A STREETCAR NAMED ST. CHARLES

New Orleans seems not to belong either to the United States, the Western Hemisphere, or, for that matter, Earth. Insanely dependent upon a Three-Stooges-designed system of badly functioning levees and pumps to keep the Gulf of Mexico, swamps, lakes, and mud from swallowing it, most of the city lies below sea level in perpetual suspension between life and death, which may contribute to the feeling that when there you can’t be entirely sure if you’re alive or dead. The inhabitants drink a lot, unnecessarily, as they can be perfectly drunk on the very air they breathe. Brushed by palm fronds, they drift through the darkness trying to find a bed on which to lie down—even though in New Orleans it is mysteriously possible to lie down while standing up.

Yachts, fishing boats, tugs, barges, tenders, and huge, ocean-going ships glide past the city, mute emissaries of the real world. They make their escape to the Gulf like people who file past the glowing oddities of an aquarium and are happy to exit into the daylight and open air. The city is corrupt, its luxuries are corrupt, its necessities are corrupt, its days are corrupt, and its nights are corrupt, but oh how easily they flow.

Shockingly and amazingly, not everyone there doesn’t work. One who did work was Rensselaer, who managed to carry on even though the ethos of New Orleans is antithetical to that of the Navy. It is neither a humming outpost on the Arabian Peninsula, a busy European or Japanese port, nor a fixture on one of the three domestic naval axes, which run all along the East Coast from Maine to Florida, then, skipping like a stone past New Orleans (pace a naval air station), across the Gulf of Mexico from Pensacola to Corpus Christi, and up the West Coast from San Diego to Bremerton and the Hood Canal, swinging out like a davit to Hawaii and Guam.

Whereas the small contingent he commanded was quartered on the other side of the Mississippi, in Algiers, Rensselaer lived in the Garden District, traveling every day to and from the Bollinger Yard across to downtown New Orleans. The Athena rested for a while in a floating dry dock called Miss Darby, as it needed some through-the-hull work and corrosion-proofing. In his commute, Rensselaer never once saw another soldier or sailor in uniform, and never quite got over the way people stared at him. Although like everyone else around him he couldn’t be sure that he was alive, dead, or in between, he did know that his career would soon be over. For he was in charge of a program that would be canceled after its first prototype, and he would then be assigned to command almost the smallest of the Navy’s ships, the only one of its class, and of a type that he had captained fifteen years earlier. Perhaps like all kinds of failure, early retirement, unemployment, and aging, this made him intensely aware of purpose and mortality. He judged that he was done, that absent advancement, testing, and the possibility of great deeds, his life from then on would be quiet, uneventful, and haunted by regret.

*

Someone else in New Orleans who actually worked rather than merely survive on mystery and vapors was one Penelope Catherine Farrar, a lawyer. Not just a lawyer, but, especially ill-fitting to New Orleans, a tax lawyer. She didn’t like the name Penelope. It had too many syllables, it was as sing-song as calliope, it sounded to her like the name of a pet, and some people pronounced it as if it rhymed with cantaloupe. Nor would she truck with the sobriquet Penny, just as, she said, she would have refused to have been called Nickle, Dime, Quarter, Dollar, or Fifty-Cent Piece. So from third grade on she was known as Katy, a name with which she had fallen in love after seeing a movie in which Katy was a beautiful and independent ranch girl not where Katy lived by the York River in Virginia, but in the snow-covered mountains of Colorado. There was even a song that went with the movie, and she remembered it for the rest of her life.

Four years younger than Rensselaer, at forty-eight her presence was remarkable. Everything that she was, conspired to possess her physical body as an electrical current possesses a wire. She was fairly tall, although because she was thin she seemed taller. Her features were finely delineated and extraordinarily engaging, as if much was compressed within her, waiting to spring out in a thousand observations, questions, recollections, and declarations that for some reason were kept in and, thus contained, agitated with constant energy.

She didn’t need to think before she spoke, because she could think far faster than she could speak, and she had already thought so many things through—habitually, seriously, even gravely. But she did think before she spoke, and, because of that, she was generally reticent.

However, when she did speak, it was usually so quick, sure, interesting, and economical that anyone who knew her always wanted to hear what she had to say. And when she did speak, the careful observations, deep thoughts, and striking analogies that had accumulated in silence would now and then break through her reticence in surprising and often inappropriate enthusiasm. People who are wonderful and lovely and worthy—but who can never believe they are anything but that—burst forth this way now and then, passionately uncontained, sparkling, and speaking fast, only to sink back into protective reserve.

When she was young, she had dyed her reddish-blonde hair completely blonde, and her time in the sun amplified its goldenness as it swept from her in a gorgeous mane. But as she grew older, and lost some weight as well, she allowed it to return to its natural color and no longer kept it long. Her face was not merely intelligent and entrancing, it was interesting and beautiful in a way that a man moved by profundity and grace would find deeply attractive.

Part of her appeal was a kind of potential energy that arose from the resistance within her of seemingly polar opposites. Yes, she could be as severe, precise, and as demanding as the once-archetypal spinster librarian. Given her command of the facts, it was difficult to cross her, and her natural authority could be off-putting. And yet she was capable, for example, of languidly positioning her svelte frame, half sitting on a table or a desk, feet on the floor while she leaned back slightly, both hands supporting her almost parallel to her back, as—entirely relaxed, but seductively alert—she surveyed the room with a magnetic, feminine mastery much like that of a leopard splayed upon a limb. You could not take your eyes off her, and you did not want to.

After her children were grown, her husband left her for his fatuous, perky secretary, who talked like a chipmunk and to whom Katy referred after the fact as “Beef Jerky, my former husband’s secretary at Fatuous, Perky, and Chipmunk.” That was hardly enough to dull the pain of finding herself, not Chicago-born, alive and alone in a Chicago winter. And if you say Chicago enough times, it makes no sense whatsoever. An estranged daughter was married and living in Boston. This child laid every fault of the world and in the stars on Katy, and Katy had loved her so. A son was a roughneck on the North Slope before he would go to graduate school in Geneva. Astoundingly, he took his father’s side, another heartbreak. As the house was big, the memories bitter, and she was in perpetual shell shock, she wanted a complete change. So she sought a job in New Orleans, Chicago’s opposite, and she got it.

