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disappointment.
    â€œYou look a lot like your sister,” I said. I tell you, I’d never been funnier.
    â€œOh, she’s prettier than I am,” Betty said, adding artificial coyness and artificial demureness to her artificial smile.
    â€œNot at all,” I said. “You’re a terrific-looking girl.” I admit I wasn’t being exactly brilliant, but you try complimenting a twin.
    We chatted on in that sprightly way a bit longer, and then Betty said, “Well, shall we go?”
    â€œAfter you,” I said, with a little bow. Christ!
    Liz did not reappear, which was just as well. Betty and I strolled along the dark lanes past the quaint old-fashioned streetlights—imitation gas lamps, very pseudo-London—and did not hold hands. How to proceed? Glibness now would not only be out of character for the persona with which I’d saddled myself, but would also be inappropriate for this Senior Prom beauty tripping along at my side. I was here to ball her, not terrify her.
    In point of fact, just why was I here? In order to get away from Candy and Ralph for a while, to some extent. And because the impersonation was a comic challenge that appealed to me. And because I’d suddenly realized I’d always wanted to fuck twins. And because they were rich orphans.
    Let’s not downgrade that final consideration. I’ve never been familiar enough with money to feel contempt for it, so I wasn’t about to kick a girl out of bed for being rich. Money and those who possessed it had always held a certain appeal for me. My one descent into marriage, to a bitch named Lydia whom I’d met in college, had been based partly on the mistaken notion that my bride’s family was well off. A publisher, I’d thought, is a publisher is a publisher; but not, it turned out, when the things published were four weekly newspapers in rural areas of New England.
    So I was here to amuse myself by rubbing against a rich body. Which meant we were now in the seduction scene. Of course. I was the male lead in a Doris Day comedy. Simplicity itself. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. “It’s charming here,” I said.

    A ND THE LADY WILL HAVE the beef stroganoff,” I said.
    The waiter, a slender youth dressed like a musical comedy star, pocketed his pad and pranced away. “I’ve never been here before,” Betty said, looking around in polite approval.
    Neither had I. “I’ve always liked it,” I said. “There’s something … intimate about it.”
    She gazed out across the huge deck polka-dotted with tables, half of them occupied. “Yes, isn’t there,” she said.
    So far tonight I had done everything exactly right, though often for the wrong reason. The boat, for instance. Feeling I couldn’t spend the rest of the summer stealing bicycles every time I visited a Kerner sister, I had this afternoon made an arrangement with a local Fair Harbor teen-ager who possessed a motorboat. For fifteen dollars he would chauffeur me along the bay to Point O’ Woods, wait for me to pick up my date, transport us here to the Pewter Tankard in Robbins Rest, and come back for us at eleven. At that time I would give him a prearranged signal as to whether or not he was to wait for me after returning us to Point O’ Woods.
    Well, I’d prepared all that only because the alternative—assuming no bicycles to steal—was a two-mile walk in each direction. I would not have been in love with that option in any event, but with these awkward glasses confounding me at every step it would have been impossible. Thus, the boat. But now that I was in a seduction comedy, the boat had become the most quintessential of romantic gestures.
    Similarly the restaurant. This was Friday, and my first three dinner choices in Ocean Beach had already been full when I called. But the Pewter Tankard, being slightly off the beaten track—it catered to