The man desperately wanted to take the place of her husband. He made scenes: he pled, commanded, threatened suicide. The trouble was that although she had fallen in love so suddenly, she also loved the man she had married, who was in the dark about what was happening and didn’t even know the time had come for scenes. Love, love. The same word for different things. Who can be sure what it is that is being felt? Love, like so much helium blown into a balloon. The further trouble was that, of three balloons, her husband had been blown fullest, stretched thinnest. Having no way of knowing this, and weighed on by the truth, she confessed everything to him, even her suspicion that the miscarriage they were grieving, away in his family’s place by the lake, had been the lover’s baby and not his. It was summer, the war was going on, and she was away for a last weekend with her husband before he was to go overseas. But in the morning, when he put on his uniform, instead of leaving for his train he drove the car down the boat ramp, where it lolled onto its back and sank to the bottom of the lake.
