Later, Irene would look back on those nine days with Sam and marvel at how she could have been so joyful, when she knew this arrangement was short and temporary, when the future beyond it was like a night fog. How, when they ventured out to the beach after sunset, she could have danced in mad swirls on the sand while Sam played records on the phonograph; how they could have made love for hours under the glittering night sky with no regard whatsoever for the possible consequences of uniting yourself sexually with another human being. She could only say that she was drunk at last, for the first time in her life, and didn’t realize that when you were drunk—and it didn’t matter what you were drunk on, dope or alcohol or danger or passion—you lost all inhibition. You forgot your drunkenness would end eventually in some kind of misery or that consequences even existed at all.

What she couldn’t say was that they didn’t make the most of those nine days. They might have been nine years, Sam and Irene packed so much into them. They laughed and fought and ate and played and made love, and on the last night, after Sam hobbled up the cliff in his crutches, and Irene followed anxiously with the phonograph and the records, they fell into bed so exhausted, they did not make love at all, for once. They just slept in a tangle of skin and sweat, did not dream, did not stir until a premonition of dawn slid through the open window.

Irene opened her eyes and peeled her skin from Sam’s skin. She slipped out of bed and wriggled on her bathing costume and surfed for an hour. When she climbed back to the terrace, Sam had a cup of coffee ready for her, and this morning he wasn’t smiling.

“You’ve decided, then,” he said. “You’re going to Sacramento.”

She didn’t ask how he knew. She took the coffee and drank, and when her mug was empty she washed it out and showered in Sam’s bathtub, under its rickety shower pipe. He was waiting, towel in hand, when she came out. He dried her off himself, sort of hopping about on one crutch, which made her laugh. Once he had her laughing, he set her on the edge of the chair and made love to her a final time on his knees, cushioned by the rug: an ingenious solution to the problem of the cast, which had bedeviled them all week. When they had both finished, panting like racehorses, wrung stone dry, ruined for life, she hung herself on his wet shoulders and cried a little.