Elizabeth’s next-door neighbors were having a barbecue. Though Elizabeth and Henry had lived in the house since his retirement three years before, they had only once eaten dinner next door, and the neighbors had only once visited them. After Henry’s car accident, the Newcombs had called several times, but when Henry returned from the hospital, they again only silently nodded or waved across the wide expanse of lawn when they caught sight of one another through the scrub pines that separated their property. Mrs. Newcomb was said to be an alcoholic. The boys, though, were beautiful and cheerful. When they were not joking with each other, their expressions became dreamy. The way they wore their hair, and their direct gaze, reminded Elizabeth of Clark Gable. She often saw the boys in Bethel. They were inseparable.

Though Elizabeth was repotting geraniums, her mind was partly on the boys next door, partly on her daughter, Louisa, who lived in Atlanta and who had had a baby the week before, and partly on Z, who had phoned that morning to say that he would stop by for a visit on the weekend. Her thoughts seemed to jump between those people in time with the slap of the softball into the catcher’s mitt next door. As they tended the barbecue grill, the brothers were tossing a ball back and forth. The air smelled of charred meat.

The day before, backing out of a parking space next to the market, Elizabeth had hit a trash can and dented the side of Henry’s car. Louisa had not wanted her to come to Atlanta to help out. Z’s fiancée drank a bit too much.

Elizabeth forced herself to smile so she would cheer up. Wind chimes tinkled and a squirrel ran across a branch, and then Elizabeth’s smile became genuine. It had been a month since Z’s last visit, and she knew he would be enthusiastic about how verdant everything had become.

Verdant? If a dinosaur had a vocabulary, it might come up with the word “verdant.” She was almost forty-five. Z was twenty-three. After Z’s last visit, Henry had accused her of wanting to be that age. She had gotten a speeding ticket, driving Z’s convertible.

Henry suspected the extent of her feelings for Z, of course. The attachment was strong—although she and Z never talked about it, privately. She often thought of going to see the remake of Reckless with Z at a matinee in New Haven. They had shared a tub of popcorn and licked butter off each other’s fingers. Another time, they brown-bagged a half-pint of Courvoisier and slugged it down while, on the screen, Paul Newman drove more crazily than Elizabeth would ever dare to drive.

A few days ago, returning from the train station, Elizabeth had come to an intersection in Weston, and as she came to a stop, Paul Newman pulled up. He went first. Rights of the famous, and of the one who has the newer car. Although convertibles, in this part of the world, were always an exception and went first.

Next door, the boys had stopped playing ball. One probed the meat, and the other changed the station on the radio. Elizabeth had to strain to hear, but it was what she had initially thought: Janis Joplin, singing “Cry, Baby.”

The best songs might be the ones that no one could dance to.

On Saturday, sitting in a lawn chair, Elizabeth started to assign roles to her friends and family. Henry would be emperor … The lawn sprinkler revolved with the quick regularity of a madman pivoting, spraying shots from a machine gun.

Henry would be Neptune, king of the sea.

A squirrel ran, stopped, dug for something. It seemed not to be real, but the creation of some animator. The wind chimes tinkled. The squirrel ran up the tree, as if a bell had summoned it.

Ellen, Z’s fiancée, was inside, on the telephone, getting advice about how to handle Monday’s follow-up interview. She was leaning against the corner of the bookcase, drinking bourbon and water. Z detoured from the kitchen to the dining room to nuzzle her neck. He had come in to help Elizabeth, when she left the yard to get trays. One tray was oval, painted to look like a cantaloupe. The other was in the shape of a bull. She had bought them years ago in Mexico. Deviled eggs were spread out on the bull. The cantaloupe held a bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic. A lime was in Z’s breast pocket. A knife was nestled among the eggs.

Elizabeth held the back door open, and Z walked out. Henry’s friend and lawyer, Max, was there, and a friend of Max’s named Len. Dixie had stopped by for a drink, en route to her new house in Kent. Dixie was in the process of ending an affair with her architect. He had gotten religion during the building of the house. He had put skylights everywhere, so that God’s radiance could shine in.

Z and Max were discussing jade. The man who used to deliver seltzer to Max was now smuggling jade into the country. Max was saying that people were fools to swallow prophylactics filled with drugs; look at the number of deaths. If jade spilled into somebody, it would just be like jellybeans that would never be digested.