The downtown skyscraper where she worked was entirely out of place and could have been in New York or San Francisco. Faced with red stone, it was actually quite attractive. Three male partners at the firm, two of whom were divorced and one widowed, were, according to their notions, in love with her. Educated much the same way as was she, they wore French, horn-rimmed glasses from Ben Silver in Charleston, and Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart suits, and they were kind, wealthy, and capable. As she, too, was a partner, a match with any of them would have been comfortable—coming to work and leaving together, living in one of their grand houses, and spending a great deal of time in Europe, with a trip or two to Japan.

But she had already had what they offered, they were in many ways like her husband, and she thought that, more or less, her days were over. The time remaining would be a time of quiet, when, for the failure she thought she was, nothing challenging or exciting lay ahead. She had raised her children, had her marriage, matured in her career. What was left? Certainly not love. Not the kind of love that for the young is wonderfully giddy and all-possessing.

Neither she nor Rensselaer had any idea that the other existed.

*

Athena had to be guarded even before she was fully fitted out. No code books, communication software, scramblers, or operational documents of any kind were yet present, but certain physical assets and valuable secrets of design had to be protected.

She had come on her own power the sixty miles or so from Bollinger Lockport, where she had been built. With all-electric drive, she had in her generators and motors new materials of great efficiency and necessary secrecy. Both the generators and electric motors they powered depended upon the employment of new magnets, the types, weights, and placements of which were the source of Athena’s unprecedented power and, thus, potential speed. The Cyclone-class horsepower-to-weight ratio had been the Navy’s highest, allowing the Cyclones to reach a speed of thirty-five knots in thirty seconds. Athena’s generators and motors, which occupied the same space as her predecessors’ diesels, used demagnetization-resistant samarium-cobalt magnets of high coercivity, capable of operating at elevated temperatures and correspondingly higher speeds. These were coupled with neodymium-iron-boron magnets ten times more powerful than their ferrite counterparts. This substitution in the rotors, encasements, and generators created an enormous increase of power and efficiency.

In theory, Athena could accelerate to over fifty knots—comparable to the automotive zero-to-sixty—in about forty seconds. Not only would this subject the crew to perceptible G-force, the hull had to be modified to shed the concomitant drag and provide stability in high-speed turns. Unlike any ship in the Navy, Athena, like a boat, was designed to skid her stern in a fast turn.

Because of this, her propellers and external shafts had to be set differently and closer to the hull. Even the variable-pitch propellers themselves were of such novel design and placement that when she was up on the blocks they had to be shrouded from view. Other countries had supercomputers, but they didn’t have the same postulates and assumptions programmed into them. One would have thought that, to protect these innovations, posting guards with sidearms was rather pathetic given that China had more than likely stolen every detail electronically. But even if you’re dying of cancer you should still wash your hands before eating, if only out of habit and self-respect.

And then, the ship had to be protected against sabotage and theft as well. If Tiffany, fancy hotels, and shopping malls were guarded, so certainly Athena would be, too. And there was yet something else, a combination of pride and tradition that stretched back to the eighteenth century. Like a jealous lover, the Navy is possessive of its ships. Should people pay them too much attention, it wakes as dramatically as a dog summoned by hard rapping at the door.

Bollinger had its own security staff, but after the engines and propellers were installed the Navy had a sailor on the quarterdeck (before there actually was a quarterdeck) from 0800 to 1600, and two on each watch from 1600 to 2400 and 2400 to 0800. Taking into account redundancy and leave, this required a complement of seven, including a capable E-6 striker who served as senior master-at-arms.

After relocating from Lockport, the detachment took up residence in a house on Bermuda Street in Algiers, delighted to be only a short ferry ride from all the temptations of New Orleans. Rensselaer visited this house for formal and spot inspections. Acclimated to shipboard life, the sailors kept it in pristine shape. The beds were made so tightly you could bounce a quarter on them. Pots, pans, and kitchen counters shone. The garden was tended as if Luther Burbank had come back from the dead. And, purely from habit, the sailors painted the house, which pleased the landlady, a nonagenarian with a voice like a snare drum and a face like a bat, because she had become accustomed to beery and troublesome students. The E-6 was ambitious, and he ran their quarters as if they were on the flagship of the Seventh Fleet.

Someone like Rensselaer, who’d spent his entire adult life in the Navy, knew automatically—having had experience in so many of the ranks—how to find the perfect balance of authority and friendliness. He ate with his men often enough to get to know them, but it was always in a formal manner and it was infrequent. He treated everyone with great respect, but he kept his distance.

And although he could come and go as he pleased, he spent almost every day closely supervising at the yard. He knew every rivet, spacer, and plate. When he returned home, he devoted at least two hours to running, swimming, calisthenics, and weights, after which he had the strength only to eat dinner, do his required reading, and go to bed. In his first few months in New Orleans, he had made no friends, and reasonably expected that this would not change.

*

But it did. Late in December and early in January, New Orleans shares with much of the South a darkness that seems to make no sense. Like an eclipse at midday, it is contradicted by the mild weather, and the greenery of still-flowering trees and shrubs. Looking up through Spanish moss, you find it hard to believe that the sky is dark gray, the light sepulchral, and the wind still.

These days were most depressing for Rensselaer, when the lights went on even earlier than five and he could see them as he crossed the Mississippi from Algiers to the Canal Street Terminal. At least on the ferry he was moving smoothly ahead over the water, something that always seemed able if not to bind up all wounds at least to hold them in abeyance.

As he walked up Poydras Street to St. Charles, which with its shining glass towers and five-o’clock spill-out of bankers and lawyers could have been in New York or Chicago—in Los Angeles they emerge in their automobiles from underground garages, vomited as if from the innards of the earth—it was quiet nonetheless in the persistent eclipse. The St. Charles streetcar was supposed to come every twenty minutes, but it never did, and in the almost silent twilight no one thought it would.

Katy Farrar had left her firm a few minutes earlier than usual. Now she stood on the northwest corner of Poydras and St. Charles, waiting patiently for the streetcar, briefcase hanging by a shoulder strap. Her posture was absolutely and effortlessly straight, her expression guardedly neutral. A tentative breeze slightly lifted her still-buoyant, reddish-blonde hair. She wore a conservative, navy blue suit and a single strand of pearls. The pronounced dip between the exquisitely defined tendons fronting her neck showed that she was both thin and strong.

At first and without attraction, Rensselaer noticed how motionless she was, how she held her position as others shifted from foot to foot, walked about, or slouched. Not her. This interested him. He admired it. What drew his eye and made him wonder was her strength, which, though she was beautiful and delicate, radiated from her.

Had he been younger and less worn he might have fallen in love as instantly as he was once wont to do. But not in late middle age, when, from the perspective of the young, things moved hesitantly in slow motion. And yet something stirred, something that—by necessity and from experience—he suppressed.

