It wasn’t clear, when Jeff and Terri announced that they had built a koi pond, whether they had known that Ruth had been so long suffering for one. The two couples were sitting in Jeff and Terri’s living room on a stiff modern sofa that lacked arms. They never stayed at Jeff and Terri’s long enough to relax, mostly because it was horrible sitting there. Terri worked on visual culture and talked a lot about “clean lines” and the “provenance” of this or that object — a planter, a frame. There were other rooms in the house, rooms that were habitable or looked to be in passing, but Terri always shepherded guests to this room, which she repainted every two years a different shade of neutral. The current color was Butter Cookie, a name whose associations did not at all capture the feeling of being in the room. Ruth preferred it to Oklahoma Wheat, which had been insincere, but was looking forward to Lemon Sorbet, which promised to be cleaner, more open to the future.

“Lemon Sorbet is the color of the year,” Terri said, and Ruth imagined Terri fingering the paint strips, holding them up to the window, examining them against her skin, licking them in surreptitious delight.

Jeff and Ken and Terri taught in the same department; that’s how they all knew one another. Ruth had recently acquired a real estate license but she didn’t define herself by her work.

“It happened again,” Ken said. “The koi.” If only he had left for work on time, he thought, he would not be responsible, he would not have met the depths of his own impotent inaction so early in the day.

“Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked, her tone flinty. Ken, fundamentally a soft man, deflated under the accusation. He seemed to be leaking mass. If he stood there all day, by dinnertime he would be a thin man. It was his poor posture, of course, that accounted for this. Ruth knew that.

“If only you wanted a bird sanctuary instead of a koi pond,” he said. “Then everything would be perfect.”

“How much?” I said.

“A hundred dollars,” he said.

“For what?” I said.

“You know,” he said, but neither of us did.

Sometimes sex is a thing we do for those in need out of compassion, or for ourselves, out of curiosity. I unbuttoned another button. The lawyer, who in all this time had not stopped handling himself, took a step back and collided with the sink. I pulled one bra cup down and lifted out a single breast. The executive shuddered. It was finished.

This was a problem I had faced before. In college I babysat for a philosophy professor named Talia who had adopted a little girl from China. She needed a regular babysitter because most weekends her dog traveled to compete in obstacle courses against other dogs. The dog was an excellent competitor and the dining room was filled with trophies and ribbons and medals. When I graduated Talia gave me a $100 gift card to the local liquor store. I went in alone and asked the first person I saw to show me a $100 bottle of white wine. The person suggested a nice Chablis, but at the register it rang up for $20. I lowered my voice to explain to the cashier that there had been a mistake.

“She wants the $100 bottle!” the cashier yelled across the store.

That night I drank the whole bottle myself and had no hangover the following morning, because that’s what you’re paying for with a $100 bottle. One thing I learned from that experience that I hadn’t known before was that there is a $100 version of everything, even Chablis, which I had only associated with church ladies and Tennessee, because I once heard about it in a country song.

Carla, who knew this story, proposed that I use the lawyer’s money to buy another nice wine, but I wanted to feel like I was growing.

It was hard to make out the lines by candlelight. I held her hand close to my face and touched the inside of her palm. She giggled. Carla has always been ticklish. Once I saw her kick a Korean lady in the face during a pedicure. She didn’t mean to do it, but when the lady started scrubbing the sole her leg jerked out and she made contact. The Korean lady was a real professional. She wiped off her glasses and finished the job. We never showed our feet in that nail salon again.