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me company.
    Andrew and I started out briskly but we hadn’t reached the top of the first hill before he suggested a rest. We climbed onto a rock from which we could look down onto the bay and the hotel. We could even see you and Peter, sitting on the terrace.
    “Kate, there are things I ought to explain,” Andrew began.
    “I don’t much like explanations,” I said.
    “Why?”
    “They diminish things so.”
    “There’s nothing to diminish,” he insisted. “There’s nothing between Peter and me, at least as far as I’m concerned.”
    “How unfortunate for Peter,” I said.
    “And for me,” he said. “I don’t enjoy it. I didn’t realize it until this trip. I didn’t know him very well. We were drinking one night in Paris and just decided to go—very casually. It wasn’t until the first night… I should have pulled out right then, but I didn’t want to hurt him. Now, I don’t know what to do. Sometimes it seems to be perfectly all right with him. Then it’s just terrible. I get fed up. I think I’ll leave, and then I’m afraid to leave him.”
    “So you asked us to join you.”
    “Yes, but not just because—”
    “It’s reason enough,” I said.
    “You don’t like to be involved, do you?”
    “I don’t like being on the edgy edge of things like this, no.”
    “And Esther doesn’t even know what’s going on. She doesn’t even see that Pete’s indifferent to her.”
    “He’s not, in the way she cares about,” I said.
    “But why would a woman…?”
    “Are you a little jealous?” I asked.
    “Don’t be silly,” he said too quickly.
    “All right, but let’s go,” I said, getting up.
    “Wait a minute, Kate. Why do you always run away?”
    “To keep from hurting people who aren’t bright enough to protect themselves. I’m not interested—in the way you care about. It’s a ridiculous situation for you, isn’t it? But why do you choose two people like Peter and me?”
    “Peter and you?” he asked. “You’re not—you and Esther aren’t—”
    “No, Esther has nothing to do with it, except that she seems to have your talent for picking the wrong companions.”
    “I wish we could talk. I wish we could talk until I understood. I always pretend to, but I don’t. It’s as if I’m always into a conversation at the place where it ends. In two weeks I know practically nothing about you, and you don’t know very much about me, either. We’re a couple of strangers marooned with an issue. Why don’t we ever really talk, Kate?”
    But we didn’t talk. He talked, first about his father, the kind of self-made man who must then make other people in his own image. Andrew was his only son, whose interests he both indulged and raged about. Languages, social anthropology, and painting were all so much bullock shitting nonsense. Andrew should be in engineering or at least in business school if he hadn’t any real aptitude. In another five years he would be expected to take over the family millions.
    “It’s just my luck not to have a younger brother—better still to be a younger brother. Then I could be given to charity.”
    “Second sons go into the Army,” I said.
    “A third son then, assigned to killing off dragons in Alberta.”
    Andrew could not help sometimes suspecting his own rebellion, for it did not include giving up the family millions. He saw himself as something of a scholar, a traveler, a collector. He could live simply enough, as he did now and as he had when he stayed for a time in a monastery in India, but he could not have endured such a life if it were not a free choice. He wanted the freedom of money, and he wanted the power of money.
    “There’s something weak about a poor man, something distasteful.”
    In the next sentence he began to speak of Peter, at first with kindness but gradually with impatience.
    “Will a man like that ever really paint, really accomplish anything? He’s beginning to talk about leaving Paris, moving down here where it’s