It was pleasant. They lay there without talking and with a nice sense of privacy, the traffic barreling along Storrow Drive behind them and the river in front of them satisfactorily dark as far as the lights of Memorial Drive on the Cambridge side; in the middle, one blurry white sail.

They were, of course, spotlighted under the lamp post.

The sail was moving. “I’d like to take a boat ride,” he said.

“There are a couple of rowboats at the boat club, right behind the concert shell.”

He held out his hand and she took it and they ran to the dock. There were no oars but he helped her into one of the boats anyway. “We can pretend. I’ll be Ulysses,” he said, still feeling Hellenic. “You’re a siren.”

“No. I’m just Gabrielle Pender.”

They sat in the stern facing the far shore and the lights that should have spoiled it but didn’t, Cambridge Electric and the Electronic Corporation of America and all the others. He kissed her again and when he stopped she said, “He was married.”

“Who?”

“Ulysses. Remember poor Penelope, waiting back in Ithaca?”

“He hadn’t seen her in twenty years. But, okay, I’ll be somebody else.” He buried his face in her hair. God, she smelled fine. Her barely-perceptible breath quickened as he kissed her neck and her fine pulse made little hammer blows on his lips. The boat rose and fell on tiny waves that came to them from the river mouth a few miles away and lapped under the dock.

“Ah, Adam,” she said between kisses. “Adam Silverstone, who are you now? Who are you really?”

“Find out and let me know,” he told her.

The mosquitoes drove them inland. He helped her to fold the blanket and they stowed it in her car, a battered blue 1963 Plymouth convertible parked off Storrow Drive. They walked to a cafeteria on Charles Street and sat at a table against the wall and drank coffee.

“Was it a case that kept you at the hospital?”

He told her about Grigio. She was a good listener; she asked intelligent questions.

“I’m not afraid of fire or drowning,” she said.

“That means you are afraid of something.”

“We’ve had a lot of cancer. On both sides of the family. My grandmother just died of it.”

“I’m sorry. How old was she?”

“Eighty-one.”

“I’d settle for that.”

“Well, so would I. But my Aunt Louisa, for instance. A young, beautiful woman. I’d hate to die before I was old,” she said. “Do a lot of hospital patients die? High numbers, I mean?”

“On a ward like ours, a few a month. In our service, if a month goes by without a death, the Chief Resident or the Surgical Fellow throws a party.”

“Do you give lots of parties?”

“No.”

“I couldn’t do what you do,” she said. “I couldn’t watch the pain and the dying.”

“There’s more than one way to die. Plenty of pain to watch in psychology, isn’t there?”