She had always been a plain, mousey-looking woman, even in the first flush of youth, though tonight she was looking particularly colorless, and she had had her hair cut in a new way. It was difficult to put a finger on how exactly it was different, but whatever the change was, it had made everything a little worse: more severe, exposing new swaths of neck that looked unaccustomed to the light.

“Is that a new haircut?” I said, rising from the bench and handing over the profiteroles.

“Yes, actually,” she said, sounding surprised and gratified. She gave the nape of her neck a quick, involuntary caress. “You’re the first to notice.”

How unlucky, I thought. That would teach me a lesson.

Ann and Gerry had been my neighbors when I first came to the university many years ago. My father had secured me a place in graduate student housing, though I was not a graduate student, and theirs was the apartment opposite my own. Since then we had remained friends, although in the last decade the friendship had calcified into this arrangement: every couple of months or so a dinner invitation would be issued, and I would appear, and no sooner had I stepped across their threshold than time would slow to a barely perceptible crawl. The only sign that the years were passing at all was in Stephanie, who had begun life as a cheerful thing, the mistress of a terrarium of salamanders, but who had recently morphed into an unpleasant and sullen-looking adolescent who, when she got her way, ate her dinner in her room.

Still, I thought, as I followed Ann into the kitchen and watched her put the profiteroles in the refrigerator to defrost, I suppose you could also say that in some sense the Van Gelders were my closest friends.

“Gerry just got back from North Dakota,” said Ann, as we sat down to eat: a salad, a poached fish, green beans, a warm roll each, and a stick of yellow margarine in the butter dish.

“I see,” I said. “And how was that?”

Gerry took a bite of roll and a gulp of wine and shook his head. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “it’s very bleak.”

“Oh?”

“Just flat and ugly, and as far as the eye can see.”

I made an appreciative noise. I noticed a bowl of new potatoes, split one open on my plate, nestled a yellow square of margarine in it, and reached for the salt.

“The chair of the department did his postdoc out here, actually,” said Gerry. “Swedish guy. A giant. Claims there’s just one thing that he really misses about California.”

And after his significant pause Ann asked patiently, “And what was that?”

Gerry leaned back in his chair and pointed what remained of his roll at us.

“Would you two like to guess?”

We looked blankly at him.

“Sunshine,” said Ann.

“Ocean,” I said.