women at neighboring sinks who smirk enough as it is when you do something so intimate as to brush your teeth after a transatlantic flight? (And on a spermicide timetable, they would have to be finished six hours before.)


Better for him to wear a condom, so she didn't have to be eulogized at her funeral as one of the people who thought the rules about STDs did not apply to them personally. Because although she had heretofore been true to her husband, and her prospective lover ditto claimed fidelity, and both felt able to vouch, with a reasonable degree of certainty, for the fidelity of their respective spouses (and she had been confirmed AIDS-free, by the life insurance physical), one really had to admit � and here a passage came to her from Antony and Cleopatra, subject of her long-ago honors thesis �

Why should I think you can be mine, and true
(Though you in swearing shake the thron�d gods),
Who have been false to Fulvia? Riotous madness,
To be entangled with those mouth-made vows,
Which break themselves in swearing!

     Antony crossed oceans, conquered kingdoms, just to get laid. Now he could go Concorde, fight the war by conference call. Yet in the fond absent heart department, the centuries had changed nothing. Even non-queens, married to tax attorneys, deserve a big love, to remind them that they still have souls. Elsewise what is point.
     On the other hand she had not made love with a condom in close to two decades. Nor he, probably. To travel to a foreign port in order to comfort someone over untimely loss of erection � better, maybe, to have the courage of your convictions and die of AIDS.
     What kind of wife did that make her? What kind of mother?
     2. Head lice. There had not been many consecutive weeks in which one of her children was not out of school with a strep or stomach flu. Not to mention the more exotic new ailments, like Coxsackie's � hoof-and-mouth disease, reengineered for people. Her sons had it for two days; she had it for two months. Totally bollixed her immune system. And the head lice � picking them out with the little comb, washing the sheets � she thought she'd finished with lice in college, when she'd had to pry the crab variety off her eyelashes. It is extremely hard to make long-term plans when you can be stricken at any moment by a gastrointestinal bug. Maybe Michael Jordan has the stamina to perform in crucial playoff games afflicted with a full-out from-both-ends-at-once GI virus, but she certainly did not want even to board a plane in that condition, no less make love to a stranger. Nothing like a GI virus to remind you of marriage's benefits.
     She was sure such thoughts did not haunt her prospective lover, and she was correct.


His doubts focused on the act itself. Not the erection, upon which he felt confident he could depend, but rising to the occasion of his own expectations. He'd claimed that her appearance didn't matter and conceptually, that was true, unless she was fat or even . . . the truth is that he simply could not abide certain shapes of ankle. Certain (dis)arrangements of teeth. His own wife was exquisite and fit, embarking on her dawn jog even while nursing, and for what? For a man who did not set out for a jog, at dawn or

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