She searches with systematic diligence, diving to the bottom and probing the mud and plants in ever widening circles, surfacing for air, then diving again, her movements supple and efficient. It’s like watching a Japanese pearl diver, except that Livy looks as unlike a Japanese woman as one can get. She is archetypally Western—Aryan even—like a hawk that has plummeted a thousand feet to penetrate the water and seize its prey. After fifty minutes by my watch, she surfaces and begins treading water, her face lifted to mine.

“I can’t find it!”

I hold up my hands in commiseration and call down to her. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t resurrect the past with a bottle of wine.”

She gives me an insouciant smile and dives again, so deeply that I lose sight of her. When she surfaces, she is at the edge of the pool, holding something in her hand. Not the wine. Her bathing suit. She drapes the white lycra over a cypress knee, then with a graceful roll pushes away from the stump and, floating effortlessly on her back, drifts to the center of the pool. This vision is more potent than any wine; it is my dream made flesh: Livy’s hair floating in a corona around her face, her arms loose at her sides, her breasts little rose-tipped islands, her abdomen a submerged reef stretching to the rise of her pubis with its twist of burnished gold. The sight of her heats the backs of my eyes. As I gaze down, she raises a hand to block the sun and calls out:

“Don’t you swim anymore?”

I scoot to the edge of the platform and drop forty feet through space, plunging deep into the pool. When I float to the surface, I find Livy treading water beside me. She splashes me playfully and says: “I really thought I could find it.”

“Even if you had, it wouldn’t make things like they were before. We have to talk about what happened.”

She looks off through the silver cypress trunks. “I can’t. Not yet.” She stops treading and lies back, half floating, gazing into the hazy blue sky. “I’ve thought about that bottle sometimes. Over the years.”

“Me too. During low times. Four o’clock in the morning, wondering if I ever made a single right choice in my life.”

She seems amused by this. “Not me. I thought about it during good times. Or times that were supposed to be good. I thought about it on my wedding night.”

“Your wedding night?”

She turns her head slightly, watching me as she floats. “There I was, supposed to feel some profound completion as a woman, and all I could think was that I was closing off forever an option I’d always thought I had.”

“And you did.”

Her eyes narrow. “You hadn’t exactly made me feel wanted the last time we’d seen each other.”