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could see it was really two. None of the lovers below on the beach seemed ashamed that they were loving each other in public. Even if the night had been a disguise, fifty feet away on the sand there was always another couple as oblivious and occupied as the first. They were the poor from the crowded mountaintop favellas , and the not quite so poor from the Copacabana slums, taking the only real pleasure they had; and they were the young romantics who liked to make love on a moonlit beach, and some of them were wealthy drunks who had wandered from a party and were not quite sure how they had arrived on the beach at all. It was a night for love. But every night in Rio was a night for love.
    Behind her, she heard Bert walking barefoot out of the bathroom and pausing to turn down the sheets of the bed. She went back into the room and smiled at him, full of love and secret excitement, and went quickly into the bathroom. She had taken a bath before they went to the party, but she wanted to take another one, quickly, quickly. She turned the cold water tap on full and poured in a handful of lemon-scented bath salts, because she knew it was a fragrance he liked. Waiting for the tub to fill, Helen brushed her hair, looking into the mirror at her eyes, which seemed to have become all pupil, great and dark. She would not take off any of her make-up. She loathed the idea of being one of those wives who come to their husband’s arms bristling with curlers and shiny and pale with cold cream. How could anyone bear that?
    The bath water was slightly tan from the rusty pipes, but she had learned to ignore that, and when she had dried herself she dusted her body with powder, quickly, quickly, and once dropped the puff into the sink by accident because her hands seemed unable to hold on to anything in this moment. She kept a bottle of the lemon-scented cologne in the medicine cabinet and splashed it on her shoulders, her breasts, the insides of her thighs, and left it standing uncapped on the sink.
    The bedroom was dark, but moonlight made objects stand out in gleaming silhouette. He was lying on his back, covered only by the sheet, lying very still. Helen walked quietly to the bed on bare feet and slid under the sheet beside him. He did not move. She raised herself on one elbow and looked down at his face, illuminated by the whiteness of the moonlight. His eyes were shut, shadowed, and the dark semicircles his joined eyelashes made did not even quiver under her cool breath. He was breathing deeply and softly, the otherworldly breathing of the dreamer in his first secret hours of sleep.
    Oh, no, darling, Helen thought, no; wake up, wake for me. She tried to will him awake by looking into his face, remembering that somewhere she had heard it was possible to awaken children and lovers by watching them as they slept. He only sighed and slipped deeper into his dream. On the table next to his side of the bed Helen saw that he had turned his little clock so he could see the face when he awoke. She looked at the illuminated hands with loathing, changing them in her mind into time itself, all the hours of her days and nights, marked off and rigid and ritual.
    She moved away from him then and lay on her side of the bed, listening to the tiny ticking of the clock and the sound of Bert’s even breathing. Why is a man always able to fall asleep so much more quickly than a woman? she wondered. She turned on her side, trying not to waken him. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark so that she could see everything in the room clearly. She did not like to sleep naked, so after a while she got up and took her nightgown out of the closet and put it on, and then lay down again, and waited for sleep.
    Lying tensely in the dark, she was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of loneliness and futility. She remembered what she had thought earlier that evening watching Margie and Neil: I’m glad I have a happy marriage. It’s always going to be there … always