Several blocks away, the St. Charles streetcar approached through the dusk, its headlight not as strong as one might have thought, and its forward progress slowed as it jerked from side to side while rolling on. When it arrived it lurched to a stop as if it had bumped into something. Those who had been waiting boarded silently.

Rensselaer found a seat on one of the front benches, at the sidewalk side, Katy on the street side and across from him. She noticed his military uniform. The simple Navy windbreaker had such modest insignia, which she wouldn’t have recognized anyway, that she thought he was of low rank. And in downtown New Orleans it would have been reasonable to assume that he was not, as he was, an unrestricted line captain, but someone who worked in a procurement office, perhaps ordering rolled steel, catfish, or sugar, for the fleets. But his face suggested something quite different, and in its way was very much like hers. Taking note of this, she averted her eyes. To her annoyance, however, she kept thinking of him. She cleared her throat as if to banish any thought of this man, and was temporarily successful—until, after a long run under overarching trees, the streetcar, which had been delayed by construction at Lee Circle, reached her stop. It was his as well.

He was ahead of her when he alighted upon the pavement. But as they turned toward the enameled green flank of the streetcar, they were standing close to one another when it began to slide south. After almost in lockstep they crossed St. Charles in the dark of evening, she went off to the left, he to the right, each now aware of the other.

*

Rensselaer’s predecessor, a lieutenant commander, had been lucky in finding a place to live. Grateful to get out of his lease, he transferred it to his successor. Almost impossibly, the Garden District is quieter than the rest of New Orleans. And within its tranquility and calm are mazes of even further refuge.

Off one of the quietest, oldest, and most out-of-the-way streets, a long, narrow alley ran slightly up not a hill but a bump, dead-ending before it reached the next cross street. Three-quarters of the way down this alley, on the right, a sandy driveway cut through a plot of oaks and bayonet palms, curving sharply left after a run of about fifty feet. Around this corner, invisible until after the turn, was the little two-storey house where Rensselaer lived during his New Orleans tour of duty. It was sided in paint-worn clapboard, and its gray tin roof didn’t lack for patches of rust.

You ascended to a covered front porch from which you could look out upon the sandy space meant for a car, had there been one. At night, no light from other houses penetrated the dense vegetation. And except for wind, rain, and birdsong, it was always silent. The first floor was one big room, a kitchen on one of it sides, fans above, and plantation furniture on the other: dark mahogany, bamboo, and rattan. No television, no fiber optic, no landline. The second floor had a bedroom and a bathroom. All the windows were screened and had storm shutters. Both upstairs and down were big wall-mounted air conditioners.

Almost every night in winter Rensselaer made a fire in a grill that stood in the sand beyond the porch, and barbecued chicken or fish in a slew of vegetables. He would frequently drink a beer while waiting for the coals, but water while eating. Then he read before sleep, which came at will, the result of learning to sleep by his own command in arduous conditions—under an artillery barrage, in enemy territory, in high, buffeting seas—because these were times and places when and where without sleep he would not have survived. He was able to find profound peace just before he slept, the very thing that allowed him to sleep so easily.

And here, especially with the sound of downpours, humid breezes, and leaves and the tin roof struck by steady rain, sleep was magnificent. He did wonder, however, if it would have been better—better than now, better than it had been for a long time—if the right woman were to be lying next to him, someone aware of what had passed and what was to come, knowing of love as well as its absence, knowing, as only a mature woman might, of defeat, redemption, and the sad beauty in the sound of wind and rain.

*

Their schedules were much the same, but because of unexpected events at work—an obstinate fitting on Athena, a delayed letter ruling from the IRS—they saw one another at the streetcar stop only about once a week. After a month, the first acknowledgment came, when he had briefly looked directly into her eyes (a thrill for them both), and she responded with the tiniest, shortest, slightest smile. Several days later, they nodded. Then she was gone for two weeks and he didn’t think of her that often until she appeared again at the stop, and he discovered how pleased he was that she hadn’t left forever. On the streetcar, looking straight ahead but turning his eyes so that he could keep her in view—a strain, and, he thought, ridiculous-looking to boot—he had a very strong desire, which surprised him, to dance with her. He longed for it.

To dance, that is, in a formal, prescribed fashion, to hold her and move gracefully to music. They would be brought together and yet held apart by gentle, civilized custom, in the exciting suspension between the perfect imagination that comes with falling in love, and the subsequent reality, whatever it may be. When he thought about dancing with her, gliding as the rest of the world blurred and he could see only her face and shoulders, he didn’t experience the same sensation he might have felt had he been fourteen. And if only because he wasn’t fourteen he was able to allow for the fact that, in one form or another, she might have had the same sort of thing in mind.

And she did—that is, to be held by him and to hold him—though, as a consequence of experience, she pulled herself back. And to be truthful, because although now it was warm enough for him to have shed his jacket and she saw the big square of ribbons and other decorations and insignia on his khakis, she didn’t know (most people don’t) that the eagle clutching arrows signaled the rank of captain, and still thought that he might be a military equivalent of the IRS officials who were her insufferable, natural-born opponents—an iguana-like species that lived on metal desks under fluorescent lights.

Despite this, by mid-March when Athena was beginning to come alive, each had observed that the other was without a wedding ring, was never accompanied, and seemed, across the ever-shrinking spaces that separated them, to be modest and wanting. Soon they began to say hello, and then, as April approached, they found themselves one day, for the first time, forced to sit next to one another. Because the seats were so narrow that the naval officer and the lawyer, Stephen and Katy, were compelled to touch, they, like the streetcar named St. Charles, were electrified.

*

“Hi,” he said, so restrained as to be clipped.

As if standing on a high diving board, she hesitated, and then responded with “Hi,” as almost a question, almost as if to ask, Why did you say that?

Seconds passed, until he said, “I’m not usually this eloquent.”

“I’m not either,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me. And I didn’t even have a martini at lunch. In fact, I never do. In fact, I’ve never had a martini.” She had hardly intended to be so voluble. It had just leapt from her. But she wasn’t embarrassed.

“That’s the one with the olive.”

“Right.”

“I’ve never had one either. I’ve never had a cocktail. No one’s ever even offered me one.”

“Cocktails were something for our parents’ generation. I was quite amazed to see the many types in a James Beard cookbook from the fifties, and also in The Joy of Cooking.

“People who go to bars still drink them.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t go to bars.”

“Or rock concerts,” he said, not asking.

“Never been to one,” she answered.

