—We’d, well, I mean we could take another hike here—I might be able to get out from under them tomorrow when they’re off—they’re going on some kind of excursion, it’s a tourist trap thing but they love it anyway, an ocean adventure sort of deal.

—That would be great, we can walk and I’ll bring something to eat.

—Your name, Lucinda, it’s…

—After my grandmother Lucinda.

N) Growing up in Wisconsin, there was always a lake. Your father’s arms around your shoulder. Stray dogs. Hardships. The small cabin in the forest north of Milwaukee; the brewery spewing steam. Trailers, shacks, cabins abandoned for the winter by summer folks. He’s also from the Midwest, from Toledo. Oil refinery flames twisting tongues of fire in the sky as his father drove him home from a visit to the office. Geography, loss, failures, the sustained efforts to keep the marriage going and to keep a steady toehold. (On what? On the Seventh Commandment, he wonders. He believes in that commandment, set forth for good reason.) Yeah, certainly there are failures beneath the surface, failures of marriage, things not received, and needs not met, too. Needs of all kinds—and that power of romantic love, of course, conspiring against conjugal forces: there are those temporal elements. Sure, those are there, too.

O) At Marconi Station a few stragglers loaded with inner tubes and fold-up chairs, towels, and coolers arise from the top of the stairs like resurrected souls, their forms lit brilliantly by the low-slung sun as it sinks into the scrub pines to the west. They see two cars in the far corner. The manner in which the cars are parked—the closeness of the vehicles, the offhanded angle of one car in relation to the other—exudes cheap, ill-conceived conspiracy. In the front seat two adults grope each other, lips touching.

P) Flesh isn’t enough; flesh eats you both. The desire comes from the pine swamp (your third visit), from the hollow up there where you are safe and hidden, the sense of the sea beyond the windbreak and its great insatiable turbulent continuum as it endlessly rolls into itself. The sea is eternal. We are not. The sea is forever. Touch is not. The waves are forever. My fingers are not. One thinks of those maps in science textbooks, the circular nature of the water cycle, arrows flinging up into the perfect sky and water coming down. I used to read Eugene O’Neill, he says, touching her, thinking about the rickety house at Peaked Hill Bar falling into itself and being washed into the sea.

Q) Just pulling out—the gymnastics of postcoital movements; she’s working a cramp out of her calf, a sudden charley horse that sends her bucking up, her back covered with sweat and sand. Beyond the sand and pines one hears the sweet milky sway of waves washing ashore.

R) Under the pretense of going out for a gallon of milk at the minimarket in Eastham, you drive the dark roads to Lighthouse Beach, and there, under the swaths of green-white-green-white light, you locate his car.