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between them, how could they? And yet even that first night, every time he touched her, there in the soapy water, lathering her hair, cupping her breast in his hand, it felt to her like a promise.

Had God foreseen the subtlety of your modern devils, Sam began, raising his blunt face from the carpet, he might have added a Commandment: Thou Shalt not Pity thy Self. In the case of Sorrow for a Dead Friend: Suppose, I were Dead; would I have my Friend mourn for me, with an Excessive, Oppressive, Destructive Sorrow? No, sure. Why then let my Sorrow for my Friend be moderated. You dwell in Memory like some Perversity of the Flesh. A sin against the gift of Creation it is to harp so on the dead while the living still suffer.

She wouldn't be chastised like this. Not in her own house. Not by Sam. Lying there with his fine pale coat and superior manner. It was no great mystery who he had come to fancy himself as. All that pure breeding and King James diction. As though each day she walked Cotton Mather over the golf course on a leash. Did he really expect her to believe that was the case?

Across the room, the television stood mute, its glass a dull, greeny gray. The reception had grown steadily worse over the years, though she'd changed nothing, until finally the static had grown so thick it was hardly worth it, Jim Lehrer's voice muffled beneath the hiss. She'd preferred MacNeil, in any case.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator shuddered off and the quiet of the house was once again absolute.

Eric's place had been much like hers, a studio apartment over by the water on Bethune Street. A mess of books and papers, barely any shelves to put them on, a small wooden table, one chair. The previous fall, he'd enrolled to study philosophy at the New School and had been overwhelmed by the amount of work. He was late wherever they went, unkempt, often tired-looking. Charlotte loved him for it and even more for their hours of conversation and for his letting her kiss him whenever she felt the urge, Eric being happy to let her lead the way, telling him when they would study and when they would stop, when they would sleep and eat. Those first few months he'd get up early and go to his apartment a few hours each morning to get ready for his seminars, he said, and she'd usually find him back at her place napping when she returned in the late afternoon. She'd sometimes sit watching him as he slept, his legs curled up toward his chest, his mouth slightly open against the pillow. Her first guess at his age had been right. He was only twenty-four. The youngest of seven. His mother's choice for the priesthood. Yet the only one of his siblings who hadn't ended up living within a quick drive of the house back in the working-class section of Philadelphia where he'd grown up. Charlotte had been surrounded most of her life by people who'd sauntered to their place in the world, coming to it as if by right. This hadn't been the case for her because she hadn't chosen the course offered. Watching Eric sleep like that, an entire evening in the apartment together still ahead of them, she felt delivered not just from the usual loneliness - so well hidden by the manner she kept up with family and colleagues - but from the years of it she'd already been through, the tiring work of living on one's own, of being such an odd bird, a single woman of her age back then, 1962, getting a PhD, no marriage in the offing. An awkward fit in the world. It was as if Eric gave her those years back by accompanying her now.

He made her young. He let her be silly. She'd never been able to afford silliness. Like fooling around in Henry's apartment, where she'd taken Eric for dinner, fooling around in the bathroom after dessert, their drinks perched on the sink. Stuffy Henry and stuffy Betsy in their appropriate little apartment on the Upper East Side, the settee from the back hall in Rye primped up in the living room, carpets their mother had unearthed from the attic covering the floor, the wedding silver polished to the nines, and the two of them already on the lookout for a house, the closer to Mommy and