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among the trees, over the cooling sand littered with the remains of fires and picnics past, voices could be heard. A bottle popped as it broke on a rock. There were almost twenty people on the river this afternoon, but except for the cars ranged along the sand-flats on the opposite bank, there was little sign of them. They had retired to escape the heat, to neck, to drink. By now their activities were all but enveloped in a drowse of silence.
    Sandy rolled to her back, wriggled against him. Her hair had collapsed into a stringy mass. Most of her makeup was gone, save for a blotch at the corner of her right eye, as if she had been weeping tar. He licked his finger and cleaned it off. Her face was broad and childlike, her mouth wide and thin-lipped and supple. But what took him aback just now were her eyes, gazing at him with such unguarded affection he had to look away.
    “Think we’ll get married?” she said.
    “ Married ?” he said, suddenly grinning.
    “I don’t mean now , but maybe —” Her finger traced something on his bare arm. “You know — someday.”
    “I got university,” he said.
    “I could work, help put you through. Lots of gals do that for their guys.”
    Her “gals” bothered him. As her makeup bothered him, her too-bright clothes. Sandy might live on the Island too, but their families couldn’t be more different. He thought of her house: the ugly wallpaper, the mess of clothes that never seemed to get cleared up, the absence of books, of decent music.
    “How do you know lots of girls do that?”
    “I read about it,” she said, sulking. “I do read , you know.” She gave him a little shove. But what she read mostly were romances with titles like April’s Summer and Ann Masterson’s Only Choice . He had tried to get her to read something more serious — James Joyce’s Dubliners , Churchill’s history of the Second World War — but she hadn’t got very far with them. “Not really my style,” she’d said, handing his volumes back. “I’m not as smart as you.” She said it happily, as if her lesser intelligence were a relief.
    “I don’t know,” he said, after a while. He meant he didn’t know about getting married. In fact, he’d known as soon as she raised the subject that he wasn’t going to marry her, if he got married at all. But he was being vague to avoid hurting her. It was the one thing he could give her to make up, at least a little, for the imbalance in their feelings for each other: the solicitous tenderness of the guilty.
    “We’d have our own place,” she said. Her fingertips were moving up and down his arm, brushing the blond hairs against his skin. “Our own bedroom .”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “Where we could … you know.”
    Her eyelids dropped, and he glimpsed in marriage possibilities —a silky intimacy — that was more than they had known. They had not made love, not fully, not in the way he craved, and now, in thewebbed crotch of his swimsuit, flattened against the warm rock, things were beginning to happen.
    “Tell me more,” he said, looking at her.
    “Well, you know,” she blushed. He had run up against her natural modesty. When they made out in the Biscayne, she kept her eyes closed.
    “You make it sound pretty good.”
    “It would be good.” There was play in her gaze now, he had never known her to be so openly seductive.
    “Why don’t you kiss me?”
    Her mouth had never yielded such softness. All he could think of now was what her kiss promised for later, at the rapids. He kissed her again. Between his body and the rock, a second, tubular rock had materialized.
    “So what do you say,” she said cozily, as if the matter was all but decided. He was amazed at how tenaciously she could hang on to her original idea.
    “Will you show me tonight?” he said. “What being married to you will be like?”
    “Bad boy!” she said, slapping at his arm.
    “But will you?”
    “Bad boy,” she said, pushing at him.
    He hung his head: he liked