...Claudia finds herself reading the one love scene in the book over and over. She especially likes it at the end where the young man reaches up, just after the steamy part, and strokes the girl’s hair, “looking at her,” as Rollie put it, “as if she’d shared with him the deepest of all mysteries.”

But more than that, Claudia finds herself staring at his youthful face on the dust jacket. She Xeroxes the love scene and his picture—it doesn’t reproduce well at all, but still—and she sends the book itself back to Rollie by priority mail.

She does that defiantly because she knows Andrew would prefer to have her send it book rate.

At first, Claudia would look at Rollie’s picture whenever she was mad at Andrew, but now she’s looking at it so much, even when Andrew is right in the very next room.

And whenever Andrew is out of the house, she rereads the love scene and a couple of times she even imagines herself in it, with Rollie as her partner.

This makes her feel very wicked and also, in some strange way, very powerful.

She and Andrew never make love, haven’t for seven years and only did occasionally before then. Andrew used to complain she didn’t move her hips the right way, but when she asked him to show her what he meant, he only got mad and said that if it didn’t come naturally to her, there was no point going at it as if it were a class in CPR.

Then one time she was really incredibly dry and it had made him furious. “You aren’t even wet,” he’d said, pushing her away and getting dressed and going down to his study.

That was the last time. Seven years ago.

Claudia thought she didn’t care, thought she just wasn’t very sexual, but now she regularly has really sexy thoughts about Rollie. It is almost as though she needs those thoughts now in order to survive. Sometimes she actually swoons while she’s thinking them.

The first time the thoughts came to her, she was in bed with Andrew and she kind of cuddled up to him, because Andrew was not only her husband, but there.

Andrew turned away. “We’re not kids anymore,” he said, rolling way, way over on his own side of the bed.

Claudia started looking for articles about men like Andrew in other women’s magazines that she gets, but always it was the other way around. The man wanted sex and woman didn’t. The man wanted sex and the woman turned away.

Then there was a question in Dr. Ruth that was sort of similar—a woman who kept having daydreams about another man because her husband was, well, not ignoring her totally, but being perfunctory. And Dr. Ruth said, “Be direct. Persist. It will make your marriage stronger and better if he knows exactly what you feel.” Or something like that.

But on the basis of Dr. Ruth’s answer, Claudia decided, yes, that was what she would do. She would persist and be direct. In this way, too, she could maybe channel what she went around thinking about Rollie into making her marriage…well, more the way a marriage ought to be.