Aperto, Chiuso “There’s one—it says aperto!” “Where?” Allenson asked, knowing perfectly well. There was a tense gullible nerve in his young wife that it amused him to touch. “Right there! We went right by! Mobil, just like at home! I can’t believe you did that, darling!” “I didn’t like the look of it. Too many ugly trucks.” Vivian explained to him, with the complacency of a knowing child, “You’re just nervous because you don’t know how to say ‘Fill ’er up.’ But if we don’t get gas soon we’ll be stuck by the side of the road, and then what’ll you say?” “I’ll say, ‘Scusi,’ ” he said. In the several years of their secret affair, Vivian, George Allenson’s third wife, had had ample opportunity to observe how little, in relation to his second wife, he was to be trusted; but he had not expected her, once they were married, to perceive him as untrustworthy. He was twenty years older, also, and he had not imagined that this superiority in time spent upon the earth might be regarded as a deficit—in eyesight, in reaction time, in quality of attention.
