She took off the sunglasses to reveal two bloodshot eyes, maroon bags beneath them that reminded me of nothing so much as testicles, and said, “I don’t think I slept last night.”

The beginning of the end.

“I kept thinking someone was going to come into the room and kill us.”

Phylida was falling apart. She was one rotation away from a seventy-two-hour-long crying jag. When these cycles ended we were both a mess, and she was always a little more nuts, a little less reachable, than when they began.

“I kept hearing people on the beach.”

“You thought they wanted to kill you?”

“I thought they wanted to kill you for that speech you made last night.” She was about to cry. “I’m scared I’ll never be able to sleep again.”

“You will.” I loved her, even more when she was going crazy. Now what? We had big problems. I, on the one hand, couldn’t live on a wage from a bankrupt think tank. She, on the other hand, had messed her sleep rhythm up irrevocably. A surgical resident who can’t sleep on command won’t make it.

She said, “Are you mad at me because of last night?”

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“Because I didn’t let you screw me?”

“Phylida, what good is any of it?”

I looked at the clock. I said I had to be at the country club two hours before her, for photos for the wedding party.

She said, “I just think we should have separate beds at home so we can sleep.”

“Do what?”

Phylida shoved a towel from the bathroom into her knapsack. “Your ugly girlfriend was down there at breakfast. She asked about you.” I sat up. She meant Anne, and then I remembered talking to her at dinner as she wondered if she could get more dirt from me on Bob.

“The only reason she talked to me was because I know Bob.”

“Come get me on the beach before you leave. I don’t want to fry.”

I’M RUNNING TOWARD the bathroom, tripping out of my underwear, smelling my armpits. I put on shorts and am down at the restaurant in forty seconds. A gray wooden porch overlooking a field leading down to a marsh. Anne sat alone, drinking juice. Her coffee looked cold and bitter. She had very thin arms that she raised up, hostagelike, because I was standing above her in the sun. Her voice was all gravelly. She kept clearing her throat. “You have the nerve to show your face in public after last night?” She laughed. Yuk yuk. I acted surprised that she recognized me. She did have an abrupt set of gaping nostrils that were a little hard to look at. “Did you get all the information you needed?”