The girl is twenty-five. It has not been very long since her divorce but she cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate. Once he lost a fifty-dollar pair of sunglasses while surf casting off Gay Head and felt badly about it for days. He did like kidneys, that was one thing. He loved kidneys for weekend lunch. She would voyage through the supermarkets, her stomach sweetly sloped, her hair in a twist, searching for fresh kidneys for this young man, her husband. When he kissed her, his kisses, or so she imagined, would have the faint odor of urine. Understandably, she did not want to think about this. It hardly seemed that the same problem would arise again, that is, with another man. Nothing could possibly be gained from such an experience! The child cannot remember him, this man, this daddy, and she cannot remember him. He had been with her when she gave birth to the child. Not beside her, but close by, in the corridor. He had left his work and come to the hospital. As they wheeled her by, he said, “Now you are going to have to learn how to love something, you wicked woman.” It is difficult for her to believe he said such a thing.

Charlotte left. Constance sat on a bed and looked around the room. On the bureau mirror were photographs of two little boys, Charlotte’s and Jill’s boyfriends. Their names were Zack and Pete. They were just little boys but there they were. It worried Constance that the children should already have boyfriends. Another photograph, which Constance had not seen before, showed a large dog in front of a potted evergreen. Constance was not acquainted with either him or his name. She got up and began picking up candy wrappers that were scattered around the room and putting them in her empty glass. She was thirty-seven years old. She thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that American lives have no second act.

Elizabeth was a nervous young woman. She was nervous because she was not married to Sam. This desire to be married again embarrassed her, but she couldn’t help it. Sam was married to someone else. Sam was always married to someone.

Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness. They met at the wedding dinner of the daughter of a mutual friend. Delicious food was served and many peculiar toasts were given. Sam liked Elizabeth’s aura and she liked his too. They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink. At one point, he thought he saw a red rabbit in the floral centerpiece. It’s true, it was Easter week, but he worried about this. They danced again. Sam danced Elizabeth out of the party and into the parking lot. Sam’s car was nondescript and tidy except for a bag of melting groceries.

They began going out together. Elizabeth promised to always take the babysitter home. At first, Elizabeth and Sam attempted to do vile and imaginative things to each other. This culminated one afternoon when Sam spooned a mound of tiramisu between Elizabeth’s legs. At first, of course, Elizabeth was nervous. Then she stopped being nervous and began watching Sam’s sweating, good-looking shoulders with real apprehension. Simultaneously, they both gave up. This seemed a good sign. The battle is always between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, is it not? Imagination is not what it’s cracked up to be. Sam decided to forget the petty, bourgeois rite of eating food out of another’s orifices for a while. He decided to just love Elizabeth instead.

The Wilsons’ surroundings are splendid. Mrs. Wilson has splendid clothes, a splendid figure. She has a wonderful Cuban cook. The house is worth three-quarters of a million dollars. The plantings are worth a hundred thousand dollars. Everything has a price. It is fantastic. A precise worth has been ascribed to everything. Every worm and aphid can be counted upon. It costs a certain amount of money to eradicate them. The sod is laid down fresh every year. For weeks after the lawn is installed, the seams are visible and then the squares of grass gather together and it becomes, everywhere, in sun or shade, a smooth, witty and improbable green like the color of a parrot.

The restaurant that the yard boy’s girlfriend chooses is not expensive. It is a fish restaurant. The plates are plastic. There is a bottle of hot sauce on each table. The girlfriend doesn’t like fancy.

The yard boy’s girlfriend is not talking to him. She has not been talking to him for days, actually. He knows he should be satisfied with whatever situation arises but he is having a little difficulty with his enlightenment.

“Do you think Jane and I will be friends forever?” Dan asked.

Mr. Muirhead looked surprised. “Definitely not. Jane will not have friends. Jane will have husbands, enemies and lawyers.” He cracked ice noisily with his white teeth. “I’m glad you enjoyed your summer, Dan, and I hope you’re enjoying your childhood. When you grow up, a shadow falls. Everything’s sunny and then this big goddamn wing or something passes overhead.”

Every night the chemistry teacher was projected brightly behind the square window glass and watching him was like seeing something in a museum. The girls would often close their eyes and even doze off for a time, and the snow would fall on them and freeze in their hair. Sometimes he would take off all his clothes and walk around the room, punching at the wall but never hitting it. Seeing him naked was never as exciting as the girls kept on imagining it would be since no one had ever told them what to feel about this.

Even so, Julep would come back to the house smiling, as though someone had made a very exciting promise to her. No one was there to notice this, for her mother was always locked in her room, powdered and rouged and in a lacy bed jacket like an invalid, watching TV and eating ice cream from the store, and her father had been sleeping for hours, twitching and suicidal, dreaming of meat going bad in faulty freezers.

Debevoise was thirty-four and took no part in adventure. He didn’t care for women and he couldn’t care for men. He lived in a corner second-story room of a rambling boardinghouse. The room had two windows, one of which overlooked the field and the other, the sea. There were no curtains on the windows and he never pulled the shades. He ate breakfast with the elderly owners, lunch every noon at the high school and drove to a hotel in the next town for dinner every night. He was stern and deeply tanned and exceptionally good-looking. As for the teaching, he barely recognized his students as human beings, considering them all mentally bludgeoned by the unremitting landscape. He couldn’t imagine chemistry doing any better or worse by them than anything else.

And the girls felt hopeless, stubborn and distraught, for they had come a long way on just a whisper more than nothing.

“I have a friend who is a designer,” Genevieve said. “She hopes to make a great deal of money someday. Her work has completely altered her perceptions. Every time she looks at a view, she thinks of sheets. ‘Take out those mountains,’ she will say, ‘lighten that cloud a bit and it would make a great sheet.’ When she looks at the sky, she thinks of lingerie. Now when I look at the sky, I think of earlier, happier times when I’d looked at the sky. I’ve never been in love, have you?”