Increasingly, Don Fairbairn had trouble remembering how it had actually been in the broad middle stretch of his life, when he was living with his first wife and helping her, however distractedly, raise their children. His second marriage, which had once seemed so shiny and amazing and new, now was as old as his first had been—twenty-two years, exactly—when he had, one ghastly weekend, left it. His second wife and he lived in a house much too big for them yet so full of souvenirs and fragile inherited treasures that they could not imagine living elsewhere. In their present circle of friends, the main gossip was of health and death, whereas once the telephone wires had buzzed with word of affairs and divorces. His present wife, Vanessa, would set down the telephone to announce that Herbie Edgerton’s cancer had come back and appeared to be into his lymph nodes and bones now; thirty years ago, his first wife, Alissa, would hang up and ask him if they were free for drinks and take-out pizza at the Langleys’ this Saturday. Yes, she would go on, it was such short notice that it would have been rude from anybody but the Langleys. They were socially voracious, now that psychotherapy had helped them to see that they couldn’t stand each other. Everybody’s mental and marital health, as Don remembered it, was frail, so frail that women, meeting, would follow their “How are you?” with “No, how are you really?”

And then—this with an averted glance and the hint of a blush from Alissa—she had seen Wendy Chace in the superette and impulsively asked her and Jim to drinks tomorrow evening. She had said yes, they’d love to, but they couldn’t stay more than a minute, Jim had the Planning Commission meeting, they were fending off this evil out-of-state developer who was trying to turn the entire old Treadwell estate into Swiss-chalet-style condos. Just paraphrasing Jim’s flighty, cause-minded wife made Alissa glow. This at least was vivid in Don’s memory, the way his former wife’s eyes would become livelier and her cheeks, a bit sallow normally, would redden and her lips, usually pursed and pensive, would dance into quips and laughter when Jim was near or in prospect. He couldn’t blame her; he had been as bad as she, looking outside the home for strength to keep the home going. The formula had worked only up to a point—perhaps the point, somewhere in their forties, when they realized that life wasn’t endless. The Fairbairns had been, actually, among the last in their old set to get divorced. They had stayed on the sinking ship while its deck tilted and its mast splintered and its sails flapped, whipping loose line everywhere.