I had always wanted to go to Monte Carlo. It comes up in conversation a lot, and you always feel that you should have been there, if only so that you, too, can dismiss it rather casually. Also, I have a sort of mental checklist of European countries. I have yet to visit Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland or Norway. Or Andorra. I don’t know why these should be the gaps, except Andorra, which I think most people visit only if they keep mental checklists of this kind. To come so close to ticking off Monaco and miss it would have been a shame. It was a destination that offered itself, and the night was too long in front of us, and so we went. We had promised my mother, who feared the roads, that we would not drive to Monaco after dark—how odd it was to betray her at that moment.

It was the strangest of night journeys, driving out on the lowest Corniche and back on the middle Corniche. There is a geography that holds us forever in our places, that makes us feel clearly the size and scale of human life itself, and the views of that drive—the land and the sea and the sky in geometric monochrome balance—seemed to sharpen all our senses and to remind us of ourselves. On the way to Monte Carlo, Freddy drove and I navigated and Helen was in the backseat; on the return trip, Helen drove and I navigated and Freddy dozed uneasily. It was a clear night, and mostly we could see only the sea stretching away from us. By night, Monte Carlo looks like an opera set, up against the water, spotlessly clean, busy with all-too-worldly figures rushing through lives of what the imaginative tourist suspects to be sordid extravagance. In fact, it seems also as pleasantly middle-class as a suburb. We parked the car and went to the casino, where everything had been gilded and carved and brocaded to the point of shapelessness. We walked through, the three of us, passing judgment: on the overly spectacular interior, on the overdressed gamblers, on the overtired croupiers. Afterward, we went to an overcrowded café with an apricot-colored postmodernist canopy covering the tables, and watched a light rain falling through the fairy-tale lights of the casino and the fountain in front of it.