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car stopped, its headlights on. Guiltily we dropped hands. Dazzled by the light, only as we were almost upon it could I recognize our family car, the only wood-panelled Chrysler in town. In it was my father, kissing someone; their bodies were blotted into one silhouette.
    If he saw and recognized us, there was no sign. He could easily not have seen us, or, knowing my father, who was nothing if not observant, I would guess it’s more likely he did see us but pretended to himself that he did not, as he pretended not to see that my mother was miserably unhappy, and that I was growing up given to emotional extremes, and to loneliness.
    “Stricken” probably comes closest to how I felt: burning rage, a painful, seething shame—emotions that I took to be hatred. “I hate him” is what I thought. Oblivious of the tall boy at my side, I began to walk as fast as I could, clumping heavily through the snow; at the door of my house I muttered what must have been a puzzlingly abrupt good night. Without kissing.
    By the time we left Hilton, the summer that I was sixteen, my parents were entirely fed up with Hilton, and with each other. My father thought he could get a job in the Pentagon,in Washington—he knew someone there; and my mother had decided on New York, on graduate school at Columbia; I would go to Barnard.
    I was less upset about my parents’ separation than I was about leaving Hilton, which was by now to me a magic, enchanted place. In the spring and summer just preceding our departure there were amazing white bursts of dogwood, incredible wisteria and roses.
    I wept for my friends, whom I would always love and miss, I thought.
    I hated New York. The city seemed violent and confusing, ugly and dirty, loud. Voices in the streets or on subways and busses grated against my ears; everyone spoke so stridently, so harshly. Until I met Paul I was lonely and miserable, and frightened.
    I would not have told him of my unease right away, even though Paul and I began as friends. But he must have sensed some rural longings just beneath my New York veneer. He would have; almost from the start Paul felt whatever I felt—he came to inhabit my skin.
    In any case, our friendship and then our love affair had a series of outdoor settings. Paul, melancholy and romantic, and even then not well, especially liked the sea, and he liked to look out to islands—which led us, eventually, to Yugoslavia, our desolate summer there.
    Not having had an actual lover before, only boys who kissed me, who did not talk much, I was unprepared for the richness of love with Paul—or, rather, I assumed that that was how love was between true intimates. Paul’s sensuality was acutely sensitive, and intense; with him I felt both beautiful and loved—indescribably so. You could say that Paul spoiled me for other men, and in a way that is true—he did.But on the other hand Paul knew that he was dying, gradually, and that knowledge must have made him profligate with love. We talked and talked, we read poetry; Paul read Wallace Stevens and Eliot aloud to me, and his own poems, which I thought remarkable. We made jokes, we laughed, we made love.
    Since Hilton was only twelve hours from New York by train, and we both liked travel, and trains, in a way it is odd that Paul and I did not go down to Hilton. I know he would have said yes had I suggested a trip. His curiosity about me was infinite; he would have wanted to see a place that I cared so much about. I suppose we would have stayed at the inn, as I was to do later on, when finally I did go back to Hilton. We could have taken a taxi out to what had been my house.
    However, for whatever reasons, Paul and I did not go to Hilton. We went to upstate New York and to Connecticut, and out to Long Island.
    And, eventually, to Yugoslavia.
    Our unhappiness there in the ugly yellow hotel on the beautiful rockbound coast was due not only to Paul’s declining health and my unreal but urgent wish to marry. Other problems