Lynn gets up from beside me and takes the dinner plates with her. I must be insane. She gives me what I need, and I love her. Hollow but true. I have to remember these things, about her and about the chicken in the grass—is that how it works? Perfect. Stupid. Shared. Turn off the TV now. Turn off the lights.

ISSUES I DEALT WITH IN THERAPY

WE WERE ON a preppy East Coast resort island, in the middle of summer, we just flew in for the wedding of my incredible friend Bob. We were here on vacation, away from the hot city; I was so glad to be out of that fucking house. The simple fact that it’s a plane trip away and you’re staying in a hotel on this fake, preppy island, and because you’re not married and yet you’re at a wedding together, because you’re too cheap to go on decent vacations, because your own day-to-day life could use some tuning up and like any sane person you’ve already erected an invisible barrier between yourself and that life back there and you’re now pretending that it isn’t real, and because Bob is suddenly this big deal, your most skyrocketing friend, and Bob’s wedding weekend has finally arrived—well, it’s a new beginning. I could feel the excitement.

We got to the hotel and parked the rental car and walked down to the water in our street clothes. People passed by with beach umbrellas and L. L. Bean canvas tote bags, floating in the heat. Kids ran happily in the wet patch left by the outgoing tide as seagulls hovered rigidly in the air above us, screaming into the wind. We walked back up through the mushy sand to the steps of the hotel parking lot, Phylida’s long white translucent sundress blowing in front of me. We passed the advance team for Gore, fifteen blond-haired women in their early twenties wearing hairbands talking on cell phones on the little patch of grass bordering some brown split-wood railings in front of the hotel. I was looking at everything: the people getting out of the rental cars, the bracelets on the women, the sunshine brightly beaming. It was Bob’s sunshine, you were on his island now. I looked back at Phylida; she smiled. The wind lifted her dress all the way up in the front before she could catch it. A guy struggled to pull out his golf clubs from the trunk, and a valet half his age whisked the bag away like a feather. The wife laughed. Who were they? I think every room in the hotel was rented to the four hundred people invited to the wedding.