And what of his girls’ dating, that traditional tragicomedy, with its overtones of Attic patricide, in the age of the sitcom? His older daughter had gone off to boarding school when she was fifteen, and his younger daughter had been but twelve when he left the house. He could scarcely remember a single hot-rod swerving into the crackling driveway to carry off one of his trembling virgins.

Now this younger daughter invited him to have drinks on a boat. He didn’t have to drink liquor, of course, she explained. More and more people didn’t; it interfered with their training routines. She herself was slim and hard as a greyhound, and entered local marathons; her hair, which like Alissa’s had begun to turn white early, was cut short as a boy’s, to lower wind resistance, he supposed. The deal was this, Dad: the husband of a friend of theirs was turning forty, and she, the wife, was giving him as one of his presents a sunset cruise in the marshes, and since his parents were coming the friend, the wife—are you following this, Dad?—wanted some other members of the older generation to be there, so the question is could you and Vanessa come, since you know I guess the husband’s father from apparently playing a few golf tournaments with him?

Actually, when he shook his peer’s hand, under the canopy of the flat-bottomed cruise boat, he remembered him as an opponent who had illegally switched balls on the eighteenth green and then sunk the putt to win the match. At the time, he hadn’t wished to undergo the social embarrassment of complaining to the officials, but he had avoided club tournaments ever since. Now the man—one of those odious exultant retirees with a face creased and thickened by an all-year tan—crowed over that remembered triumph. His wife, who was somewhat younger than he, and preeningly dressed in clothes that would have appeared less garish in Florida, fastened onto Vanessa as her only soulmate. Don drifted away, trying to hide among the drinking young couples, to whom he had nothing to say. Not drinking did that—it robbed you of things to say.