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yourself by wondering. Because that’s all it’ll ever be. Just wondering.” Melody’s smooth brow crumbled into a frown. “I can’t always do that. I can’t always not think of Carson.”
     
    Instead of the trial-by-wife Trish had expected, the celebration at Foster’s yacht and tennis club was painless. Thank the bubbly. Père Champagne anointed even the most conservative lady. No less than Blanche Twerbly burst into song. Though straight-haired and WASPy, she nonetheless passably sang “Empty Bed Blues,” to husband Phil’s grand astonishment and, as the light dawned, growing embarrassment. Another hidden, adulterous tale from the naked suburbs, Trish thought, glad it was theirs, not hers. She already had too many secrets.
    Foster made a speech of thanks to his crew and praised his yacht, the Emerald Lady. He stood six-four, hair thinning as he shoved hard at forty. The metal-rimmed glasses that winked as he gestured looked out of place on a face so tanned by sea sun. His long, wiry hands were rough from sailing duties. Trish felt great tenderness for him, marveling that the two of them should have come together and clicked—she the wandering one, so recently settled into respectable business, he a well-off middle sibling who bred English mastiffs for pleasure and played yachtsman. Foster could have done nothing, thanks to his heaps of stocks and bonds, but everyone in his family understood that while work might not be necessary, idleness was unacceptable. His older brother ran a brokerage house in New York. His younger sister imported South American fabrics to her Dallas boutique.
    When the party broke up Foster led Trish outside. The moon was out, the June night warm. They strolled toward the marina, where masts swayed to the beat of tides and current. They climbed the gangway to the deck of the Emerald Lady. Answering both their unspoken desires, he kissed her. She eagerly welcomed his taste and the grainy scent of his after-shave. His lips’ parting sounded dim melancholy chimes in the cathedral of her mind. The sensuous side of their relationship hadn’t gone that well. She was entirely to blame. Having surrendered so totally to Carson, she found she couldn’t let herself go at all with Foster. It was as though some vital gear in her erotic clockwork had lost teeth from rough use.
    Foster’s reaction to her hesitancy was confusing. The couplings that she considered inadequate seemed to satisfy him. So she worried about the breadth of his experience. The problem was that Carson had conditioned her to certain physical expectations—though she wanted with all her heart to dislodge them. Yet she wondered now and then if Foster could satisfy her that way. Did she really want him to? When she tried haltingly to communicate her anxieties he seemed to comprehend too readily, making her think that he was failing completely to understand. She had perhaps naively hoped that these matters of intimacy would work themselves out before September fifteenth. Now she wasn’t so sure.
    The moon rose higher. The Emerald Lady stirred against her moorings like a restless cat. She brought him up to date on her mother and wedding plans.
    He laughed, a nice deep chuckle that always delighted her. “If she had more to do, she wouldn’t be so busy with your life,” he said. Trish knew he was fond of Marylou. In gloomier moments she thought the man understood her mother better than she.
    Their conversation wound around, then he said, “Lois called again, ears sharp for sounds of divisiveness between us.”
    “Do you have to talk to her?” Trish said.
    “She’s a hard person to discourage.”
    “Sometimes I think you could try harder.”
    “We kept company formally for four years. Casually for maybe a dozen before that. We go back. Just the same, she knows it’s all over between us.”
    “Lois Smith-Patton isn’t the kind to give up,” Trish said. Lois was a predatory divorcée who reminded Trish of a