Rich felt like punching Emile, but saw, for the first time now, the man smiling.

THEY HAD DINNER in the backyard, by candlelight, beneath a row of linden trees. Some neighbors came to fill the empty seats. They drank local wine from a wooden drum, ate fruit tarts for dessert with strong coffee.

Emile sat beside Gynnie, half-heartedly trying to calm her suspicions about Martina’s family’s complicity during the war. He knew well enough what she was getting at. “We had our own Holocaust in the Alsace,” he wanted to tell her. “We didn’t have time to worry about the fucking Poles working in your grandfather’s factory in Ulm.”

He could see that her mind was over in the trees. She wanted to hear only the terrible stuff.

He wanted to break the cycle of misery he’d passed down. Open your heart, make room for others. He wanted to help her—he didn’t know what to do, but she needed to know that everyone loved her, that she had a nasty mother, that no one would stop her from becoming a bitter bride. He lived in a dumb repetition, and she was somehow part of it, a problem that had not been fixed through time.

Out of the corner of Gynnie’s eye she saw Rich, at the other end of the table, eating steaming duckbreast off his mother’s hot fork, wincing as his mother smiled. She was marrying an idiot. Gynnie simply wanted to find a root cause of her problem, how genocide was linked to her crabby life maybe, how the stress of a bride was linked to Polish slaughter. She didn’t care about her ancestors in Europe. She’d been hoping to uncover some flaw in his evasion, something she could take and pick at and hate him for. She gave up, and when she saw Rich playing with the baby, she felt sad and snuck off to bed.

Later, Rich sat in a chaise at the other end of the table, Jean-Louis asleep across his lap, Chantal sleeping on the other chaise in the dim candlelight.

He and Gynnie weren’t speaking, partly because he knew he revolted her right now.

This would be the beginning of a life of real aloneness he hadn’t felt since childhood, and he wondered about the baby on his lap, and how the bond that produced this little kid then, in turn, tested women and men. Were the ways we revolt each other infinite? Revulsion did not describe the problem. He felt sorry for himself.

Wherever Nora Garleck was on the earth right now, she did not know how repulsive it was even to kiss her. Maybe no one should ever have to bear the burden of knowing a make-out session could turn so ugly. Maybe intimacy was inherently putrid.