Gynnie asked, “Do you like kids?”

She imagined him, for a moment, more mature, with a dark black mustache and beard, a father to her children, a hardened understanding of real responsibility, how it would shape him into something rugged, dependable, steady. She lay there and looked at him as though a mysterious black-haired matador had broken into the room to seduce her.

She said, “Are you mad at me?”

He said, “Are you?”

She said, “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.” She waited for him to speak. “The only good thing.”

“Are you kidding?”

By the time Rich lay down beside Gynnie they both were feeling that this quarreling was humiliating, and they put their faces together and talked about how they’d been avoiding this moment, and after five minutes they felt lucky and ashamed and were able to kiss. Was this the time and place for him to confess? Confess what, though? He needed to do everybody a favor and stuff that one. The amount of work and excitement and well-wishing had overwhelmed them. The building up of so much in their heads. A lot of the tension was dispelled with that first long kiss. By the time they were making love, they’d quit talking. The entire house knew what was happening. You could hear something that was not creaking but was an indescribable click that was the slats of the bed, the wood being bowed in rhythm. The floor also repeated a faint noise. If you stood on the patio you could hear low speaking of a certain raving nature. You could hear a little of the loony madness of it.

After Rich had walked off the patio, Emile explained to Martina that the morning light, coming from the east, would leave the yard in shadows. He wanted the statues and linden trees on the far end of the yard to be in the background for shooting, and so he showed her how the altar could be turned so that the couple would stand in the sun. He stared at Martina and wondered if his love life was over.