“It began to feel funny,” Phyllis admitted. “Tickly. Theatrical. Like you were showing off for somebody. Let’s just do it.”

“Do you want to? We don’t have to. I can wait until you want to. Maybe tomorrow, when we’re not so tired and jazzed up by other people. Weddings are killing, aren’t they?” They were in a cottage, the Truro cottage, lent to them for a week by her parents. He had graduated in the top third of his class; she had spent an unhappy year at graduate school desultorily taking advanced courses in number theory and topology and groping for a thesis topic and not getting along with her advisor. They were to go back to Cambridge for the summer, she to pick up a few more credits at summer school and he for an eight-week internship with Whirlwind that the department of electrical engineering had arranged. They could hear from afar surf breaking and withdrawing on the beach at the base of its sand cliffs and smell the stunted pitch pines. The sound and the smell, which would be there whether they were or not, gave the dark outside a vastness their newly joined lives could never fill. “Why is everybody supposed to like champagne?” he asked, timid of her silence. “To me it always tastes sour.”

He could not read her expression, only see the lean arabesque of her jaw and the long tendon of her neck as she turned her head toward the window. A three-quarters moon was framed and bisected by the sash; its light picked out the tab of an earlobe in the obscure mass of her hair. What was Phyllis doing, with her motionless gaze? Saying goodbye to the moon? This small bare house, strange to him, to her was full of girlhood summer memories and quaint souvenirs—books, shells, immature watercolors fading in their dime-store frames—of a bygone family life. The cottage’s briny, musty odors would be murmuring a language to her brain. Still kneeling, possessed of the privileges of a husband, his brain sapped by the flight of all his blood into his erect prick, he surveyed the glimmering moonlit wealth of her—the crescents of round hard shoulder and the collarbone jutting above its slant pockets of shadow and her breasts flattened on the fragile splay of her ribs. She turned her head back to gaze up at him.

“No, let’s do it,” her voice came, softer. “Why buck tradition?”

“Did you say fuck tradition?”

“That’s not funny, Owen.”