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would a drunk. “You’re crazy,” I said.
    “I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you since the night I found you in my bed.”
    “How could you marry a woman who reminded you of New Jersey?”
    “You know I’ve never worked better.”
    I thought about his working, the dozens of pages, the continuously stained fingers.
    “It’s all your doing,” he said.
    “You’re wrong,” I said. “You were ready to write these poems.”
    “You let me forgive myself. You gave this to me.”
    “No I didn’t.”
    Thomas had on a blazer, his only jacket, a navy so dark it was nearly black. His white shirt seemed luminescent under the
     street lamp, and my eye was drawn to the place where his shirt met his belt buckle. I knew that if I put the flat of my hand
     there, the fabric of the shirt would be warm to the touch.
    “I’ve only known you for a month,” I said.
    “We’ve been together every day. We’ve slept together every night.”
    “Is that enough?”
    “Yes.”
    I knew that he was right. I put the flat of my hand against his white shirt at the belt buckle. The shirt was warm.
    “You’re drunk,” I said.
    “I’m serious,” he said.
    He pressed toward me, backing me insistently into an alleyway. Perhaps I made a small and ineffectual protest. In the alley,
     the tarmac shone from the wet. I was aware of a couple, not so very unlike myself and Thomas, walking arm in arm, just past
     the narrow opening of the alley. They glanced in at us with frightened faces as they passed. Thomas leaned all of his weight
     against me, and put his tongue inside my ear. The gesture made me shiver, and I turned my head. He put his mouth then on the
     side of my neck, licking the skin in long strokes, and suddenly I knew that in that posture he would come — deliberately —
     to show me that he had become helpless before me, that I was an alchemist. He would make of this an offering of the incontinence
     of his love. Or was it, I couldn’t help but wonder, simply the abundance of his gratitude?
    I am trying to remember. I am trying hard to remember what it felt like to feel love.
    I enter the building with the tall, arched windows and shut the door behind me. I follow signs upstairs to the library. I
     knock on an unprepossessing metal door and then open it. The room before me is calm. It has thick ivory paint on the walls,
     and heavy wooden bookshelves. The feeling of serenity emanates from the windows.
    There are two library tables and a desk where the librarian sits. He nods at me as I walk toward him. I am not sure what to
     say.
    “Can I help you with something?” he asks. He is a small man with thinning brown hair and wire glasses. He wears a plaid sport
     shirt with short, crisp sleeves that stick out from his shoulders like moth’s wings.
    “I saw the sign out front. I’m looking for material on the murders that took place out at the Isles of Shoals in 1873.”
    “Smuttynose.”
    “Yes.”
    “Well… we have the archives.”
    “The archives?”
    “The Isles of Shoals archives,” he explains. “They were sent over from the Portsmouth Library, oh, a while ago. They’re a
     mess, though. There’s a great deal of material, and not much of it has been cataloged, I’m sorry to say. I could let you see
     some of it, if you want. We don’t lend out materials here.”
    “That would be—”
    “You’d have to pick an area. A subject.”
    “Old photographs,” I say. “If there are any. Of people, of the island. And personal accounts of the time.”
    “That would be mostly in diaries and letters,” he says. “Those that have come back to us.”
    “Yes. Letters then. And photographs.”
    “Have a seat over there at the table, and I’ll see what I can do. We’re very excited to have the archives, but as you can
     see, we’re a bit short-staffed.”
    I have then an image of Thomas with Adaline and Billie. Each has a vanilla ice-cream cone. The three of them are licking the
     cones, trying to control