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various adventures, but he was never too exhausted to ogle—as she knew and as Flap knew too. They were all one another’s best friends and had been for three years, and they inspired one another to heights of talk they were otherwise seldom inspired to; still and all, there were romantic nuances in the friendship, and the fact that Danny had gotten married didn’t seem to affect the nuances at all. No one with a grain of sense expected his marriage to last, or even to count particularly. He had married on a typically feckless impulse, and it might have already stopped lasting, for all she knew.
    The fact that Danny had actually managed to get his novel published seemed more astonishing to Emma than the fact of his marriage. It was an equivocal, ambiguous thing, and her mindnibbled at it while her legs grew hot from the sun. Almost everyone she knew had hoped at one time or another to become a writer. It had been Flap’s only ambition when she first met him. She herself had written fifteen or twenty vague, girlish short stories, but she had never let anyone see them. Most of their college friends had poems or short stories or fragments of novels secreted away. Danny even knew a janitor who wrote screenplays. But Danny actually was a writer, and it made him different. Everyone treated him as if he weren’t quite a normal person, or the same as they were. It was probably true, and Danny probably knew it was true, but it bothered Emma a little. She was the only person, so far as she knew, to treat him as if he were the same as everyone else, which was why they were such special friends. But being married to Flap and treating Danny as if he were the same as everyone else weren’t simple things to combine, she had discovered. Areas of the friendship and areas of her marriage had become almost all nuance.
    The sun got too hot to sit in pleasantly, and she scooted back into the shade of the eaves to brood about it. While she was waiting for Danny, Flap appeared. It didn’t surprise her. She knew perfectly well that he could feel her thinking about things. He opened the screen door about a foot and looked at her with no great friendliness.
    “What about breakfast?” he asked. “Are we married or aren’t we?”
    Emma kept sitting in the shade. Only her toes were in the sunlight. Her toenails were getting hot. “I don’t think you should bully me,” she said, not moving. “No one was awake to cook breakfast for, so I didn’t cook it yet.”
    “Okay, but Dad and I are leaving after a while,” he said. “You don’t want to send me off on an empty stomach, do you?”
    “I didn’t know you were leaving,” she said quickly. “I don’t really want to send you off at all. Why are you leaving?”
    Flap was silent. He was in his underwear and couldn’t come out on the porch.
    “You didn’t tell me you were leaving,” Emma repeated. “Why didn’t you say something about it last night?”
    Flap sighed. He had hoped she would be cheerful about it so he wouldn’t have to feel guilty for two days, but it had obviously been a forlorn hope.
    “Well, we wouldn’t buy a new boat and not go try it out, would we?” he asked. “You know us better than that.”
    Emma pulled her toes in out of the sun. She had been extremely happy for a few minutes, with just herself and the warm boards and a few vague thoughts of Danny. It was such happiness to be alone on her porch that she had been quietly expecting the whole day to be complete delight. Perhaps warm boards and cool shade were the best parts of life, after all. Flap had only to open the screen door to tip everything out of kilter again. All the life that went on in the house itself came out on the porch, and Emma felt cornered. She also felt angry.
    “I didn’t know I married Siamese twins,” she said. “Can’t you two go anywhere without one another?”
    “Now don’t start that,” Flap said.
    “No, you’re right, why should I?” Emma said, getting up. “I