How strange it was to be once more at a party where the women were still menstruating. Lean, smart, they moved and twittered and struck poses with an electricity like that in silent movies, which look speeded-up. The men in their checked jackets and pastel slacks were boyish and broad—relatively clumsy foils for their wives’ animation, which in the shuffle of the party kept sprouting new edges, abrupt new angles of slightly startled loveliness. Don inhaled, as if to extract from the salt air the scent of their secretions, their secrets. It had been at parties like this that he had gotten to know Vanessa Langley, her and her socially voracious husband. The similarity of her name to Alissa’s had been one of the attractions; she would be a wife with a “v” added, for vim and vigor, for vivacity and vagina and victory. He had fallen in love with her, she had fallen with him, and here they were, on board together, more than twenty years later.

The boat trundled, with its burden of canned music and clinking drinks and celebrating couples, out through the winding channel between the black-mud banks of the golden-green marsh toward the wider water, where islands crammed with shingled summer houses slowly changed position, starboard to port, as the captain put his craft through a scenic half-circle. There was a white lighthouse, and a stunning sun-struck slope where some American grandee of old had decreed a symmetrical pattern of trimmed shrubs like a great ideogram, and a marina whose pale masts stood as thick as wheat, and a nappy blue-green far stretch of wooded land miraculously yet undeveloped, and the eastward horizon of the open sea already darkening to receive its first starlight while the undulating land to the west basked under luminous salmon stripes, the lean remains of daylight. Don silently gazed outward at all this, and his fellow-passengers gave it moments of notice, but the main thrust of their attention was inward, toward each other, in bright and gnashing conversations growing shrill as the drinks sank in, a feast of love drowning out the canned music. That was how it was, how it had been, the living moment awash with beauty ignored in the quest for a better moment, slightly elsewhere, with some slightly differing other, while the weeds grew in the peony beds, and dust balls gathered beneath the sofa, and the children, unobserved, plotted their own escapes, their own elsewheres.