It is a hot, lazy day. They are becoming torpid from so many days of lying in the sun. They will be ready to go back to Chicago tomorrow.

“It reminds me of that place in France two years ago,” Lucy says. “What was that hotel?”

“Can’t remember,” Parker says. “Never can remember that stuff.”

They have been all over the world, Lucy thinks, watching the sea. Yet so little of it has stuck with her. She clings to names, to snapshots and matchbooks, but the many seasons have mingled hopelessly. She used to arrange their photographs according to which bathing suit she was wearing—the polka-dotted one in Cannes, the striped red in Spain. But the sand and water around the bathing suits all look the same.

Josephine’s apple pie arrived, and she heaped a bite with ice cream and ate vigorously. Her jaws flexed under her wide cheekbones. “You remember,” she began, speaking slowly, “how we used to imagine being rich? Do you remember that?”

Lucy nodded. She sensed from Josephine’s tone that this was a last attempt to get at some basic thing. “Yes …” she said, cautiously.

“All I’m asking is, is it actually like that?”

Lucy considered. It was true, there had been moments when she’d thought, I can’t believe this is happening to me. The feeling came sometimes when she and Parker traveled, sometimes just when she looked around her own house at the fireplace and thick rugs, at the vast green lawn outside. Whenever she had that feeling, Lucy longed to tell someone. She would turn to Parker, who was usually reading, or anyone else who was there, but no one ever behaved as if anything special were happening. Soon her wonderment would begin to fade. As time went on, it came less and less often.

“I get excited,” she said, speaking carefully, “but it’s not like the magazines.”

She could not explain. Something separated her from Josephine, for the first time in her life. Josephine seemed to feel it, too. She sighed and pushed her pie away, lighting a cigarette and looking out at the rain. “Well,” she said, “at least you’re happy.”

“Parker,” Lucy says suddenly, “do you think it was right for you to give it up?”

She knows she has broken some tacit code in asking this. Parker is silent. He opens his mouth to speak, but doesn’t. “I don’t know,” he finally says.

Lucy wants to press the point, but is afraid of pushing him too far. She waits, almost holding her breath, the way one does in the presence of a squirrel or a bird that will scramble away at the slightest jolt.

“I loved history,” he says. “It was exciting.”

As the maître d’ leads the young couple to their table, the blond woman pauses at the grill and looks at the fish. Timidly she reaches out to press the shining scales of one.

“The funny part is,” Parker says, “somehow I made a choice. I don’t even know when. Only after it was made, I noticed that I just—”

“Thought differently?”

“Yes! That’s right!” He seems elated that she understands. “That’s what it was, I thought differently. But what bothers me …

The man and woman sit down and hold hands. The blond hair falls in a curtain down the woman’s back.

“What bothers me is …” He can’t seem to finish. One hand waves halfheartedly, trying to conjure the sentence.

“Money?” Lucy says very gently. “That somehow it was the money?”

Parker drops his hand. They look at one another in silence.