“Still haven’t heard, huh.” Behind this seemingly neutral comment and Debby’s neutral question Fred senses hostility. His friends do not know Roo very well or like her very much. On both occasions when they met they had made evident efforts to know and like her, but-as with London-these efforts had not succeeded.

“She was never really right for you,” Debby says, breaking a three-year silence. “We always saw that.”

“Yeh,” Joe agrees. “I mean, she was obviously a decent person. But she was always in overdrive.”

“Those photographs of hers. They were so kind of frantic and weird. And she seemed awful immature compared to you.” Roo, admittedly, is four years younger than Debby and three years younger than Joe and Fred.

“She just wasn’t on the same wavelength.”

“Evidently not.” Fred picks up that morning’s Guardianfrom the plastic imitation-oak coffee table.

“Listen. Don’t let it get you down,” Joe instructs him.

“Yeh, that’s easy to say,” he replies, turning the pages of the newspaper without seeing them.

“You made a mistake, that’s all,” Debby says. “Anybody can do that; even you.”

“Right,” Joe agrees.

“You know, I’m still really sorry it didn’t work out for you and Carissa,” his wife murmurs. “I’ve always liked her so much. And you know she’s really brilliant.”

“She has a fine mind,” Joe says.

“Mmf,” Fred utters, noticing that Carissa is described in the present tense, whereas Roo by implication not only has a mediocre or coarse mind but has ceased to exist.

“She’s a unique person,” Debby goes on.

A unique person is exactly what Carissa is not, Fred thinks. She is a conventional, frightened academic: intelligent, granted; but forever anxious to seem even more intelligent. Whereas Roo-

“Let’s not talk about it, all right?” he says abruptly.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry-”

“Hey, we didn’t mean-”