“Jesus!” Conrad says.

“Close the door,” she says.

“How did you get in here?”

“You’re not like the rest of them,” Deborah says. She’s still in her bridesmaid’s dress but she’s not wearing any shoes. She’s very drunk. “I can see you, you know,” she says. “You should give up trying to be one of them because you’re not.”

He’s starting to get an inkling of what this is all about. She’s not what he usually considers attractive, but on the other hand sometimes life puts something in your path that may never show up there again.

“You deserve something special,” she says. Something in him chafes at this self-satisfied Mrs. Robinson routine. But he’s in no position to call her bluff; she does know at least that much about me, he thinks. She lifts up her bridesmaid’s dress; if she was wearing something underneath it earlier, she’s not anymore. She has a piercing that actually makes him wince. He is still young enough to immediately amend a mental checklist of sexual phenomena he has or has not seen.

“Close the door,” she says. “Come on. Quickly.”

“Aren’t we related now?” he asks.

“Get on your knees,” she says.

“Jesus Christ!” he says, and he gets on his knees.

In the ballroom an actual fight breaks out. One of the dishwashers has come out of the kitchen and told Sam to leave the young waitress alone; she’s reached the end of her shift but is now so afraid to leave the hotel, because she knows he’ll follow her outside, that she’s in tears. Sam throws the first ridiculous punch, but the real damage is done when he’s backing away in self-defense and falls right across the bar, smashing glasses and bottles alike. The women have long since removed their shoes, and so as a safety measure they climb up on the tables and continue dancing there. The band hasn’t had this kind of contact high in years. They play until the moment they stop getting paid, and then they play three more songs, and then the night manager comes in and threatens to pull the plug. It would be really punk to tell him to go fuck himself, but they have another job here next month.

So the music stops, and the bar is closed, and the lights are all turned on because the night manager has had all the complaints from upstairs he can take; but there are still twenty or thirty people in and around the ballroom, drunk, tired, euphoric, young, beautiful, sweaty, dressed up and on someone else’s nickel, and determined-as who wouldn’t be?-to remain all those things forever. When the ballroom is locked they take over the lobby, and when they’re chased out of the lobby they take it upstairs to their rooms. Dawn seeps around the drapes. They pass out on one another’s floors, across one another’s beds, refusing to part, sealing their legend.

At the bed and breakfast eight blocks away Cynthia, in a t-shirt and shorts, is propped up by pillows on the huge four-poster bed, some librarian’s idea of a honeymoon bower; she strokes her husband’s hair as he sleeps with his head in her lap. He didn’t even make it out of his clothes. She’s not disappointed. Sex is no novelty; being exhausted together, being each other’s safe place-that’s what tells you you’ve found what everybody’s always whining about searching for. The air conditioner hums. Tomorrow they will fly to Mexico, and when they fly back to New York Cynthia will be pregnant. When she figures that out, she will wonder again what she is wondering right now: whether it’s true what the priest said-that God gives each of us only what He knows we can handle-because, all her life, things have come at her very fast.

TIME ADVANCED IN TWO WAYS at once: while the passage of years was profligate and mysterious, flattening their own youth from behind as insensibly as some great flaming wheel, still somehow those years were composed of days that could seem endless in themselves, that dripped capriciously like some torment of the damned. There were two full weeks, for instance, between the end of the children’s summer camp and the beginning of school. Cynthia started out full of ideas, but after the zoo, the aquarium, the Children’s Museum, the Circle Line, and the other zoo, there was still a week to go. And then came the rain.

Two days since they’d set foot outside the building and April and Jonas, who were six and five, could not find anything to do, separately or together, that didn’t devolve into a death match within ten minutes. Cynthia sat at the kitchen table with a magazine and listened to them yelling in their bedroom. An only child herself, she had no experience with this kind of fighting; she took it too much to heart, which was why she was trying her best to stay clear of it now. She had a tendency to lose her own patience and end things by punishing them both indiscriminately in the name of fairness. In spite of which they were now raising their voices on purpose to try to get her to intervene. Then there was some kind of a snapping sound, and Jonas started howling, and Cynthia was out of her chair like a shot and by the time she’d come out of their bedroom again she had told them there’d be no more TV that day, a stupid, spontaneous decision she knew would hurt them but that would really wind up hurting her because it was not even two in the afternoon and they were not going outside and the day would now pass about three times as slowly for all of them.

The kitchen faced back into the building’s air shaft, a column of rain. Through the blur she could see the other kitchens in the building, most with their lights off. Cynthia and Adam had hired three nannies in the two years after Jonas was born but they had no luck there at all; one took eighteen sick days in the first two months, and one was so out of it the doors of a city bus once closed with her on the outside and the children on board, though the other passengers had started yelling before the driver could pull away. And when the third one, whom they all loved, quit without notice to return to the Philippines, April was so upset that she’d come into their bed every night for two weeks. So Cynthia, who was down to part-time at work anyway, decided to try it herself for a while, because she just couldn’t put them through that anymore. Childhood was not supposed to be about loss. That was three years ago now.

April came out of the kids’ bedroom after a while and leaned against her mother’s upper arm.

“Still raining?” she said in a weary, grown-up voice. Cynthia nodded and laid her cheek on top of April’s head.

“No playground today, sweet potato,” she said. “What shall we do instead?”

April sighed thoughtfully. Her face was thinning, where her brother’s was still round as a ball, and she had her father’s small mouth and sharp eyes. She could read pretty well for her age and so Cynthia closed the Vogue she was looking at and laid it face down on the table.

“Want to play Go Fish?” April said.

Jonas got wind of it; April tried to discourage him from joining them by making up complex new rules, which wasn’t fair, and Cynthia said “of course he can play” just to forestall that awful whining note in their voices, the note that got in under her defenses and made her own voice turn scary. She could see it in their faces whenever this happened-they were like a mirror at her weakest moments-and then she would end up miserable after they had gone to bed, Adam rubbing her back with a pointlessness that only made things seem worse.

Jonas’s hands were small and at one point he dropped his cards on the table. “That’s a nine!” April said.

“No it’s not,” Jonas said as he gathered them up again.

“I asked you if you had any nines and you said go fish!” she said hotly. “Mom!”

“You did not,” Jonas said, “and anyway that’s a six. And it’s cheating to peek at other people’s cards, that’s what Mom said. Cheater.”