My wife was slow-dancing on the forward deck with her lover, Frank Greer. Audrey had materialized beside me and my hand went around her waist as if we might dance, too. There my hand stayed, and, like the gentle buzz you get from a frayed appliance cord, the reality of her haunch burned through to my fingers and palm. She was a solid, smooth-faced woman, so nearsighted that she moved with a splay-footed pugnacity, as if something she didn’t quite see might knock her over. Her contact lenses were always getting lost, in somebody’s lawn or at the back of her eyeballs. She had married young and was a bit younger than the rest of us. You had to love Audrey, seeing her out on the tennis court in frayed denim cut-offs, with her sturdy brown legs and big, squinty smile, taking a swing and missing the ball completely. Her waist was smooth and flexible in summer cotton, and, yes, she was right, for the first time in all our years of acquaintance I sensed her as a potential mate, as a piece of the cosmic puzzle that might fit my piece.

But I also felt that, basically, she didn’t care for me, not enough to come walking through all of adultery’s risks and spasms of guilt, all those hoops of flame. She distrusted me, the way you distrust a competitor. We were both clowns, bucking to be elected Funniest in the Class. Further, she was taken, doubly: not only married, to a man called Spike, with the four children customary for our generation, but involved in a number of murky flirtations or infatuations, including one with my best friend, Rodney Miller—if a person could be said to have same-sex friends in our rather doctrinairely heterosexual enclave. She had a nice way of drawling out poisonous remarks, and said now, to me, “Shouldn’t you go tell Jeanne and Frank the boat is about to dock? They might get arrested by the Portsmouth fuzz for public indecency.”

I said, “Why me? I’m not the cruise director.”