Ellen came out of the house. She had had several drinks and, chin up, trying to look sober, she looked like a stunned soldier. She called out to Elizabeth that Louisa was on the phone. “The minute I put it back in the cradle, it rang,” Ellen said.

Elizabeth thought: the cradle of the phone; the cradle she had ordered for Louisa’s child … She was smiling when she picked up the phone, so it came as a surprise that Louisa was angry with her.

“I offered to come,” Elizabeth said. “You said you had enough people underfoot.”

“You offered,” Louisa said. “You never said you wanted to come. I could hear it in your voice.”

“I wanted to come,” Elizabeth said. “I was quite hurt you didn’t want me. Ask your father.”

“Ask my father,” Louisa said. She snorted. “So who’s there today?” she said. “Neighbors? Friends from far and wide?”

In recent years, Elizabeth had begun to realize that Louisa was envious of her knowing so many people. Louisa was shy, and when she was a child, Elizabeth had thought that surrounding her with people might bring her out. When she taught, she did seem to find many interesting people.

“Oh, go ahead and go back to your party,” Louisa said.

“Please tell me to come to Atlanta if you want me,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes, do conclude this foolishness,” Louisa said.

Sometimes Louisa was so good at mocking what she thought were her mother’s attitudes that Elizabeth actually cringed. As they hung up, Elizabeth said a silent prayer: Please let her have had this baby for the right reason. Please let it not be because she thinks that if someone needs her, he loves her.

Z was in the doorway when she opened her eyes. She looked at him, as startled as if the lights had just come up in the movies.

“Headache?” he said.

She shook her head, no.

“Your eyes were closed,” he said. “You were standing so still.”

“I was talking on the phone,” she said.

He nodded and left the room. He opened the refrigerator to get more ice. She heard the cubes cracking as he ran water, then twisted the tray.

Outside, Dixie was volunteering to go into town and get movies. Henry told her to get one serious one and one funny one. Most people did that when they went to Videoville, to allow for the possibility that they might want to be silly, after all. Elizabeth realized that it was harsh of her to judge Henry—it was overreacting to think of his insisting that Dixie get what he called “a comedy and a tragedy” as ambivalence.

“It was right there,” Henry was suddenly saying to Max. “Riiiight there, and I tapped it with the cane. Looked at Jim, back in the cart, and he looked away, to let me know he hadn’t noticed. Hell, I had done good to land it there, with one leg that wouldn’t even swivel. Who’s going to criticize somebody who’s half crippled? It’d be like taking exception to finding a blind man in the ladies’ room.”

On Wednesday Len stopped by, having guessed that the bracelet in his car must have been Dixie’s, lost when she borrowed his car to go to Videoville. Henry was upstairs, taking his afternoon nap, when Len arrived. Elizabeth invited him in for an iced tea. He countered with an offer of lunch. He was house-sitting for his brother, whose house was about fifteen miles away. She didn’t know she would be driving thirty miles when she got into the car. Why take her there, instead of into Bethel, or to Westport, for lunch? He probably thought she was more fun than she was, because they had gotten involved in a drunken game the other night, playing matador in the backyard with the tablecloth and the bull tray.

She had put on Dixie’s bracelet for safekeeping: copper strands, intertwined, speckled with shiny blue stones. The stones flashed in the sunlight. Always, when she was in someone else’s yard, she missed the music of the wind chimes and wondered why more people did not hang them in trees.

She and Len strolled through Len’s brother’s backyard. She waited while Len went inside and got glasses of wine to sip as they surveyed the garden. The flowers were rather chaotic, with sunflowers growing out of the phlox. Scarlet sage bordered the beds. Len said that he had been surprised she did not have a garden. She said that gardening was Henry’s delight, and of course, so soon after the accident, he wasn’t able to do it. He looked at her carefully as she spoke. It was clear to her that she was giving him the opportunity to ask something personal, by mentioning her husband. Instead, he asked about the time she had taught in New Haven. He had been accepted there years ago, he told her, but he had gone instead to Duke. As they strolled, she learned that Max and Len had been college roommates. As he spoke, Elizabeth’s attention wandered. Was it possible that she was seeing what she thought?