“Nor have I. May I ask, do you have a name?”

“Of course I have a name. Everyone has a name,” she said, playfully, but, still, as if he were an idiot.

“But would you tell me . . . it?”

“Maybe. If you tell me yours.”

“Rensselaer.”

“That’s not your first name.”

“Last name.”

“I won’t ask why you’re named after a polytechnical institute. I’m sure you’ve heard that one before. But did they name the polytechnical institute after your forebears?”

“My very ancient forebears.”

“And you’re in the Navy?”

He looked down at his insignia as if to confirm.

“What do you do in the Navy?”

“Across the river, in Algiers, I’m seeing along a new class of ship that’s to have neither a twin nor descendants. Kind of like me.”

“I think I see it from my window,” she said, actually excited. “It’s up out of the water?”

“It is, in dry dock.”

“I see it every day. And I see you quite a lot, too, as you know. What rank is required to do what you do?”

“Underemployed captain. To put a captain in charge of a patrol coastal is a marked demotion. I blew it.” He seemed to take pleasure in remembering.

“How do you mean?”

“I sidetracked into NSW—Naval Special Warfare, the SEALs—then to surface warfare, then graduate school, then to staff, and then, kind of late in the game,” and this was what amused him, “I discovered after spending my life in the Navy that I couldn’t respond adroitly to over-bearing authority. This is my last assignment. I finish the ship, take command for a short time, and I’m out. You?”

“I’m just a tax lawyer.”

“What rank?”

“Partner. I should’ve been something else, but I blew it.”

“Something else, like what?”

“A pilot. An FBI agent. A violist, maybe. I hate sitting at a desk.”

“I’d very much like to hear your name.” That was it. He was in love. Like a blind man, he had heard her voice, and that was enough.

She thought for a moment, weighing whether or not to tell him. It seemed to her that things were going too fast, which made her feel almost angry. But, still, she did tell him. “Katy.”

“Katy what?”

“Actually, my name is Penelope, but I’ve never liked it. I go by Katy. Some people who knew me when I was young still call me Catherine, or even Penelope, although most of them have more or less faded away.”

“Katy . . . ?”

“Farrar.”

“Katy Farrar,” he repeated. “It sounds like something out of Stephen Crane or Edith Wharton.”

“A literary Navy captain.”

“Why not?”

This embarrassed her, and she showed it, reddening beautifully. “I’m sorry.”

He thought it was a wonderfully telling overreaction, and although she may have been, at least according to his first impression, perhaps the sharpest, most vital woman he had ever encountered, and still lissome despite her age—which he misjudged—he saw as well how intensely full of sorrow and self-doubt she was, how checked by sadness and regret that seemed to have neither origin nor justification. But of course how would he know? Unlike as in a less complicated flirtation, this spurred him on.

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “I’ll tell you some lawyer jokes.”

“I know them all.”

“I bet you don’t know this one.”

“I’ll bet I do.”

“Oh yeah? A lawyer woke up after surgery and noticed that the curtains were tightly drawn across the windows. He asked the nurse why this was so. What did she say?”

“‘There was a fire across the street, and we didn’t want you to think you’d died on the table.’ See? I toldya.”

They came to their stop. After they disembarked, and the trolley pulled off, and they had crossed St. Charles, they reached the point where they would go their separate ways, only this time, instead of doing so deliberately as if the other did not exist, they turned, face to face.

Now close, and looking directly at her for the first time other than just briefly, he saw how beautiful she really was, and he determined to know her.

*

Because her office was on a very high floor and her view of the Mississippi as it flowed past the city was unobstructed, she kept a binocular within reach. When a large ship went by, or a yacht under sail, she would often pause from her work, swivel, raise the binocular, and by the trick of bright optics hover in the air above them, taking in all the details of crowded decks, billowing mainsheets, and wakes churning in white. The compressed visuals worked together with the intensified colors to make an unplanned work of art.

The day after she had spoken to Rensselaer, she aimed the binocular not at the river or distant flatlands, waters, and clouds, but at the shipyard. In the smaller of two dry docks, the Miss Darby (as it announced in large letters on its side) was the ship she now knew as his. Despite months to go, due to its long, thin, and businesslike shape it already looked like a warship. Now and then, people appeared on the open deck or on the wharf, and although she was unable to tell much about them from so far away, she knew somehow that they weren’t Stephen Rensselaer (whose full name she now knew), that she would know him even at a great distance, that she would be excited—and feel it in her body—when she did see him, and that she was pleasurably driven to look for him.

At a knock on her glass office door, she turned and rested the binocular on her desk in a single, graceful movement, and gestured for the man on the other side to come in. This was Roger, one of the three partners who—inexplicably to her—seriously sought her company, which, at their age, domesticity, and wifelessness, could only mean a yearning for marriage.

Katy Farrar didn’t understand how anyone could be truly interested in Katy Farrar, if only because, having by her husband’s account driven him crazy, she found it difficult to imagine another man letting himself in for what her husband, in agreement with her son, had claimed he could not abide. Incapable of putting anything back whence it had come, he felt reprimanded when she returned everything to its rightful berth, something which she could not help. A towel hanging at a jaunty, careless angle was an offense to symmetry, as was an uncapped toothpaste tube, or a folder on a desk that did not sit in parallel with the lines of the desk itself.

What was wrong with arranging things in a refrigerator by type, and, on the door shelves, the row of jars by height? It was effortless, well organized, and efficient. She was extremely well aware of how things were and how they ought to be. Her memory, her senses, and her eyes were easily and always alert. Contrary to what the detractors of such a personality might suspect or assert, nothing in her ordered precision stopped her from being daring, profound, witty, and . . . orgasmic. But he left, after which she assumed that anyone else would eventually do the same.

So there was Roger, standing in front of her, reasonable, undoubtedly gentle, not quite shy, with blond, thinning hair, a pinstripe suit, and an English bow tie. She had never been to his house, but she guessed that he had a lot of mahogany and cherry furniture, a tantalus, crystal glasses, dog-and-hunting prints, potted palms, and a marble hall. He radiated comfort, resignation, kindness, longing, and the Anglo-Saxon ability to be mildly intoxicated throughout the day, starting at just after noon. She liked him, and was tempted by his aura of relaxed oblivion, excellent tailoring, and lots of gin.

He stared at her. She lifted her head a little, as if to say, Yes? But he was frozen.

“What?” she asked. And when he didn’t respond, she said, “Roger, hello? Talk.”

