A man knows his love is dead when he can imagine with equanimity his wife or lover making love with another man or, as must also be considered nowadays, with another woman. This Feldman eventually could do. He awoke one day a year or so after his divorce and no longer cared with whom Elaine slept, or how much pleasure it gave her, or if he compared well or badly with Larry or with any new lovers she might since have acquired. 

Apart from any effect that her fate might have had on his daughters — when they divorced Diane was eleven and Miriam nine — Elaine was no longer of any personal interest to Feldman. She was now the woman who endorsed and cashed his ample child-support cheques, nothing more. Were it not for his daughters, dark truth to tell, had Feldman learned that she had died in a car accident or on an operating table, he should not have been much moved. She was dead to him already. 

Feldman decided not to confront Larry with what Elaine had told him. He had no evidence beyond Elaine's word, and while he felt the truth of his wife's accusation in his own bones, this wasn't evidence that would, so to speak, hold up in court. Bringing it up could destroy his friendship with Larry.

Feldman cared a lot more about Larry Goodman than he did about his ex-wife. He might have cared more about him even when he and Elaine were still married. They went back a long way, Feldman and Larry — to grade school, in fact. Feldman had already lost Elaine; he didn't want to lose Larry, too.

How many times had Larry and Feldman been together since he and Elaine had been lovers, if in fact they were lovers, Feldman wondered? He had no way of knowing, since he didn't know how long ago Larry and Elaine had begun their affair, if affair it truly was. An affair implied duration. For all he knew, they might have had sex together only once; it could have been a fling, a roll in the hay, a thing of the moment, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. Elaine had said, Feldman recalled, that she "slept with", not "had been sleeping with", Larry.