came downstairs, Paul was alone in the hammock. “Where is Marse?” I said.
“I have no idea.”
I put down the bag I was carrying and looked around. The downstairs bathroom door was open and she wasn’t on the boat or the dock. I opened the door to the generator room, but there was only the loud motor and the many shelves of salt-crusted shoes. I went back to the hammock. Marse could certainly handle herself, but nevertheless I felt protective of her. “Really, where is she?”
“I really don’t know.” He had an arm under his head. The hammock swung leisurely.
“Get up.”
“Why?”
“Go find your girlfriend.”
He smiled. “She can take care of herself.”
“I know she can, but I’d prefer to know roughly where everyone is at any given time.”
He gave a mock look of concern. “You think she drowned?” He was baiting me; of course he knew where she was. He sat up in the hammock and I stepped back. “I don’t bite,” he whispered. I heard Dennis talking upstairs, then Marse’s laugh. Paul said, “I have no intention of hurting Marse, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
I took a breath. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
He was sitting down, but still I felt dwarfed by his intensity and charm and looks. “I can be discreet,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt Dennis either.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s been a while,” he said, “me wanting you.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You think you’ll never do it, Frances?”
There was a warm wind coming from the north. I willed it to carry our words, and my memory of them, out to sea. “No,” I said, “I’ll never do it.”
His voice was calm. “You will,” he said. “One day you will, and you’ll realize that what people say about it isn’t true. You won’t feel guilty, you’ll just feel happy and horny and you’ll think back and realize you could have done it with me.”
He was broad and sexy. He would be good at sex, I guessed. He would put his heart into it. He would be generous and complimentary, would inspire an eagerness to please, a dismantling of inhibition. He would moan without checking himself. He was a man who loved plants, who worked for himself, who had great sex: I felt a brief flush of desire for him.
When I didn’t say anything, he put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, then looked off. “That goddamn package,” he said. He seemed truly to shift his attention. In the end, he turned away and walked upstairs, and I remained, overcome by sorrow for many reasons, not the least of which was this: I had a feeling that Paul was right about what he’d said. We were still at the start of a long road together, Dennis and me. The future was still so murky. For a long moment it seemed almost inevitable that our happiness would not last, could not last, and that at some point, after Margo left home or before, I would find myself in a similar situation, and this time I would want it badly enough to let it happen. And—this thought was incredibly sad to me—I might not even feel terribly ashamed. I might come to consider it just one episode in the life of the marriage, just another wave in the windy channel. Not a hurricane at all.
1982
On a Saturday evening in February of Margo’s sixth-grade year, Dennis and I drove her to a slumber party in a gated community called CocoPlum, ten minutes from our house by car. The hostess was a girl named Trisha Weintraub, whom I’d met only once. Trisha was a year ahead of Margo in school. When we drove up, her mother, Judy, was sitting on the terra-cotta porch with her boyfriend, drinking white wine. Judy’s boyfriend wore a loose linen shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, and Judy wore hammered gold earrings and an embroidered caftan. When I complimented her on the top, she told me she’d brought it back from Lima, where she’d been on retreat. Dennis asked the pertinent questions: How many girls were sleeping over? Was Trisha excited to be turning thirteen? (Margo was still only eleven.) Did Judy have our number, in case? Would any boys be dropping by? (He managed to slip this last one in jokingly; if I’d asked, I would have seemed uptight.) Judy didn’t say anything about it, but I assumed that she’d heard Dennis was unemployed. All the ladies must have heard—it was exactly the