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as we waited, “you’ve deliberately dramatized this.” But nothing could fleck the happiness widening within me, to capture the dying light.
    The Pingrees had brought swordfish and another, older couple—the man was perhaps an advertising client. Though he was tanned like a tobacco leaf and wore the smartest summer playclothes, a pleading uncertainty in his manner seemed to crave the support of advertisement. His wife had once been beautiful and held herself lightly, lithely at attention—a soldier in the war of self-preservation. With them came two teen-age boys clad in jeans and buttonless vests and hair so long their summer complexions had remained sallow. One was their son, the other his friend. We all collected driftwood—a wandering, lonely, prehistoric task that frightens me. Darkness descended too soon, as it does in the tropics, where the warmth leads us to expect an endless June evening from childhood. We made a game of popping champagne corks, the kids trying to catch them on the fly. Startling, how high they soared, in the open air. The two boys gathered around Linda, and I protectively eavesdropped, and was shamed by the innocence and long childish pauses of what I overheard: “Philadelphia … just been in the airport, on our way to my uncle’s, he lives in Virginia … wonderful horses, super … it’s not actually blue, just bluey-green, blue only I guess by comparison … was in France once, and went to the races … never been … I want to go.” Margaret and Jenny, kneeling in the sand to cook, setting out paper plates on tables that were merely wide pieces of driftwood, seemed sisters. The woman of the strange couple tried to flirt with me, talking of foreign places: “Paris is so dead, suddenly … the girls fly over to London to buy their clothes, and then their mothers won’t let them wear them … Malta … Istanbul … life … sincerity … the
people …
the poor Greeks … a friend absolutely assures me, the CIA engineered … apparently used the NATO contingency plan.” Another champagne cork sailed in the air, hesitated, and drifted down, Jimmy diving butmissing, having misjudged. A remote light, a lightship, or the promontory of an unmapped continent hidden in daylight, materialized on the horizon, beyond the shushing of the surf. Margaret and Jenny served us. Hamburgers and swordfish full of woodsmoke. Celery and sand. God, sticky with things he had spilled upon himself, sucked his thumb and rubbed against Margaret’s legs. Jimmy came to me, furious because the big boys wouldn’t Indian-wrestle with him, only with Linda and Cora: “Showing off for their boyfriends … whacked me for no reason … just because I said ‘sex bomb.’ ”
    We sat in a ring around the fire, the heart of a collapsing star, fed anew by paper plates. The man of the older couple, in whose breath the champagne had undergone an acrid chemical transformation, told me about his money—how as a youth just out of business school, in the depths of the Depression, he had made a million dollars in some deal involving Stalin and surplus wheat. He had liked Stalin, and Stalin had liked him. “The thing we must realize about your Communist is that he’s just another kind of businessman.” Across the fire I watched his wife, spurned by me, ardently gesturing with the teen-age boy who was not her son, and wondered how I would take their picture. Tri-X, wide open, at 1 / 60 ; but the shadows would be lost, the subtle events within them, and the highlights would be vapid blobs. There is no adjustment, no darkroom trickery, equal to the elastic tolerance of our eyes as they scan.
    As my new friend murmured on and on about his money, and the champagne warming in my hand released carbon dioxide to the air, exposures flickered in and out around the fire: glances, inklings, angels. Margaret gazing, the nick of a frown erect between her brows. Henrietta’s face vertically compressing above an