“We’re putting together the McLaren Petroleum Trust and, needless to say, there are some very complicated tax aspects. In the next few weeks, do you have time to look this stuff over, or can you recommend an associate who’s good with net operating losses and depletion allowances? McLaren Oil is spread across eight fucking states and three countries.”

Before she could answer, he said, his pitch noticeably rising and his speed increasing, “And I’m going out this weekend on the boat. The weather’s supposed to be good and I’ve got new sails. I know that may not sound exciting, but they’re so white and clean that on a blue day it’s really something to behold. Blinding, really.”

“I can look over the trust documents,” she told him. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

In answer to her silence, he ventured, with the timidity of sensing defeat, “What about this weekend? It would be really nice.”

“Actually, Roger, I’m seeing someone. And—sort of coincidentally, I guess—he’s making his boat ready, too. I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to get on the water before he can take me. But it’s kind of you to ask.”

“I see,” he said. “The invitation is always open. What kind of boat does he have?”

“I don’t really know, exactly, but apparently it can go quite fast.”

He didn’t know it, but Roger was actually glancing at it as he tried not to stare at Katy.

“Sail?”

“I think it has a motor,” she said, quite charmingly.

Roger felt the superiority of having a sleek sailing yacht rather than a cabin cruiser. “How big is it?”

“I think it’s a couple of hundred feet.”

“A couple of hundred feet!”

“Maybe two hundred?”

“Jesus. That’s enormous. Two hundred feet?”

“Ya. It’s big.”

“Yes. Yes. Okay, well, I’ll bring you that stuff, probably next week. Thank you, Katy. Thank you.”

As he left, she thought, Oh God. What have I done? Perhaps at forty-eight she had no right to feel like she was seventeen, but she did. And she loved it.

*

She looked for Rensselaer every evening, and he looked for her. As they made their dinners, as he studied engineering and installation manuals, of which he was not fond, and she wrote briefs, of which she was not fond, they thought of one another. Especially before sleep, after they switched off the lights and lay in the dark, they imagined the other. They imagined making love, real love, because of love, and then they slept, hoping to dream.

Their schedules were such that they often didn’t see one another for days, but one Saturday when it was unusually hot they each went out early in the evening to the market closest to them both, and he saw her holding an empty basket and staring at the fish counter. While she was still unaware of his presence, he said, from almost next to her, “How about some barbecued chicken instead?”

She turned, poker-faced, mastering her surprise. “It takes too long,” she answered, “and when I do it, it’s either undercooked on the inside or burnt on the outside.”

“That’s because your living doesn’t depend upon it, but at the Who Dat? Barbecue, theirs does, so they’ve got it down, and you don’t have to clean up, either. We could go. There’s not much in your basket.”

“There’s actually nothing in my basket.”

As they left the market together, anyone who had had to guess might have assumed that they were a couple. “What are you worried about?” he asked her, kindly. Although she seemed quite happy, she seemed pained as well, perhaps not on his account or on any account at all.

“I have to tell you, I can’t read and choose from the menu while making conversation. I hate that.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s like trying to converse while walking, when you have to move into single file when someone passes, or to avoid a dog on a leash, or at a narrow part of the sidewalk where tree roots crowd it. I’ll tell you what. We won’t say a word until we’re seated, we’ve ordered, and we’ve had a moment of silence.”

“Why silence?”

“So we understand that we don’t have to speak if we don’t need to. Your presence is enough, as it was months ago when I saw you at Poydras and Saint Charles—nervous and preoccupied, perhaps suffering from a surfeit of awareness, open, observant, sad, and beautiful.”

She made no response, only wondering how it was that he knew her so well, although she never would have admitted to being beautiful.

*

When they had settled in, she inspected the silverware. “You know,” she said, speaking rapidly, “most restaurants have dishwashers that don’t reach the required sterilization temperatures. Ideally, things should be steam cleaned, although even in an autoclave not all viruses are eliminated, I’ve heard, and it’s probably true.” It was almost as if she were talking to herself. She was nervous. He knew it, and that it would pass.

They studied the menu. The waiter came and left. “Okay,” he said, “tell me what I would have found if I were Sherlock Holmes, or if I had looked you up on the Internet, which I didn’t.”

“I didn’t look you up either. It would be understandable but creepy.”

“I think so. Young people,” Rensselaer stated, “meet on the internet. How can they do that?”

“They don’t rely on accidents, because we’re so far from the belief that marriages are made in heaven. And they’re used to ordering everything on the Internet, why not another person? But to make yourself available to the whole world like that is like putting yourself on the shelf at the supermarket.”

“I suppose it’s the descendant of the personal ad.”

“Exactly. Do you like walks on the beach?”

“Me? No. I was a SEAL. For me a walk on the beach means a bunch of sweaty guys trying to carry a telephone pole.”

“Well then do you love dogs?”

“I do. I don’t have one, but if I did I’d buy him a BarcaLounger.”

“If I had a dog,” she answered, without the slightest pause, “you might not like him, because he wouldn’t thank vets for their service.”

Her quick return pleased Rensselaer no end. “I do admit,” he said, “that it took some doing not to look you up.”

“You wouldn’t have found much. You really want to know?”

“I do.”

“I see.” She looked down, and then she looked back up, pleased. “I was born in and grew up in Virginia. When I was a little girl I was fat. I thought you were supposed to eat a big breakfast, so I did even though I hated it and it made me hungry the rest of the day. Then I ate only lunch and dinner and I lost a lot of weight, started running and swimming and lost more. William and Mary, class of ninety-three. I made a point of absorbing the pace of eighteenth-century Williamsburg, and it was easy to do that in winter when there weren’t so many tourists, especially late in the day. You know, the college abuts the restoration. That was the heart of my education—the sense of time and the slow pace, the patience, beauty, and dignity. The modest aesthetic. What a pity it’s gone, but we can’t live in restorations, can we?”

“No.”

“And then, then things changed. UVA Law School, ninety-six, Supreme Court clerk.”

Impressed and delighted, he smiled. “For whom?”

“O’Connor. Marriage to a fellow clerk, whose name was Colt. I became Katy Colt (until I changed it back), and I followed him to Chicago, to Winston and Strawn, where I fell into tax because I didn’t want to litigate.” She paused, as if catching herself. “I have a fear of public speaking. It gets worse as I get older. I’m not really comfortable with people, but I guess I don’t really mind that.”

“How about people one at a time?”

“That I can do.”

“When you speak,” he said, “it floods out of you, as if speech could never carry all that you think. It’s enthusiastic and joyous, and then you get quiet, as if embarrassed.”

