For a moment she appeared not to recognize him, glared at him only as a man who had seen her naked and ugly. And then it hit her, like a snowball in the face, a moment of shock, then fear, a fear she quickly covered. And finally it was hatred again. Bedrock.

She got into her car and drove off, wildly, almost running down an old woman and a teenage clerk wheeling a shopping cart full of groceries across the parking lot. Hook decided not to follow her. He had seen enough of Dorothy Rubin for one day.

That night, as he drove past it in the dark, the old hotel looked even more beautiful than he remembered it from the forties—like the courthouse a vast white Moorish castle, but low and sprawled out along the seafront, all minarets and arches and balconies set among its anarchy of wings and alcoves. The giant eucalyptus trees in front were more gigantic now, the sweeping lawn still smooth as a golf green, the lights burning inside still somehow as soft and moneyed as before. And of course the cars parked in front, along the drive, were big and shiny, though that was hardly a distinction anymore, in an age when the average chain motel could boast a parking lot every bit as gleaming. But here there was a beach beyond the parked cars, a beach where some of the oldest and dirtiest money in the nation took the winter sun, and where he and Mrs. Cunningham had walked and swam and talked and made love.

But as Hook drove slowly past now, it was not any talk he had had with her that he remembered but one with Kate a few months before her death, on an autumn night outside when he had set logs on top of burning leaves and the two of them had sat together toasting marshmallows and talking and watching the fire until long after the children and Aunt Marian and Arnie had gone to bed. And somehow the subject of Mrs. Cunningham had come up, a subject Hook had told Kate all about even before their marriage, not as a confession but as simply a part of his life that he had not wanted to withhold from her. And if she had been a touch jealous then, in the beginning, that touch had disappeared over the years, for on this night she expressed her gratitude that there had been a Mrs. Cunningham.

Hook asked her why.

“Because I’m so happy. So lucky.”

“And you think she’s responsible?”

“I don’t know. But maybe if it hadn’t been for her, maybe you would have been different when we met. And maybe we wouldn’t have gotten together. Maybe I wouldn’t have what I have now.”

“And what’s that?”

“You. The children.”

“And we make you happy?”

“You make me happy.”

He was sitting back against a log, with her between his legs, lying back against him. And when he said nothing now she turned and looked up at him.