appointed himself general and doled out orders, first to Bob, whose job it would be to phone the village police department and warn them that “something” was going to happen to Isabel Moore.

  “Why would I do that?” asked Bob incredulously.

  “Maybe she’ll take a hint and leave on her own,” said Tom. “Think of this as the diplomacy phase.”

  So the next evening at his office, as soon as Charlie had gone, Bob pulled the phone under his desk and wrapped his handkerchief over the mouthpiece. He felt like a patsy for accepting an assignment Tom could easily have done himself, but when the time came for phase two—which would apparently involve kerosene—it might be useful to have already taken a turn.

  Bob dialed the number that Tom had copied down and asked to speak to the officer on duty, then nearly hung up twice while waiting to be put through.

  “Go ahead, sir,” said the operator.

  “Something is going to happen to Mrs. Isabel Moore,” Bob read from Tom’s index card.

  “What’s that?” said the officer.