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the air just inches from his head. “Well, it can always grow back,” Miriam says.
    “All the guys on the team are getting it cut like this now,” O’Neil says. “Some of the girls too.”
    “I think it looks great,” Arthur chimes in. “Very 1962. I think I had one just like it.”
    O’Neil smiles. “See, Mom? That’s the idea.”
    The steakhouse where they usually go will be too packed by now with the parents’ weekend crowd, so they agree to eat at the hotel, taking seats in the bar while they wait for a table. Miriam, pleading exhaustion, orders a club soda, and Arthur his usual Dewars and water; when the waitress asks O’Neil what he wants, he thinks a moment, and then asks for a club soda too.
    “You know, the hardest thing for most of the guys on the team is not drinking,” he says, chewing a mouthful of peanuts from a bowl on the bar. “They catch you, you’re off, no question.” He reaches into the inside pocket of his blazer and produces a photograph. “That’s Sandra.”
    The girl in the photo is younger looking than Arthur expected, and a good deal prettier. The photo is of the two of them, standing arm-in-arm before a brick building that Arthur recognizes as O’Neil’s dormitory. Her hair isn’t brown, as he imagined, but a bright shade of blond that verges on red, a red that reminds Arthur of certain autumn leaves—though the picture, he realizes, was taken months ago, before the summer had gone. The grass at their feet is lushly green, and they are both dressed for warm weather and sunshine, O’Neil in his nylon running clothes, Sandra in white tennis shorts and a T-shirt. On her head, covering most of her hair and dimming her eyes and brow into shadow, she wears a baseball cap—navy blue, with a red
B
for the Boston Red Sox. The way the shadows fall makes Arthur think that the photograph was taken just before sunset, and the two of them are on their way to dinner, or to change for dinner. Sandra is small, the top of her head rising only to O’Neil’s shoulders, and a bright splash of freckles dresses her cheeks and nose, which is button shaped and turned slightly upward as she looks into the photographer’s lens. Arthur knows he should say something about how pretty she is, and when he does, his son smiles with happy relief.
    “Sox fan, I see,” Arthur adds.
    O’Neil shrugs. “I guess. Really, she just likes hats. She’s what you would call a hat person.”
    “She’s in a play?” Arthur asks.
    O’Neil frowns in confusion. “No. Well, she has been, but she isn’t now. What gave you that idea?”
    “You said she had a rehearsal.”
    “Oh. I did, didn’t I.” O’Neil nods. “Actually, it’s a jazz band. She plays the trombone, if you can believe it. You’ll hear her tomorrow night.”
    Arthur laughs at his son’s embarrassment, though he also knows that this is exactly the kind of thing he likes about her. What does anyone like? Freckles, the curve of hair where she tucks it behind an ear, the sound of her voice when she tells a joke, her great, gleaming trombone in its velvet case. O’Neil has had girlfriends before, but this, Arthur knows, is different; he is entering the web, the matrix of a thousand details that make another person real, not just an object to be wanted. Beside him Miriam, looking at the photo, hasn’t said anything.
    “Hey,” Arthur says, “the trombone can be very sexy.”
    “I don’t know how she does it all,” O’Neil says. “There’s field hockey and band. She’s starting this year, so next year she’ll probably be varsity, and she’s on the lacrosse team too. Then, she’s, like, a straight-A student, doubling in bio and English, with all her premed courses on top of it.” He shakes his head, amazed. “Some days it’s all I can do just to get out of bed and go to class.”
    “Seems like she’s a good influence,” Arthur says. “Don’t you think, Mimi?”
    Miriam manages a smile and passes the photo back to Arthur, who