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stretched the scoring string, and in the center of the third was a large fireplace. The tan felt of the table's playing surface shimmered under the cone of light. I took the house to have that pool table, because I knew Michael would love it—a game to be played without strong legs. Was that treating him like a cripple?
    Now I racked up as if he were here. I chalked, broke, shot, chalked, shot—running the table once, then again. The noise of the ceramic spheres, one against the others, with the faintly erotic punctuation of the pocket thunks, defied the stone silence of the empty house. The stick gliding through my fingers and the kick in my right elbow at each stroke kept my mind tethered to physical sensation.
    Nicolaus had set the fire roaring in the ornate hearth before he'd departed for the evening, as he always did on the Fridays we expected Michael, but it was down to embers before I noticed. I remember consciously deciding not to add a log.
Where are you?
    But by then the question had moved away from Michael. The raw particularity of eight-ball solitaire had failed me. My mind had cut loose from one snapping sequence of sounds to drift, with no leave from me, back to that other: the slamming of the screen door that took her from the summer kitchen out into the breezeway, then into the garage, and another slam. My God, she could get angry! And then into the car—slam!—the rev of which I heard so clearly because I'd followed her for once, this time to apologize.
    That memory brought me back to the fight that had taken Michael away on Sunday—"You can't treat me like this!"—and my knees became weak. Have I done it again? The very question made me tack.
    I saw her across a narrow gap of the churning water of Long Island Sound. With her hair hidden by her long-billed cap, she was skipper of her father's Lightning, bearing down on mine as we both drove in on the last mark in the last heat of the Manhasset Memorial Day Regatta, a class race that drew boats from all over the Northeast. I took her for a boy as she was shrilly screaming, "Starboard tack! Right of way! Right of way! Starboard! Starboard!"
    I refused to head up, exactly as she later charged. At the last second, she fell off, and I took the mark ahead of her, to come in sixth out of more than fifty. She came in eighth, and lodged a protest with the race committee. Her protest was promptly overruled. Where was the collision?
    Only at the hearing did I discover that my deadly rival was a girl. I went up to her and apologized, saying that had I known, I would certainly have given way—and she nearly spit at me. Later, at the commodore's ball, I asked her to dance. After blatantly looking me over and tossing the raven hair I had not seen before, she accepted. When she came down to the beach with me, after the band had packed its instruments, I teased her that she clearly wanted to be with a man to whom she could yield, but while feeling superior. She did not find my remark funny in the least, because to her, she said, the inability to rightfully ram another boat broadside was no virtue. She regretted falling off. So where was superiority? It was a point I conceded in all sincerity, realizing that this girl was something new.
    We talked for hours, sitting on the sand, staring at the stars. When I said good night, we kissed, and kissed again. Much later, she told me that I knew nothing of a woman's readiness to yield, since she had already chosen to be with me for life, and would have made love right then on the beach had I only pressed. How she took delight, after that, in teasing that I was more timid on sand than on water. All I knew was that with this fierce girl I felt complete for the first time in my life, and I was not about to risk losing that.
    Although we had made our home together in the apartment on Central Park West, and though we continued to spend weekends at her family compound on the North Shore of Long Island, most of my