A duck was floating in a wash tub of water, with a large fence around it. Phlox were growing just outside the wire. Bees and butterflies flew around the flowers. There was a duck, floating.

Len smiled at her surprise. He said that the pen had been built for a puppy, but his brother realized he could not give the puppy enough time, so he had given it away to an admirer. The duck was there in retirement.

“Follow me,” Len said, lifting the duck out of the tub and carrying it into the house. The duck kicked, but made no noise. Perhaps it was not kicking, but trying to swim through the air.

Inside, Len went to the basement door, opened it, and started down the steps. “This way,” he hollered back.

She followed him. A fluorescent light blinked on. On one corner of a desk piled high with newspapers there was a rather large cage with MR. MUSIC DUCK stenciled across the top. The cage was divided into two parts. Len put the duck in on the right and closed the door. The duck shook itself. Then Len took a quarter from his pocket and dropped it into the metal box attached to the front of the cage. A board rose, and the duck turned and hurried to a small piano with a light on top of it. With its beak, the duck pulled the string, turned on the light, and then began to thump its beak up and down the keyboard. After five or six notes, the duck hurried to a feed dish and ate its reward.

“They were closing some amusement park,” Len said. “My brother bought the duck. The guy who lives two houses over bought the dancing chicken.” He reached into the cage, removed the duck, and smiled. He continued to smile as he walked past her, duck clasped under his arm, and started to walk upstairs. At the top, he crossed the kitchen, pushed open the back door, and carried the duck out to the pen. She watched through a window. The duck went back to the water silently. Len looked at it a few seconds, then turned back toward the house.

In the kitchen, Len poured more wine and lifted plates out of the refrigerator. There was cheese and a ham butt. He took out a bunch of radishes—bright red, some of them cracked open, so that white worms appeared to be twisted around the bulbs. He washed them and cut off the tops and tips with scissors.

They ate standing at the counter. They talked about the sweaty bicycle riders who had been pouring over the hilly highways near Elizabeth’s house all summer. She looked out the window and saw the duck swim and turn, swim and turn. She poured a third glass of wine. That finished the bottle, which she left, empty, in the refrigerator. Len reminisced about his days at Duke. He asked then, rather abruptly, if he should drive her home.

In the car, he put on the radio, and she remembered the crashing keys under the duck’s bill as it played the piano. Drinking wine had made her think of the brandy in the bag, and of sitting in the matinee with Z.

She wondered what she would say to Henry about how she had spent the afternoon. That she had eaten lunch and watched a duck play the piano? She felt foolish, somehow—as if the day had been her idea, and a silly idea at that. To cover for the way she felt, and in case Len could read her mind, she invited him to Sunday brunch. He must be lonesome, she realized; presiding over someone else’s house and someone else’s duck was probably not his idea of a perfect day, either. But who was he, and why had he not said? Or: why did she think everything had to have a subtext?

She shook his hand when he dropped her off. His eyes were bright, and she realized that the ride back had been much faster than the ride to the house. His eyes were riveted on the stones in the bracelet. Henry, too, noticed the bracelet the minute she came in, and told her he was glad she had gone out and bought herself something pretty. He seemed so genuinely pleased that she did not tell him it was Dixie’s. It hurt her to disappoint him. He would have been sad if she had admitted that the bracelet was not hers, just as he had been very worried when she told him, some time ago, that the college where she taught in New Haven would no longer be using part-time faculty, so she would not be teaching there after the end of the semester. She had been able to say that, in spite of his sad face, but of course other thoughts remained unstated.

Z had young hands. That was what had stopped her. Or maybe she thought that because she wanted to think there had been one thing that stopped her. He had large, fine hands and long, narrow feet. Sometimes it seemed that she had always known him in summer.

*  *  *

She searched her mind for the title of the poem by Robert Browning about the poor servant girl who had only one day off a year.

Here it was Sunday, and she was entertaining again. Z (without Ellen, who was having a snit), Len, Max, Margie and Joe Ferella, who owned the hardware store, Louisa, and the baby.

