Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

them,” he said. “At home it’s all the lights and crap.”
    “Watch it,” his father said. But he said, Okay then, five minutes, and we all went outside and looked at the sky. We looked for the Pilot Star, close beside the second star in the handle of the Big Dipper. If you could see that one, Johnston said, then your eyesight was good enough to get you into the Air Force, at least that was the way it was during the Second World War.
    Sunny said, “Well, I can see it, but then I knew beforehand that it’s there.”
    Mike said, the same with him.
    “I could see it,” said Gregory scornfully. “I could see it whether I knew it was there or not.”
    “I could see it too,” Mark said.
    Mike was standing a little ahead of me and to one side. He was actually closer to Sunny than he was to me. Nobody was behind us, and I wanted to brush against him—just lightly and accidentally against his arm or shoulder. Then if he didn’t stir away—out of courtesy, taking my touch for a genuine accident?—I wanted to lay a finger against his bare neck. Was that what he would have done, if he had been standing behind me? Was that what he would have been concentrating on, instead of the stars?
    I had the feeling, however, that he was a scrupulous man, he would refrain.
    And for that reason, certainly, he would not come to my bed that night. It was so risky as to be impossible, in any case. There were three bedrooms upstairs—the guest room and the parents’ room both opening off the larger room where the children slept. Anybody approaching either of the smaller bedrooms had to do so through the children’s room. Mike, who had slept in the guest room last night, had been moved downstairs, to the foldout sofa in the front room. Sunny had given him fresh sheets rather than unmaking and making up again the bed he had left for me.
    “He’s pretty clean,” she said. “And after all, he’s an old friend.”
    Lying in those same sheets did not make for a peaceful night. In my dreams, though not in reality, they smelled of water-weeds, river mud, and reeds in the hot sun.
    I knew that he wouldn’t come to me no matter how small the risk was. It would be a sleazy thing to do, in the house of his friends, who would be—if they were not already—the friends of his wife as well. And how could he be sure that it was what I wanted? Or that it was what he really wanted? Even I was not sure of it. Up till now, I had always been able to think of myself as a woman who was faithful to the person she was sleeping with at any given time.
    My sleep was shallow, my dreams monotonously lustful, with irritating and unpleasant subplots. Sometimes Mike was ready to cooperate, but we met with obstacles. Sometimes he got sidetracked, as when he said that he had brought me a present, but he had mislaid it, and it was of great importance to him to find it. I told him not to mind, that I was not interested in the present, for he himself was my present, the person I loved and always had loved, I said that. But he was preoccupied. And sometimes he reproached me.
    All night—or at least whenever I woke up, and I woke often—the crickets were singing outside my window. At first I thought it was birds, a chorus of indefatigable night-birds. I had lived in cities long enough to have forgotten how crickets can make a perfect waterfall of noise.
    It has to be said, too, that sometimes when I woke I found myself stranded on a dry patch. Unwelcome lucidity. What do you really know of this man? Or he of you? What music does he like, what are his politics? What are his expectations of women?

    “Did you two sleep well?” Sunny said.
    Mike said, “Out like a light.”
    I said, “Okay. Fine.”
    Everybody was invited to brunch that morning at the house of some neighbors who had a swimming pool. Mike said that he thought he would rather just go round the golf course, if that would be okay.
    Sunny said, “Sure,” and looked at me. I said, “Well, I don’t know if I—” and Mike said, “You don’t play golf, do you?” No.
    “Still. You could come and caddy for me.”
    “I’ll come and caddy,” Gregory said. He was ready to attach himself to any expedition of ours, sure that we would be more liberal and entertaining than his parents.
    Sunny said no. “You’re coming with us. Don’t you want to go in the pool?”
    “All the kids pee in that pool. I hope you know that.”

    Johnston had warned us before we left that there was a prediction