On the balcony on the other side a woman sat alone having a beer on her wicker loveseat. Her name was Sebastian. She had a long, washed-out-green dress unwrinkling on a hanger, and the ocean breeze kept tipping it into her face as she sat, looking pale and basically dead, squinting into the hot sun reflecting off the ocean. Phylida leaned across the railing and asked, “Did you and Niloo grow up together in New Jersey?” Sebastian knew Niloo from college. She offered Phylida a beer. Already, the first lonely person Phylida saw she befriended. The gay guys stood muscularly in belted swim trunks. I went back inside and hung up my suit.

I lay down on the bed and listened to the women chat. They told each other where they’d come from. Phylida worked into her intro that Bob and I no longer knew each other. Sebastian said, “I can’t believe I got invited to this thing.” Phylida was leaning on the balcony divider, moving her weight back and forth, her butt aimed at the opening in the doorway at my feet. I felt myself relaxing. Phylida’s butt had become the focal point of our life together. It was soft and circular and amazing. I wanted to crawl inside it. I got comfort knowing it was there. She was explaining her medical residency to Sebastian. Now it was swinging. I shut my eyes and began twitching, conking out like the overworked dead person with foul breath I’d become.

After a while Phylida came in and closed the sliding glass door and the see-through curtain, not the heavier, room-darkening drape, and lay down next to me and explained that Sebastian hadn’t rented a car and wanted to ride over with us to the rehearsal dinner. Then she fell asleep. She hadn’t slept all week. She hadn’t slept in seven months and four years. Medical residents are sleep-deprived. On call for three surgical rotations this week, she slept through her beeper one night, what they call a “no-hitter,” got clobbered the next two nights with huge repair jobs, came home in a black cloud, unable to talk.

I said, “Are you asleep?” She didn’t move. “How can somebody name a girl Sebastian?”

Phylida and I never fought. We also never saw each other. Our life consisted of lengths of days, with nothing fun in the middle, grinding. We got together and listed what had happened since the last time we spoke, became sad and fell asleep. I kissed her canted hipbone. I ran my finger along her “zipper,” the scar that went from her sternum to her crotch, open heart surgery as a kid, what got her interested in medicine back then, coarctation of the aorta—a narrow, collapsing aorta, congenitally smushed. I weighed her chest. She let me. I said, “Should I let you sleep?”