ex signals in the rain forest were flagrant. Tortured ululations, fanned ruffles, engorged genitals, fulgent colors. Lainie’s signals are just as obvious. The drop of her eyes, the pout of her lip, how she leads with her bosom. It’s a wonder the children don’t crumple their noses at the pheromones as she puts a coat atop her apron and herds them to the bus. She returns and lets the coat drop to the carpet like a movie star. She touches the banister of the stairs with a single arched finger and asks, “Do you have time?” His head is smothered in painkiller, roaring like a tornado heard from a storm cellar, and words are inaccessible. She pivots on her finger and climbs the stairs, hips swinging like the tail feathers of a sashaying macaw.

Strickland takes his plate to the sink and shakes the omelet into the drain. He flips the switch of the garbage disposal. It’s the first they’ve owned. Blades whir like feasting piranhas. Specks of egg spatter the stainless steel. He turns it off and hears the floorboards overhead squeak and bedsprings creak. He’s been given food, is being offered sex, is suffused in warm morning sun—what else could he want? Yet he disapproves of his wife’s brazenness. He disapproves of himself, too, for the erection pressing against the sink. Seduction games belong in the Amazon, not here in this precise, planned American neighborhood. Why can’t he control himself? Why can’t he control anything?

He’s upstairs. He can’t say how he got here. Lainie is perched on the edge of the bed. He’s sorry to see that the apron’s coarse pragmatism has been replaced by a nightgown’s sheerness. She sits with shoulders forward, knees together, one leg kicked out to the side. This pose, too, she’s learned from movies. But is the sole of any starlet’s foot so dirty? Strickland continues toward her, upbraiding himself with each step. Accepting a woman’s lure is like taking an enemy’s bait. Lainie’s cunning: She waits, a shrewd shrug persuading a strap of the nightie to slip from her shoulder. He stands before her weak and worthless.

“I like it here,” she says.

Discarded clothing hunches on the floor like vermin. Perfume bottles are scattered in insect chaos. The blinds are crooked as if cracked by earthquake. He does not, in fact, like it here, nor does he trust it. Everything in this city is an elaborate feint toward civilization, a bluff regarding the safe superiority of their species.

“Baltimore,” she clarifies. “People are nice here. None of that phony southern stuff. The kids like their big backyard. They like the school. The stores are very impressive. And you like your job. I know you don’t think about it in those terms. But a woman can tell. All those late hours. You’re dedicated. I’m sure they appreciate you. You’re going to do great there. Everything is going to be wonderful.”

His bandaged left hand is in her hand. He can’t say how this happened, either. He hopes it’s the pills. Otherwise it’s his traitorous body flooding with the intoxicants of prospective intercourse. She settles his fingers on the slope of her breast and inhales to expand it, stretching out her neck. He examines the flawless skin and in its place sees the two puffy scars of Elisa Esposito. Elisa, Elaine. The names are so close. He finds himself tracing the imagined scars with his fingers. Lainie kittens her neck into his hand. Strickland has a pang of sorrow for her. She has no idea of the things in his head. His current thought, for example, that he’d rather like to chew her to pieces, just like the hidden piranhas in their sink.

“Does that hurt?” She sinks his cold, sewn fingers into her hot breast, just above her heart. “Can you feel anything?”