“Does it bother you?”

He slowly shook his head from side to side. “Not at all. The opposite.”

When she looked down and wouldn’t look up, he broke the silence that followed, by saying, “Katy.” It was a beautiful name.

“Stephen?”

“Not Steve. I never wanted to be called Steve. It’s like someone straining to lift a box.”

“I prefer Stephen anyway. I don’t know why. And Rensselaer?”

“Dutch seems a little odd to most people, I know.”

“No quotas for you.”

“I wouldn’t take them.”

“Nor would I.”

“I sense that, just from the way you vet utensils.”

“Which telegraphs what?”

“Skepticism. Independence. Shedding and defying what’s commonly expected and assumed. And maybe a little OCD.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “And this is the Big Easy. I’ve never liked easy.”

“In navalspeak you’d say that running with the wind is exhilarating, but tacking against it makes you strong.”

“As long as we’re channeling fortune cookies, I’ll see your metaphor and raise you one. In the end, salmon have to swim upstream, and they better know how, because to forget would mean extinction.” And then she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly met anyone of Dutch extraction.”

“There are pockets mainly in Michigan and New York. Not Pennsylvania—they’re German. On the Hudson when I was a child in school we learned the anthem of the Dutch West India Company. Really. I don’t suppose they teach it anymore.” Forgetting that it was his turn to offer, as she had, a resume, he asked, “You’ve never been here?”

“No, I find it almost impossible to go to a restaurant by myself. I hope you don’t think I’m a nut, but I don’t mind telling you that most of the time when I’m on a business trip, rather than sitting alone in a restaurant I have a picnic in my room.”

“Everyone does that. I do it,” he said. “When I was in France not long ago I used to get sandwiches and eat in my hotel room while I read the French papers. I’m either too self-conscious, or not self-conscious enough, to sit alone in a café or restaurant—if I can help it. Sometimes you can’t, of course.”

“But I’ll bet you were never so shy that when there was no market convenient to the hotel you ate from vending machines.”

“No, but . . . Katy,” he said, moved by her confession, “I appreciate shyness. I appreciate it very much.”

“You do?” Suddenly she felt that her growing infatuation was accompanied by something of greater weight.

“Yes, and since there are two of us here, we can relax. No one will stare at someone because he or she is sitting alone. And you said that sometimes people call you Katy.”

“Yes.”

“May I call you Katy?”

As her expression became a slight smile, she said, “You already do.”

Even before the chicken, baguettes, and salad, the waiter brought iced and frosted glasses of achingly cold beer, which quickly relaxed them a lot further.

“According to you, you blew it,” she said. “I did, too. I guess by this age almost everyone does, one way or another, even if they don’t know it. “

“For a reason.”

“What reason? I know mine.”

“Then you go first.”

She did. “All right. It’s simple. As I’ve gotten older and the time ahead has grown shorter it’s become very clear to me that most people . . . rather—most people or not—I myself have spent much of my life trying to gain recognition, prestige, and money in a kind of giant game of Chutes and Ladders, although I never played that game and I don’t know if the analogy is correct. But not that long ago I just sort of stopped and let out a breath and said, what am I doing? Do I really care about this stuff? People kill themselves all their lives so that other people will regard them in a certain way.

“How many orchids are there in the Amazon? Trillions? They’re beautiful. No one ever sees them, but they’re there. Value is independent of recognition. It must be. If a tree falls in the forest, of course it makes a sound. What kind of idiot would think it wouldn’t? A sound is not defined by its being heard.”

“The idiot might say, what if there’s no air?” he told her.

“I admit, in a vacuum forest there would not be a sound. Oh, and by the way, you should know, I’m forty-eight.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, but it goes well with my being fifty-two. You look much younger. I’m not just saying that.”

He went on. “I’ve come to pretty much the same conclusion as you. Certain things seem not to matter anymore, and others seem to matter a great deal more than they used to. I’m in New Orleans, where I’ve never been before, because I pissed off the President of the United States. Perhaps I flatter myself by thinking that it was because I don’t have the disgusting, oleaginous skill, which some people so much admire, of attaining power by satisfying it. Because of that, I’m always at the edge of things and then cast out. It never fails, and the older I’ve gotten the more it kicks in. My father, too, was always at the edge of things, and easily cast out.”

For a moment, she was speechless, as this described her as well. “I can tell you,” she said, “that someone like that, and I’m exactly like that, wants to be cast out. Because to be in the center of things is illusory. Only at the edges is it real. At least that’s what I think, what I’ve found, and what I feel. But you know, you’re a captain and I’m a senior partner, so what does that say?”

“It says we haven’t put in the time to be an admiral or a Justice of the Supreme Court. We chose a certain way.”

She nodded. “True, and I don’t believe that’s an excuse.”

“No. By nature,” he added, “at sea—if you’re at least somewhat reflective—you learn exactly that, because anywhere at sea is so far from the center, where power lies, where millions of people coordinate their wills and build giant cities, skyscrapers, bridges, railroads, dams . . . and ships. At sea you’re pretty much alone even if you’re stuffed into a steel vessel with hundreds or even thousands of other people. You look out, and the only thing there is the ocean, two-thirds of the world’s surface, miles deep, mainly unexplored. All you see is a little of the top, and even that’s too vast to comprehend. You’re just on its edge, you feel very small, and, in understanding this, you’re freed.”

“When you’re out at sea,” she asked, “do you have a lot of time to read? I could see going through Gibbon or Victor Hugo in their entirety with all that time and no distraction.”

“You’re a real lightweight.”

“Well, could you?”

“No, especially if you’re in command. You never stop working and you’re on-call twenty-four hours a day. Just running the ship properly can fill up all your time. You’re responsible for its safe navigation, its readiness for combat, its propulsion, hotel systems, damage control, crew morale, personnel, training, diplomacy ashore, and a hundred other things. Just changes to the goddamned software are enough to drive you crazy. I delegate that to the kids, who live and breathe it. We go through continual training evolutions and drills, absorb new systems, implement new directives. There’s so much paperwork and so many things to study that you just don’t have the time to read at leisure, certainly not if you’re the captain. Even my XOs hadn’t any time, because they were burdened enough in studying for command.”

“What’s an XO?”

“Executive officer, sort of like a vice-captain.”

“I thought that on the bridge you’d stare for hours at the sea.”

