Time grinds and polishes your expectations; the news we received would, through the murky hopeful lens of a year before, have been bad. But through the refined clarity of pain, it was good, good news for the first time since October, news of stability if not of improvement. Some part of some treatment (the fourth? the fifth?) seemed to be having some effect that might be sustained for some length of time. On that Thursday, a day that could have held the news of my mother’s almost certain death, we had what I was determined to receive as good news. And armed with that, I began my holiday. I did not make new plans to travel: that, too, was part of the holiday. For me, there was no greater vacation than the calm of staying in a familiar place. Another test result was expected three weeks later; I said to my mother, and to my father, and to Freddy, that if we all managed three weeks of feeling light and easy and unconcerned, we could build up our depleted energy for the renewal of the battle. “And if the battle need never be renewed,” I insisted, “we will not have wasted this time by being happy.”

Sparkling that Thursday night, I chanced to pause on a corner to let the traffic pass, and on the opposite corner chanced to stand a broad man with unkempt blond hair and a skier’s tan. I caught his eye, and he caught my eye, and I stood quite still as the traffic waned; and after a moment he crossed the road, and spoke to me in imperfect English with an indeterminate accent that seemed to live at the back of his throat. I broke with old rules, and with new rules, and I walked with him to his car, and drove with him to his home and slept with him in his bed. By the time we arrived at his door, I knew that we shared only a world of mutual surface; but I was fascinated by his face and his body and his movements, and by the gilded edge between eroticism and romance.