“Certainly not the way I’ve made love to you.”

She laughed, and turned in her seat to face the dashboard again.

After a few minutes, she said, “I would like to know all the different ways you’ve made love to all the different women you’ve made love with.”

“Too bad.”

“You’ll never tell me?” She was smiling, teasing.

“Nope.”

She yawned and tilted her seat farther back. “Only Americans say ‘nope.’”

“Of course. It’s an Americanism.”

They rode in silence for a while. “Do you feel like doing something tomorrow?” she asked. “Maybe it would be good to go out somewhere.”

“Mmm. I’ve got a couple of things I have to read. But one’s a revision, so it won’t take all that long.”

“I thought we could go to the cinema, maybe. And then dinner?”

He looked over at her. She looked very . . . particular, he would have said. She’d pulled her hair back and pinned it into a careless kind of chignon when they got in the car. It made the strong lines of her face—her nose, her large heavy-lidded eyes—seem more prominent. He had never been with a woman he found as beautiful. He said, “Only Frenchies say ‘cinema.’”

“That’s simply not true.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “Elegant people the world over say cinema.”

“Nope. Not in the U. S. of A.,” he said. “Mooovies.”

She swatted him lightly on the arm and settled deeper into her seat, wiggling her butt a little— as if getting comfortable on a nest, he thought. They rode in the sound of the onrushing car for a few minutes. She said, “I’m going to sleep, I think. Whether I wish to, or not.”

“Good.” A light rain began to dot the windshield. He turned the wipers on. The view smeared momentarily, then opened again.

After a long moment of silence, she said, “I thought Annie was odd about the ashes.”

“How so?”

She made a face, thinking. After a moment, she said, “Efficient. Oddly efficient, at least momentarily.”

He thought of Annie’s face, turning to look at him when Jeanne stepped toward him and held him. The open sympathy stamped on it, the shared pain. “Well, I think they were—they are—the least important part of everything to her.”

“Mmm.”

“She’s very feeling. I’ve always found her so. She’s much more—tenderhearted, really, than Frieda. Or maybe just more available, emotionally. “ He was remembering how often he had talked to Annie in the afternoons when he got home from high school. Graham would still be at the store, Annie always at the back of the house at that time of day, fixing dinner.

Where was Sarah in this picture? He couldn’t remember. Not there. Or if there, quiet. Irrelevant to him at that age, in any case.

Now he was thinking of one particular afternoon when he’d come to talk to Annie about a beautiful girl, a senior named Lucinda Graver who’d taken him up briefly when he was a sophomore—maybe in amusement at the unlikely situation she was creating: the sophisticated upperclasswoman, the cute but uninitiated underclassman. He had wanted to tell Annie about his feelings for Lucinda, about his anger at Frieda, who had refused to give him permission to go to a party Lucinda was having at her suburban home—refused unless she could speak to Lucinda’s parents about how the party would be supervised.

He had said she couldn’t do this, embarrass him in this way.

She said that in that case, she couldn’t consent to his going.

He was furious with her. No one else’s parents cared, he told her.

He had hated the smugness in her voice when she said, “Well, I do.”

What he had wanted in coming over today was to try to get Annie to take his side, to plead his case to Frieda. Now, as an adult, he could imagine her dilemma, threading her way carefully between his rage and Frieda’s rules. He had said to Annie, “I know you don’t believe it, but I love her. I really love her.”

“Of course I believe it,” Annie said. She had set down whatever she was doing when he came in, calling her name from the front door. She had sat across from him at the table.

He’d pushed it. “I want to be with her, forever.” He’d imagined this, he was recollecting now. He’d driven around then in the poorer parts of Cambridge, picturing himself living with Lucinda—living with her there, in that crummy apartment building—he could get a job, they’d be able to afford it. Or there, in that tiny falling-down house. They could manage somehow, he’d been sure. They’d be together, alone together. And images of sex, which they hadn’t quite had, would descend on him and make him moan aloud.

“Of course I understand that completely,” Annie had said to him all those years ago. “It’s part of why this . . . party, or whatever it is . . .”

“It’s a party,” he’d said impatiently.

“Right. And that’s why—because you love her so much—it’s why it’s just so unimportant in the great scheme of things. You have”—and here she’d lifted her arm and moved it in a wide arc—“world enough, and time.”

A phrase that actually comforted him in the moment. He had remembered it later, all of it, when he came across the Marvell poem in college. He’d laughed aloud then, thinking of the way Annie had reversed the meaning of the thing, with the dreamy, expansive way she’d said the words. A trick, really.

But it turned out that none of this really mattered anyway, because Lucinda suddenly began sitting at lunch with another student, a boarding student this time. Like her.

A senior, like her.

When Lucas confronted Lucinda late one afternoon after a soccer game (November, the dark iron gray of the sky at five thirty before he caught the 6:10 train home, the air raw, the sting of his knee where he’d fallen and skidded on the wet grass during the game, their breath clouding the air between them), she said she was sorry, but she happened to be in love with him, with Eliot. When Lucas started to cry, she said—he could remember it still, the revulsion in her face—“God, Lucas! Get a grip.”

“Well, I suppose I can believe that,” Jeanne said now.

“Hmm?”

“That she is. More feeling, as you say. Though Frieda too is very sad right now.”

“She is. Of course she is.”

“Not so much, of course. She’s often seemed so . . . reserved, to me. You can’t tell what it is that she’s thinking of. Sometimes I think even she doesn’t know. For example, when I told her she would not scatter the ashes with us and she was so angry with me, she wouldn’t admit that.”

“I thought you said she did.”

“No, she didn’t. She was angry, and I knew she was, but she wouldn’t say that to me. I had to be the one to say it—that I knew she was angry—before she would acknowledge it. And even then, she wouldn’t speak of it to me.”

“She . . . she just has trouble, with her feelings.”

He saw his mother in his mind’s eye, tall and bony, unfailingly kind, but cut off from him until it was too late by the unreachable sorrow that had seemed to him a permanent part of who she was.

(When he’d come up to Cambridge to tell her he was going to marry Jeanne, she had spoken to him, finally, but glancingly, about her regrets.

It was late. They’d gone out to dinner—his treat—and they were sitting in the living room of the apartment. Out of the blue she had said, “Here’s my advice to you,” and he thought, Oh, shit.

“Just don’t leave anything on the table.”

He had almost laughed out loud at this slangy language, straight from poker, coming from his tall, dorky mother. She looked like Olive Oyl. She had on multicolored striped socks, he noted then, and shoes with thick, rubbery soles. Who wore such things?

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he’d asked.

“You have to work for what you want, that’s all.” And after a moment, “In marriage.”

“And you did?” He was surprised by his own sharp tone, surprised that even in his happiness with Jeanne, he could still react with this old, familiar anger to his mother.

“I didn’t. That’s my point. I didn’t fight for what I wanted.”

“What do you mean?”

He wanted to hear her say it, that her pain was her own fault. But she stopped then. Her face changed. She said, “Oh, nothing really. It would be unseemly for me to be offering anyone else advice about marriage, so I won’t.”)

“You were so sad,” Jeanne said.

“When?”

“Well, about the ashes, for one thing.”

“Yeah, I was.” He looked over at her. “Because it seemed sad to me. It seemed awful.” He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “That . . . large-spirited person, so big, in every way. Reduced? To white . . . grit? To a few shitty bits of bone?”

Her hand came over and rested on his thigh. His vision was blurred with tears. His throat hurt.

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Do you need a tissue?” she asked. He didn’t answer.

“I have one.” She lifted her body slightly and reached over into the back seat for her purse. She got out a Kleenex, handed it to him.