After a second round of drinks, Diana went down to the cabin. The sun hurt her eyes—it had been like that since she’d started researching her dissertation, “Crisis and Catharsis in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock.” She had promised James she would cut down the hours she spent viewing, but lately she found that everything in her life—the telephone calls, the endless, hopeful pounding of their son Daniel’s basketball against the garage door as he struggled to match his father, the bills and invitations—seemed like nothing but distractions from Hitchcock’s tense, dreamlike world, where even the clicking of heels was significant. Diana often felt weirdly nostalgic as she watched, as if her own life had been like that once—dreamy, Technicolor—but had lost these qualities through some misstep of her own.

He nodded, then shyly put his arms around her. As they hugged, Diana teased herself, imagining what it would be like to make love to Sonny. Then he drew back, took her face in his hands, and kissed her.

Diana was as stunned as if he had slapped her. Gently she tried to pull away, but Sonny was running his palms along her back and kissing her neck as if this were all something they had agreed on. She tried to take it as a joke. “I’ve heard of self-contradiction,” she said, “but this is outrageous.” Sonny didn’t pause, and as the moments passed, Diana felt drawn in by his fierce arousal, by the very fact that something so unthinkable was actually happening. The feeling was not quite desire, but something like it. It held her still while Sonny eased her onto the concrete floor, pushing a folded rag behind her head. She was crying by then, and tears ran from her eyes into both ears. She pulled Sonny to her, hooking her fingers over the thick ridges of muscle along his spine. He felt heavy and strange in her arms. His belt buckle struck the concrete—once, then again, over and over again with a thick, blunt sound. She closed her eyes at the end. When Sonny was done he stood up, slapped the dust from his hands, and picked up his paintbrush. Diana touched the floor beneath her, thinking she might have bled, though there was no reason. She ran through the rain back to the house, convinced her life would never be the same.

But nothing happened. No mention of the incident was ever made, and Sonny never again laid a hand on her except in the most benign affection. Only one thing changed: he liked her after that. It was as if she had passed some test or—and she tried not to think about this—as if she were partly his. What troubled her most was that she couldn’t forget it; not Sonny himself so much as the paintbrushes soaking in their jars of cloudy water, the rolls of unstretched canvas, each detail bringing with it an ache of longing that still haunted her sometimes.