Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out. It was December; she felt a curtain closing on another year. She wanted to do this before she got too old. She was sure she would be disappointed. - P1
A jukebox song, "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," lured her into a pub, a converted prison with barred windows and a low, beamed ceiling. - P1
She wished the world could turn into a fabulous, outrageous red to match her mood. - P3
They sold everything: smelly secondhand books and china, big red poinsettias, holly wreaths, brass ornaments, fresh fish with dead eyes lying on a bed of ice. - P4
"I know your type," he said. "You’re wild. You’re one of these wild middle-class women." - P4
He was free with his money, kept it crumpled in his pockets like old receipts, didn’t smooth the notes out even when he was handing them over. - P4
It was neglected, like a place where someone used to live; dank smells, no sign of a phone, no photographs, no decorations, no Christmas tree. The rubber plant in the living room crawled across the carpet toward a rectangular pool of streetlight. - P5
"I know what you need," he said. "You need looking after. There isn’t a woman on the earth who doesn’t need looking after. Stay there." He went out and came back with a comb, began combing the knots from her hair. "Look at you," he said. "You’re a real blond. You’ve blond fuzz, like a peach." His knuckle slid down the back of her neck, followed her spine. - P6
He kissed her and kissed her. There wasn’t any hurry. His palms were the rough hands of a working man. They battled against their lust, wrestled against what in the end carried them away. - P6
While he took charge of dinner, she sat on the couch with the cat on her lap and watched a documentary on Antarctica, miles of snow, penguins shuffling against subzero winds, Captain Cook sailing down to find the lost continent. He came out with a tea towel draped across his shoulder and handed her a glass of chilled wine. - P7
She could stay drunk; she could live like this. - P7
"I always thought hell would be an unbearably cold place where you stayed half frozen but you never quite lost consciousness and you never really felt anything," she said. "There’d be nothing, only a cold sun and the devil there, watching you." She shivered and shook herself. - P8
"In that case," he said, "hell for me would be deserted; there’d be nobody there. Not even the devil. I’ve always taken heart in the fact that hell is populated; all my friends will be there." - P8
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