Comforting Her Husband’s Lover : MOON PASSAGE <i> by Jane LeCompte (Harper & Row: $16.95; 187 pp.; 0-06-016120-5) </i>

Wives have assorted ways of handling infidelity. Some fight; others flee, and then there are those who fashion personalized permutations of either extreme. “Moon Passage,” a sublimely written and deeply satisfying first novel, is the story of how one wife deals with her husband’s chronic infidelity: Anne Ellis sequesters herself in a magnificent stone house overlooking a craggy but picturesque bluff on the Mendocino coast and tends her vegetable garden. Literally.

There are those who would quarrel with her coping mechanism, but it seems to serve her well--preserving her sanity by focusing on the vegetables, the vistas and her solitary flashback reveries of all those happier days when the marriage was new and the children were small. Thus armed, she’s more than a match for the occasional discarded lovers who hike to her doorstep, curious to meet her husband’s muse, “the anima made flesh,” as one of them describes her.

That is to say, she is more than a match for all but one. Of course, Anne does not know this the morning that Ellen trudges over the hill toward the house: “The sway of her steps falters . . . It has hit her how difficult it will be to say, ‘I have slept with your husband, and I just wanted to see you.’ She expects emotional fireworks . . . or she wouldn’t be here. But at the same time, she is a little afraid and, oddly, embarrassed. She can’t imagine how to break the news. It’s hard to understand that you’re doing something that’s been done before, and that you are perfectly obvious to those with more experience.”

The scene is thus set for this rich and resonant character study of two women in love, two women who meet as antagonists, although neither has the prize at the moment. Successful author that he is, Jeff is off again, giving yet another writing seminar--and picking up yet another young, adoring fan for yet another brief dalliance.

How a cool and in-control wife and a confused and still-consumed discarded lover cut through the hostility, the suspicion and the fear that fuel their emotions when they first meet are the pungent ingredients of this thought-provoking and beautifully wrought tale that should provide wise lessons in loving under unsettling circumstances.

In one of her revealing interior reveries, Anne tries to rationalize and justify her situation: “Why had I thought my life would be a fairy tale when I had deliberately, insistently, sought intensity? Hadn’t I refused the nice commonplace men who had now and then pursued me? I wanted an extraordinary man, wanted my life to be like a meteor smearing the sky. My friends admired my ambitions. None of them had the courage, or perhaps the insight, to point out that the meteor is burning away.”

The young and unsubtle Ellen, only 20 and not on familiar terms with reflection, probes Anne for scraps of what Jeff is like and what the marriage has been like, hungry for anything she’s willing to share, determined to make a collection of events she’d never shared. And Anne, after initial hesitation and unfamiliar irritation, finds a quirky sort of satisfaction in tossing out these little scenes of young married life, filling Ellen’s empty emotional plate.

But throbbing through the book like a patient pulse is the theme of adjustment to betrayal. Is Anne wrong to “indulge” her seldom-seen husband, grateful for his occasional attention? Is Ellen wrong to be so outraged that she consciously invades Anne’s refuge in search of answers? Can two women at different stages of life and with different levels of passion discover any common ground? Can they comfort each other? Should they?

Which introduces the reader to yet another, less transparent but no less meaningful theme: the inherent nature of the feminine--the capacity to feel deeply, the proclivity for compassion and the access to reconciliation.

“Moon Passage” is a telling exploration of the female psyche recorded by a skillful traveler who already knows the terrain. As such, women readers will find it a very rewarding journey.