of the town. Thomas seems anxious and distracted. We pass boutiques, a microbrewery, a home-furnishings store. In a storefront window, I see my reflection, and it occurs to me there are no mirrors on the boat. I am surprised to see a woman who looks older than I think she ought to. Her mouth is pressed into a narrow line, as if she were trying to remember something important. Her shoulders are hunched, or perhaps that is simply the way she is standing, with her hands in the pockets of her jeans. She has on a faded navy sweatshirt, and she has a camera bag on her arm. She might be a tourist. She wears her hair short, hastily pushed back behind her ears. On the top of her hair, which is an indeterminate and faded chestnut, there is a thin weave of dew. She wears dark glasses, and I cannot see her eyes.
I am not, on the afternoon we walk up Ceres Street, or even on the evening I first meet Thomas, a beautiful woman. I was never a pretty girl. As my mother once said, in a moment of honesty that I used to resent but now appreciate, my individual features were each lovely or passable in themselves, but somehow the parts had never formed an absolutely coherent whole. There is something mildly disturbing, I know, in the length of my face, the width of my brow. It is not an unpleasant face, but it is not a face that strangers turn to, have to see. As Thomas’s is, for instance. Or Adaline’s.
Thomas and I do not touch as we walk up Ceres Street. “She seems a pleasant person,” I say.
“Yes, she does.”
“Billie likes her.”
“And Rich.”
“He’s good with kids.”
“Excellent.”
“She has a beautiful voice. It’s interesting that she wears a cross.”
“Her daughter gave it to her.”
At the top of the street, Thomas pauses for a moment and says, “We could go back.” I misunderstand him and say, looking at my watch, “We’ve only been gone ten minutes.”
But he means, We could go home.
There are tourists on the street, people peering into shop windows. We reach the center of town, the market square, a church, a tiny mall with benches. We round the corner and come upon the facade of a tall, brick building. The windows are long and arched, multipaned. There is a discreet card in the window.
“That was an interesting game you were playing with Adaline,” I say, studying the card for a moment.
“Not really,” says Thomas. He leans in toward the window and squints at the sign.
“THE PORTSMOUTH ATHENAEUM,” he reads. “READING ROOM OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.” He examines the hours listed. He seems to study the card a long time, as though he were having trouble understanding it.
“Who was the poet?” I ask.
“Fallon Pearse.”
I look down at my sandals, which are spotted with drops of oil from cooking in the kitchen at home. My jeans have stretched and wrinkled at the tops of my thighs.
“If any place would have archival photographs, this would be it,” he says.
“What about Billie?” I ask. We both know, as Rich and Adaline do not, that even a half hour with Billie can be exhausting. All those questions, all that curiosity.
Thomas stands back and scans the building’s height. “I’ll go back and find Adaline,” he says. “I’ll give her a hand with Billie. You see if they’ve got what you need, and we’ll meet back here in, say, an hour?”
Underneath my feet, the ground seems to roll slowly up and away as it sometimes does in children’s cartoons.
“Whatever you think,” I say.
Thomas peers into the front window as if he might recognize something beyond the drapes. With a casualness and tenderness I suddenly mistrust, he bends and kisses me on the cheek.
Some weeks after Thomas and I met each other in the bar in Cambridge, we parked my car by the waterfront in Boston and walked up a hill toward an expensive restaurant. Perhaps we were celebrating an anniversary — one month together. From the harbor, fog spilled into the street and around our feet. I had on high heels, Italian shoes that made me nearly as tall as Thomas. Behind me, I could hear a foghorn, the soothing hiss of tires on wet streets. It was raining lightly, and it seemed as though we would never make it up the hill to the restaurant, that we were walking as slowly as the fog was moving.
Thomas pressed in on my side.