“There’s more or less continuous activity on the bridge, but you have moments. In the absence of mountains, rivers, cities, and trees, you look more closely at what there is, and you find that though it appears to be less, it isn’t. You become keenly aware of the clouds. They and the colors of the sea are ever-changing, but clouds appear in three dimensions, stretching miles high, looming like mountains, or breaking up the sky into woolly skeins, or dots like sheep in the field. You know, how in England you can look across miles of green squares dotted with sheep. Actually, we do have a particular time for what can be an almost Zen-like practice.”

“You do?”

“We do. Because before you stand watch at night you have to sit in the dark for half an hour to an hour. That’s how long it takes the iris to open widest, so you can operate properly on the night sea. The lights on the bridge are red and low, and don’t degrade night vision. You can’t listen to the radio or anything, because you’re bringing all your senses to maximum power. When you’re ready to go to the bridge, despite the engine noise and the wind you can hear the ticking of someone’s watch even if he’s twenty feet away.”

After a moment in which she looked at him as if she were registering a change within her, but then reverted to careful conversation, she said, “I don’t think people give the Navy enough credit. Part of it’s because it’s out there, where no one knows what’s going on, so it’s easy to ignore.”

“It doesn’t matter. Eventually, everyone gets to a point where you don’t need credit, even in the Navy. I’m there.”

“I am, too. I see myself as old, with cats,” she said, half teasingly, half testingly.

“I see you as young, with dogs.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off her as she spoke. He loved the fact that her skin wasn’t as unblemished as a girl’s but showed some effects of the sun, that in her face and even in her hands and most certainly in the way she moved and spoke there were signs of experience and coming up against things, and of a kind of weathering that showed strength, all of which he found admirable and attractive in so many ways, not least sexually.

“I should have cats—I don’t, yet—because my husband threw me out and got a younger woman.” She thought to herself, here it comes. This is where he’ll know it’s over. “That shook me up, and I think I’m still shaking. My children are gone; I never see them. Tax law isn’t a life. Three guys—three—at the firm seem to be interested in me, but I’m past that. I’m not twenty. Sure, they’re personable, somewhat educated, not just lawyers, and I don’t think they ever beat their ex-wives. I mean, this is New Orleans, you have to watch out for all that Tennessee Williams stuff. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“You’re telling me this because we’re sitting here together, so, obviously, I’m interested in you.”

“Well, they are, too. I don’t see how they can be. They could almost be identical triplets—fine Southern gentlemen, a little pudgy, who drink a lot, dress beautifully, and seem to have racehorses.”

“Do they? And if they do, are the racehorses pudgy?”

“I don’t know, but I’d be willing to guarantee that they have pictures of racehorses, within three feet of half a dozen single-malts and an ice bucket. Horses or dogs.”

“Maybe they want what they don’t have, a beautiful woman with great depth.”

“I don’t understand how that pertains to me, and I’m not being falsely modest. False modesty is disgusting.”

He was about to speak, but she held up her hand, almost like a traffic cop. More than a little tipsy because she was unused to alcohol, she took a drink of the still very cold beer, and said, “I can drink beer, and eat anything, because I’m so thin. I didn’t used to be this severe. You don’t find that off-putting?”

“No. Look, no one ever sees himself properly. Mirrors and photographs distort. They don’t capture the life of someone. I don’t want to sit here flattering you, so let’s leave it at this. I’m telling you, with no uncertainty and no ulterior motive—and then I’m going to stop—that you’re exquisite. You’re, as they say, drop-dead gorgeous. Finished.” She tried to conceal that she loved this, but couldn’t.

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“But, again, what about you? Why are you single at your age? I apologize, if you’re a widower, for putting it so roughly.”

“Not a widower. My wife left me. I used to say it was because I spent so much time deployed. But I don’t know. I asked too much, she gave too little. She asked too much, I gave too little. I can’t speak for her, but I was too young and too self-centered. A bookie wouldn’t have bet on us, but we couldn’t see it.”

“Did she love you?”

“Apparently not enough.”

“Did you love her?”

“Oh yes.”

“Do you still?”

Without hesitation, and soberly, Rensselaer said, “Not as much as I did.”

“I’ve always thought,” Katy said, “even before I was alone, that it would be impossible to start over. That just conveying who you are and the story of your life would take more time than you have left.”

*

Remembering the feeling of ease in the Washington heat as Rusty had driven him in Freeland’s Mercedes, Rensselaer spent the money to rent a black BMW convertible with brown leather upholstery and a steering wheel fashioned of what appeared to be rosewood. Speeding along in the open air with the sun beating down and the country sliding rhythmically by to music was precisely what he wanted when next he would see Katy. And when they did clear the outskirts of the city and suburbs they felt wind and sun, in air that smelled at times of cane, flowers, pine, and the burning of fields. He had never seen her sit back: in the restaurant and on the streetcar she was rule-straight and had edged forward while speaking. Here, she relaxed, her face to the sun and her eyes closed.

Then she leaned forward a bit and turned to him. “What’s the song?”

“‘Beast of Burden.’”

“I know, but isn’t that . . . ?”

“Yes, The Rolling Stones. Sort of uncharacteristic.”

“You’d think they’d been here,” she said, and it was true. The ballad was languid but exciting, perfect for the moment and the wind waving the cane and grasses. Her eyes closed and her face turned again to the warm sun, she leaned back once again, equally content and excited. It was the seal set on the beginning, when you know you’re really in love, and the world has changed.

The road was straight but narrow and often flanked by drainage ditches close to the pavement, so when he glanced at her it could be for only a second or two, and he did it again and again. He’d seen her in nothing but a suit. Now she was in a sundress, and he saw—as she knew he would—that her tanned shoulders and arms were firm and beautiful. When she opened her eyes, he said, “Most people who work in offices are pale, if not jaundiced.”

“I have a garden,” she replied.

“Is that what keeps you fit?” he dared, because it was a comment on her body.

“Swimming, running. Lifelong habit. I used to shoot skeet.”

“Lucky skeet.”

“They were,” she said. “I didn’t hit them. Except once. In high school I had a boyfriend whose father had a trapshooting field. In my first outing, when I had no idea what I was doing, I didn’t miss any. No one believed I wasn’t a practiced expert and headed for the Olympics. Neither did I, until after law school when I went out again and failed to hit a single one. I don’t think I’ve ever recovered,” she said, not exactly tongue-in-cheek.

The cane fields waved in the wind as the car shot down the straight, empty road. “I have to say,” he told her, “that . . . the way you look away after you make an assertion; the way you clip your sentences, paragraphs even, and then lapse into inexplicable silence; the way you speak fast and intensely as it floods brilliantly and comes to a sudden stop. . . . You must run rings around the Southern gentlemen at the law firm. You run rings around me. And I’m beginning to think that you may have struggled all your life to contain and subordinate yourself.”

