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right,” said Marian. “It means I have to move the car seat.”
    “Then leave him here.”
    “You’ll keep an eye on him?”
    “Of course I will. You like to help Daddy garden, don’t you, Roland?”
    Roland did not reply. Marian lowered him over the fence, onto the ground inside the garden. He crawled toward his father.
    “You’ll stop at the liquor store?” John asked.
    “Yes,” said Marian. “What did you decide about beer?”
    “You might as well get a case, so we have it.”
    “What kind?”
    “I don’t know,” said John. “Bass, or something.”
    “I thought I’d stop at Elmer’s and see if they have any tuna or swordfish, and we can grill it.”
    “That sounds fine,” said John. “You’d better go. You don’t want to miss the train.”
    Marian looked at her watch. “I’ve plenty of time. Darling?”
    “Yes?”
    “You won’t hide in the garden all afternoon, will you?”
    “I don’t hide in the garden,” said John. “I work in the garden.”
    “I know. But not this afternoon, all right?”
    “Of course not,” said John. “I’m looking forward to seeing Lyle. When I’m through in here, I’ll get out the croquet set. It’s in the basement, isn’t it?”
    “It should be,” said Marian. “We didn’t play at all last summer.”
    “No,” said John.
    “I’m off, then,” said Marian. “Wish me luck.”
    “What do you need luck for?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. I just want everything to go well.”
    “If you want it to go well, it will,” said John.
    “Are you sure?” asked Marian.
    “Yes,” said John.
    “The weather’s perfect.” Marian looked up at the sky.
    “See? I told you.”
    “But I don’t control the weather.”
    “You don’t? I thought you did.”
    “Get up.” Marian motioned with her hand. “Come here.”
    John got up and walked to his side of the fence. “What?” he said.
    “Nothing,” said Marian. She kissed him, then lay her face on his shoulder. John extended his arms around her, but kept his hands in the air, for they were dirty, and Marian was dressed all in white. He kissed her neck, and then moved his mouth from her jaw to her shoulder. He kept his lips there, in the hollow above her collarbone. “I love you,” he told her, because it was true and because he knew it was what she wanted to hear.

5
    LAURA PONTI WAS SITTING by the pool, waiting for her daughter, Nina, to arrive, and watching one of the female gardeners pick mulberries off the flagstones. The gardeners came with the house, which she had rented for the summer. Her villa, outside Florence, was being renovated, and she had decided to spend the summer in the States, to be near her daughter, who was making a movie in New York. Nina was an actress. She got a lot of roles in what she referred to as “action pictures”; roles in which she invariably bared her breasts.
    Nina had tried to persuade her mother to rent a house in the Hamptons, but Laura refused. She didn’t particularly like the ocean, and she definitely didn’t like the way Americans behaved
when they congregated near it. They tried to be sensual and decadent, two things to which, in her opinion, Americans were not well suited. So she had told the Realtor: just a nice house upstate; and that is what he had found her: a brand-new house, modern, with glass walls and decks and a pool, all surrounded by woods. The people who had built it didn’t have the money anymore to live in it. That was another thing Americans seemed to have trouble with: living within their means.
    The pool was for Nina, an alternative ocean, but she had yet to use it. Every week she called and said they had to reshoot over the weekend so she wouldn’t be able to come up. Nina was in a movie about a serial killer who raised pigeons on the roof of his apartment building. Nina played a prostitute. Nina was thirty, and ever since she was twelve, and had been sent to boarding school in the States, Laura had lost the sense of being her mother.