What a week it had been. Phone calls back and forth between Connecticut and Atlanta, between herself and Louisa, between Louisa and Henry, between Louisa’s husband and both of them—and finally, through a flood of tears, after Louisa accused Elizabeth of every example of callousness she could think of, she had said that not only did she want to be with Elizabeth and Henry but that she wanted to be with them there. She wanted them to see the baby.

The baby, in a cotton shirt and diapers, slept on Louisa’s chest.

Louisa’s hand hovered behind the baby’s head, as if it might suddenly snap back. Elizabeth was reminded of the duck, held in the crook of Len’s arm—how lightly it rode there, going downstairs to play the piano.

Ellen came after all, in a pink sundress that showed off her tan, wearing high-heeled sandals. She went to the baby and lightly touched its shoulder. She said that the baby was miraculous and fawned over him, no doubt embarrassed that she had made a scene with Z earlier.- She did not seem to want to look at Z. He was obviously surprised that she had come.

They were drinking Soave, with a little Cointreau mixed in. A big glass pitcher of golden liquid sat on the center of the table. The food was vegetables that had been sautéed in an olive oil as green as Max’s treasured jade, a plate with three kinds of sausages, a wooden tray with bunches of radishes (she had placed scissors on the board, to see if Len would say anything, just as a reminder of the day), strawberries, sourdough bread, cornbread, and honey.

Everyone was exclaiming. Several hands reached for the pitcher at once. Beads of sweat streamed down the glasses. Z complimerited Elizabeth on the meal as he poured more of the wine mixture into her glass. It was so easy to please people: to take advantage of a summer day and to bring out attractive food, with trays rimmed with sprigs of mint, studded with daisies. Even Louisa cheered up. She lifted a sausage with her fingers and smiled. She relinquished the baby to Ellen, and soon Ellen’s lips were resting on the baby’s tiny pink ear. Pretty, pretty, Elizabeth thought—even though she did not like Ellen much. Pretty the way her lips touched the baby’s hair. Pretty the way her diamond sparkled.

She looked around the table, and thought silently: Think only about the ways in which they are wonderful. Henry’s cheeks, from the long morning in the sun, were pink enough to make his eyes appear more intensely brown. Next to him, Z raised the lid off the honey pot and she looked at those fingers she loved—the ones that, as he gestured to make a point, seemed to probe the air to see if something tangible could be brought forward. Margie and Joe were as attuned to each other as members of a chorus line (he looked at the cornbread, and her hand pulled the tray forward). Max was so complacent, so at ease, that any prankster would have known where to throw the firecracker for best results. Len, sitting next to Ellen, edged his shoulder a little closer and—as Louisa had done earlier—cupped his hand protectively behind the baby’s head. And Louisa, though there were dark circles under her eyes, was still the child—half -charming, half-exasperating—who picked out her favorite vegetables and left the others.

Next door the brothers, again lighting the barbecue, again tossing the softball, shouted insults to each other and then cracked up at their inventiveness. One threw the ball and it rolled away; the other threw it back underhand, to make it arch high.

What happened then, out on the lawn, was this: Henry swatted at a bee with a roll of paper towels, and suddenly three or four more buzzed low over the table. Hardly had any of them begun to realize what was happening when bees began to appear everywhere, dropping down on the table like a sudden rain, swarming, so that in a few seconds anyone who had not seen the honey pot on the table to begin with would have seen only a cone of bees the size of a pineapple. And then—however wonderful they had been—Max became in an instant the coward, chair tipped back, colliding almost head-on with Margie Ferella; Henry reached for his cane and was stung on the wrist; as a bee flew past Ellen’s nose, she screamed, shooting up from the chair, knocking over her glass of wine. Joe Ferella put his hands over his head and urged the others to do the same. Louisa snatched the baby back from Ellen, hate in her eyes because Ellen had been concerned only with her own safety, and it had seemed certain that she would simply drop the baby and run.

When Elizabeth remembered the afternoon, late that night, in bed, it was as if she had not been a part of it. She had the sense that the day, like a very compelling movie, was something half dreamed. That there was something inevitable and romantic about the way she and Z had risen in unison and reached toward each other reflexively.

Later, Henry had told her that her hand and Z’s, clasped across the table, had reminded him of the end of a tennis match, when the winner and the loser gripped hands perfunctorily. And then he had stopped himself. What an odd thing to think of, he had said: clearly there had been no competition at all.