it necessarily disloyal to tell the truth—to acknowledge that your spouse is no longer the beautiful girl you’d married twenty years before? The point is—and this is a big point—that his preference for Penelope, who could never be as beautiful as a goddess and who anyway is now aging, maybe approaching middle age, means something. What? Madeline waved a hand at me; the red hair shimmered. That physical beauty and good sex aren’t the basis for a marriage?
