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things will be here for just a little while," Levrin assured him. "Gone before your family comes back from the ocean."
    "Good," Josh said.
     
9
     
    THIS WAS THE FIRST YEAR they'd tried this kind of summer vacation, and the first year on Fire Island. Before Jeremy, they'd automatically done everything together, and the first year after Jeremy's arrival they did nothing. Now, it had become necessary to plan some sort of summer vacation that would get the increasingly active Jeremy out of the apartment for at least part of the season. Josh would take his own vacation time in midwinter, as usual, and the family would do something in the Caribbean, but that meant this summer had to be their first extended separation.
    They'd chosen Fair Harbor because it was a summer beach community, supposed to be good for kids, and because they already had some links to the place, two couples who regularly summered there, the Frasers, who were childless, and the Welshes, with daughters, four and six. It was enough of a nucleus so Eve wouldn't be lonely out at the beach during the week. Not as lonely as Josh in town.
    Usually, the trip out from the city on Friday afternoons was a simple pleasure, no matter what the traffic or the weather, because he was on his way to a reunion with Eve. But today everything was different — anxious and unnerving. Today was the day he'd tell her everything, and try to decide, with her, what to do about it all. Driving out, he tested various fantasy conversations in his mind, but everything he imagined himself saying sounded awkward and false.
    "I'm being asked to be a traitor, and if I don't do it they'll kill me." No, he'd have to ease into the story from some other direction, if he didn't merely want to sound like a lunatic. But he had no idea what, neither in the car nor on the ferry.
    There she was on the dock, as usual, waving. He could recognize which bikini was hers by now, and so he could start his own waving from farther out in the channel, and as he did so he realized that telling her his problem could not be the first thing he did out here this weekend. It would have to be the second.
    Yes. She kissed him, and smiled with her eyes that certain way, and said, "Jeremy's with Mrs. Winchell until we pick him up."
    "Good," he said.
     
     
    "The Welshes invited us for dinner," she said. She'd just come out of the shower and, naked, stood in the middle of the bedroom to pummel her wet hair with a large green towel.
    He was half-seated, half-sprawled on the bed. 'Tonight?"
    "Yes, of course." She let her hair alone long enough to peer out at him from inside the towel. "What's wrong?"
    "Wrong. Well…" He couldn't tell her like this, in this situation, but if they were going out to dinner with other people he had to tell her soon.
    She shook her head, lowered the towel, and said, "We'll talk later. I can see something's bothering you. Take your shower and I'll go get Jeremy."
    "No," he said. "Don't get Jeremy, not yet."
    She looked at him. "Why not?"
    "We do have to talk," he said, getting up from the bed. "Just wait. I'll take a quick shower, and then we'll talk."
     
     
    Dressed in khaki shorts and a blue T-shirt, he went out and found her on the back deck, in white shorts and a green halter. She was drinking iced tea. She pointed at it, and said, "Want some?"
    "Maybe later."
    He sat at the rusted white table with her, and looked out at the scrub pines that incompletely hid the neighbors. The houses were too close together here and the vegetation too scrubby, but people made up for it by leaving one another alone. There were people in the houses all around them, but no one could be seen, and nothing could be heard except somebody's electric saw half a block away. The owners did their own carpentry all summer. The rising and falling shush of the ocean sounded in a different way, hardly a noise at all, but always present.
    Eve watched him, a little worried. "You have something to tell me," she said.
    "I've