The party was in a dozy subdivision. I went to be nice. The hostess was a woman I liked; we were hovering on the doorstep between acquaintanceship and friendship. The party was typical of my safe island: a lot of voluble, smart, still-beautiful women chatting and cackling away; a few softer-spoken bearded men interspersed. I sat quiet—unusual for me—and listened to someone talk about her divorce; there had been a crop of them that year, like rhubarb. My friend Melinda came in, looking glamorous, the way a fresh divorce takes some women. She looked thinner and somehow more big-boobed. She had that crazed gleam in her eye I had come to recognize. Maybe I had it too. She strode up to me and kissed me on the mouth. “Woman!” she said. “You look HOT.” And she kissed me on the mouth again. Avec tongue. She slipped me the sashimi.

The beignet sat leaden in my stomach. I thought, perhaps not entirely illogically, of dinner parties I would not be invited to as a single woman. The expense of a setting up a second household. Changing the batteries in the smoke alarm. The empty bed. All that old business. At the same time, I felt lighter. When I was in Indonesia many years ago a parrot landed on my head. Everyone oohed and aahed and told me how lucky I was, but all I could feel was its weight, surprisingly heavy. Bruce’s words felt like the moment the parrot took off from my head.

“That guy has been writing you. It sort of hurts my feelings.” He paused, figuring out what to say. “People like you, you know, Claire,” he said. “They love you.”

“I know,” I said. Even though I didn’t really believe him.

“It’s okay to have secrets,” he said. “Just be careful.”

I cried a little, in a pro forma sort of way, wondering as the tears leaked out: Did he have secrets? We had been gone from each other so much, traveling alone. I knew it was dangerous, but I also intuited it was the only way for us to be married right now. We were each giving the other a long lead. I was so mired in my own despair it was hard for me to see that Bruce was undergoing something or other as well. We were sort of trundling along, in our separate orbs, next to each other. I didn’t know what to do about it, except hope we were headed in the same general direction. I often had an obscure feeling that I wanted to figure out a different way to be married; it had never before occurred to me that Bruce and I were in the midst of inventing it.