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game that this self liked to play, and in which Liza Hatter had joined to the best of Tristan’s recollection, a game
that involved leaving the brights on and drinking from a whiskey bottle, kept always under the seat for this purpose, each time another driver on the lonely highway flashed them, which was often enough that Tristan felt fairly dizzy by the time they pulled off the highway and onto the road to the lake house.
    The details of the ten-mile drive from the turnoff to the lake house at Garfield Bay presented themselves to Tristan’s memory more clearly, as if in moving closer to the event things became sharper due to their proximity, like a kind of foreshadowing, or maybe just the opposite, that the event itself in its startling vividness had shone a light backward over the preceding hour. Even now, warming up for dart night at the 321, thinking about how Russell Harmon had been in the john for such a long time and what sort of drugs he had in his possession and whether he might be willing to share, because something like that might help him relax, he could recall the sight of the lake that night as they drove, visible through the cedar trees, sparkling with moonlight. He could recall also how the night had turned colder, how the wind curled in through the open window and helped to sober him as he took the winding turns, how from the stereo Mick Jagger had sneered his way through “Midnight Rambler.” And he could recall the conversation then, too, or not so much his own words, if there had been any, but Liza Hatter spilling out her life to him as she had been for the last three hours, poor dizzy Liza Hatter, dumber than a post, dumber even than Russell Harmon with his dart league and his score sheets and his puffed-up pride in his trivial abilities.
    Liza Hatter, he recalled, had talked for several minutes about her plans to switch her major to veterinary science. She had
already begun to take courses in preparation for the switch, and although she was sure she’d made the right decision because she just loved animals so much , she had been disturbed by a class in which her professor dissected a dog, and Tristan hadn’t felt much but disdain for her at the time, disdain for her squeamishness at the opening of the sternum and the examination of the viscera, disdain for her sentimentality and lack of professional rigor, for her teary-eyed assertion that “this was someone’s best friend, this was once someone’s little puppy.” It seemed pretty nigh hopeless for Liza Hatter ever to become a veterinarian, but he allowed her to believe in his sympathy and understanding even while he was starting to hate her a little. And yet this conversation came back to him now daily, hourly, with a kind of poignant irony.
    They arrived at the lake house. They carried their things inside. He searched through his parents’ CD collection, which wasn’t much to shout about, and put a Ray Charles disc in the player, the old Ray Charles stuff from the time when he still wrote his own songs and hadn’t yet become a clown. He showed her around the house, listened to her ooh and aah at the view of the lake from the tall windows, a view that he could have appreciated more himself if he’d been in the house alone. They sat out on the deck and drank beer and Liza Hatter scooted in close to him and kissed him and he lit a cigarette, because he didn’t want to kiss her then, was still finding her slightly repugnant, even despite the perfume she’d dabbed on in the upstairs bathroom.
    It was her idea to go skinny-dipping. He agreed reluctantly, bored, bored, bored with the predictability of the suggestion but agreeing to play along, and preparing himself already for
the iciness of the water at this time of year, an iciness that he knew would surprise her and probably send her swimming frantically back to the dock as soon as she dived in, so that he could escape for a few minutes and swim out into the lake alone.
    They stripped at