I could have gone with him to his boat. There’s nothing stopping me. Maybe it’s every bit as tidy and maritime as he is—dark blue with copper trim, weathered only in the right places. Or maybe it’s big, a forty-five-foot Hallberg-Rassy, a stylish cliché, white as chalk, except for a single dark-blue, snobbish stripe, and with a bed twice as wide as my own, good mattresses, clean sheets, another body against my own, another’s warmth . . .

But no. Such an ordeal, the undressing, the bashfulness, the discomfort, embarrassment. Maybe he has hair growth in the wrong places—I do at any rate. Maybe he smells rank, alien, maybe he’ll think I’m too hackneyed, too worn out, at the end of the day, with all my scratches, scrapes, and dents. And what about him, what about his scratches? For sure, he doesn’t even think about them; he’s a man, the positive and neutral being. The word for man in both French and English also signifies human beings in general while I’m the negative; woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.

I empty my glass, stand up, pay at the bar, stop for a moment. Shall I say something to the man, shall I give him a piece of my mind? No, I can’t be bothered. I am too old for anger. Too many have tried to rescue me.

Magnus also wanted to rescue me—he rescued me with a snowman, he rescued me at a party. It was maybe for that reason alone that we were together, because he continued to live off the good deed he had done when he was thirteen, when he had behaved like an adult. Maybe he had tried to live off that moment, tried to find it again, and perhaps also tried to find his way back to the same helplessness in me.

Or was it me, was I the one who based our relationship on this, who was searching for the same thing again? I know that memories are unreliable, just as unstable as fiction. But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to base a life on. He was a hiatus, only, a hiatus in everything else that is really me. I have to trust it, because what can I trust if I start second-guessing my own history?

I unlock the boat and walk into the saloon, where the containers dominate the space completely. I want to sit down, but there’s no room, so I walk out into the cockpit again. It’s damp there, condensation on the benches, a cool evening. I miss the saloon.

I go below, pick up one of the ice containers. I can put them on deck—the mast has to come down tomorrow, be disassembled for the trip up the canal. I can put them beside it. There aren’t any waves here, no storms to wash them overboard.