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eyes.
    I am not, on the afternoon we walk up Ceres Street, or even on the evening I first meet Thomas, a beautiful woman. I was never
     a pretty girl. As my mother once said, in a moment of honesty that I used to resent but now appreciate, my individual features
     were each lovely or passable in themselves, but somehow the parts had never formed an absolutely coherent whole. There is
     something mildly disturbing, I know, in the length of my face, the width of my brow. It is not an unpleasant face, but it
     is not a face that strangers turn to, have to see. As Thomas’s is, for instance. Or Adaline’s.
    Thomas and I do not touch as we walk up Ceres Street. “She seems a pleasant person,” I say.
    “Yes, she does.”
    “Billie likes her.”
    “And Rich.”
    “He’s good with kids.”
    “Excellent.”
    “She has a beautiful voice. It’s interesting that she wears a cross.”
    “Her daughter gave it to her.”
    At the top of the street, Thomas pauses for a moment and says, “We could go back.” I misunderstand him and say, looking at
     my watch, “We’ve only been gone ten minutes.”
    But he means,
We could go home.
    There are tourists on the street, people peering into shop windows. We reach the center of town, the market square, a church,
     a tiny mall with benches. We round the corner and come upon the facade of a tall, brick building. The windows are long and
     arched, multipaned. There is a discreet card in the window.
    “That was an interesting game you were playing with Adaline,” I say, studying the card for a moment.
    “Not really,” says Thomas. He leans in toward the window and squints at the sign.
    “THE PORTSMOUTH ATHENAEUM,” he reads. “READING ROOM OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.” He examines the hours listed. He seems to study the
     card a long time, as though he were having trouble understanding it.
    “Who was the poet?” I ask.
    “Fallon Pearse.”
    I look down at my sandals, which are spotted with drops of oil from cooking in the kitchen at home. My jeans have stretched
     and wrinkled at the tops of my thighs.
    “If any place would have archival photographs, this would be it,” he says.
    “What about Billie?” I ask. We both know, as Rich and Adaline do not, that even a half hour with Billie can be exhausting.
     All those questions, all that curiosity.
    Thomas stands back and scans the building’s height. “I’ll go back and find Adaline,” he says. “I’ll give her a hand with Billie.
     You see if they’ve got what you need, and we’ll meet back here in, say, an hour?”
    Underneath my feet, the ground seems to roll slowly up and away as it sometimes does in children’s cartoons.
    “Whatever you think,” I say.
    Thomas peers into the front window as if he might recognize something beyond the drapes. With a casualness and tenderness
     I suddenly mistrust, he bends and kisses me on the cheek.
    Some weeks after Thomas and I met each other in the bar in Cambridge, we parked my car by the waterfront in Boston and walked
     up a hill toward an expensive restaurant. Perhaps we were celebrating an anniversary — one month together. From the harbor,
     fog spilled into the street and around our feet. I had on high heels, Italian shoes that made me nearly as tall as Thomas.
     Behind me, I could hear a foghorn, the soothing hiss of tires on wet streets. It was raining lightly, and it seemed as though
     we would never make it up the hill to the restaurant, that we were walking as slowly as the fog was moving.
    Thomas pressed in on my side. We had been at two bars, and his arm was slung around my shoulder rather more passionately than
     gracefully.
    “You have a birthmark on the small of your back, just to the right of center,” he said.
    My heels clicked satisfyingly on the sidewalk. “If I have a birthmark,” I said, “it’s one I’ve never seen.”
    “It’s shaped like New Jersey,” he said.
    I looked at him and laughed.
    “Marry me,” he said.
    I pushed him away, as you