“Because I’m a woman? I hope you haven’t swallowed that.”

“No no. Because you’re you. There are certain substances, sodium for instance, that must be isolated from exposure to the elements because if not they react so fast they flare or explode. You discipline yourself to operate at the slower speeds and with the lesser intensity of everyone around you. When I first saw you, I thought, there’s so much in that woman, so much life, so much to be told and said, like an actor who can’t wait to come onstage and into the lights.”

Her only response was a slight smile.

They drove in silence until they reached an airboat place, where he put the top up in case of rain. Even in shadow, Katy glowed from the sun and wind. With the air now still, he said, “You probably shouldn’t have worn perfume. Mosquitoes.”

“I didn’t.”

He was skeptical. “That wasn’t a criticism. I really like it.”

“But I didn’t.”

He leaned closer. “That’s just you?”

“Just me.”

He was still very close, and she hadn’t pulled back. One kiss, intoxicating and full of promise.

*

The airboat guide was huge, bearded, baseball-capped, and tattooed. He wore green-mirrored sunglasses the color of a fly’s eyes, in the shape, roughly, of a flying saucer. The first thing he said—to Katy, clearly with a fifth-grade boy’s idea of shocking her—was, “Want some gator bits?” He held out a plate of barbecued alligator. “They’re farmed, and they never know what hits’em.”

“I’ve been eating way too much gator,” Katy replied. “Breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner. Gator, gator, gator. I’ll pass.”

“She doesn’t scare easily, huh?” the guide asked Rensselaer.

“No,” he replied. “She’s a waitress in an alligator restaurant.”

The guide was now ready to take them out without the usual friendly condescension of guides who encounter what they often rightly assume to be helpless city people. His only clients that afternoon, they asked questions respectfully, and he answered seriously, about the draft of the boat, how far on sandbars and over matted vegetation it could shoot, its speed, its power, its stability. They sat in front of him and somewhat lower. Everyone put on ear protectors. Then the engine was started, the propeller engaged, and the aluminum boat came up to speed, going very fast over slightly wind-rippled, open water. The boatman made it weave from right to left and left to right over and over just for the pleasure of it, like a water skier repeatedly hopping a wake. This showed his passengers that the boat could heel and still remain stable, that it could slide through turns nimbly, that going fast was to be enjoyed.

Without warning, they made a sharp turn into a long straightaway deep in the swamp and then glided as slowly as a canoe. At first, the channel was banked by grasses and reeds. Then mangroves and live oaks rose on each side, and the light dimmed as they floated beneath branches from which hung enormous clumps of moss. For ten minutes they moved slowly down this alley of black water, imagining what it would be like at night, miles from any road or field, impassable, its own world as foreign to New Orleans as New Orleans was to the rest of the country.

Closer to open water, the boat stopped at a half-hammock in which quite a few alligators were waiting patiently for fish the boatman pulled from a bucket in the bow. Trained and relatively docile, made to grasp the fish three or four feet over the water, they rose so fast and their jaws snapped so quickly it was a wonder the boatman still had his hands. He didn’t invite Stephen and Katy to feed the alligators, but he did fetch a baby one a foot and a half long and presented it to Katy, who held it level in both hands before her and studied it closely.

“Now you can just toss it in, ma’am,” he said, and after a moment she did. They sped back over open water at high speed as the sun went low, herons took flight, and the boat weaved to the port and starboard of an imaginary centerline before it pulled up to the dock so adroitly that even a Navy captain was impressed.

“I guess we got sunburnt,” Rensselaer said as the top of the convertible retracted. “It feels good. Irresponsible, but good.”

As they pulled off, he asked, “Now what?”

“We could keep going,” she said, “deeper and deeper, to see where the road leads. Maybe it ends at the open sea. There’s not much of a hard line around here where the land ends and the Gulf begins. It’s more like gears or fingers meshing, a compromise. I miss the clear line, but that’s what makes this whole place like a dream. And to think that people come here to gamble and get drunk. They miss the point. It’s the underworld. It’s Hades. The water has corrupted the land, and the land has corrupted the water.”

“A right turn will take us where we haven’t been, left will return us to the city. What would you like?” he asked.

“How much gas do we have?”

“Three-quarters of a tank.”

She pointed right.

*

An hour later in the dark they pulled up to a few buildings in what was almost a town—a combined post office, store, and gas station, and a restaurant from which music wafted out over several rows of pickup trucks. The slow, country music was seductive, and the smoke issuing from the vent above the kitchen was redolent of barbecued fish, meat, and shellfish.

He glanced toward Katy, but she was already out the door, and the way she walked was not the same as what it had been in the city. It was smooth and timed eagerly to the slow waltz from within, with several electric guitars, and a woman singing. Inside was a bar, dance floor, stage, and a dozen tables. As Katy entered, followed by Rensselaer, heads turned, but then turned back, and lost in the music the musicians and singer onstage didn’t even notice. Rensselaer didn’t order beer with his shrimp boil, because driving in the dark on the narrow, shoulderless road he had to be a hundred percent on task. She, however, had no such requirement.

Given the music, he was more nervous than she was, remembering how so early on he had wanted to dance with her. Two couples were on the floor, and another rising to join them.

Were he and Katy to dance they would hardly be alone or draw attention. She appreciated his hesitancy, and she, whom at first he had taken as the awkward, shy, damaged one, gave him an inquiring and daring look.

He was brave in every way except socially, but this was not social, it was love, and the music was enough to make anyone brave. So he rose and extended his hand to her, reaching across the table. Taking it, she stood, and they went out onto the floor.

“I don’t dance well,” she said, but without any care.

“Neither do I.” They embraced, and started a languid waltz, seeing only one another. Except that, after a while, they imitated other couples when the women would separate for a few steps, still holding one of their partners’ hands, twirl, and come back—all without letting go. It left them momentarily in a three-quarter stance, with him cradling her. They did this several times until they could do it perfectly, and she turned to look up at him, all her tension and doubt having fled, the sometime city brittleness of her movements, the checking of her steps, all gone, all gone in favor of the softer, more radiant person—her reddish-blonde hair having been made lighter by the sun and buoyant about her neck as she danced; her skin almost throbbing with sunburn and heat; her body lithe, graceful, and released.

That’s when he said, because he couldn’t help but say it, although it was so early, but he knew it was true, “Katy . . . I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything but love you.” It was quite so.