“What do you think?” Connie asked, gazing at the rings arrayed on velvet.

“I don’t know,” he said from his little cloud of regret. “They all look good.”

“Pick them up, try them on, handle them,” the jeweler said. “You can’t hurt gold.”

Connie turned to Joey and searched his eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I think so. Are you?”

“Yes. If you are.”

The jeweler stepped away from the counter and found something to busy himself with. And Joey, seeing himself through Connie’s eyes, couldn’t bear the uncertainty in his own face. It enraged him murderously on her behalf. Everybody else doubted her, and she needed him not to, and so he chose not to.

“Definitely,” he said. “Let’s take a look at these.”

When they’d selected their rings, Joey tried to bargain down the price, which he knew he was supposed to do in a store like this, but the jeweler merely gave him a disappointed look, as if to say: You’re marrying this girl and you’re quibbling with me about fifty dollars?

Leaving the store, the rings in his front pocket, he almost collided on the sidewalk with his old hall mate Casey.

“Dude!” Casey said. “What are you doing here?”

He was wearing a three-piece suit and was already losing his hair. He and Joey had drifted apart, but Joey had heard he was working in his dad’s law office for the summer. Running into him at this moment seemed to Joey another important sign, although of what, exactly, he wasn’t sure. He said, “You remember Connie, right?”

“Hi, Casey,” she said with fiendishly blazing eyes.

“Yeah, sure, hi,” Casey said. “But, dude, what the fuck? I thought you were in Washington.”

“I’m taking a vacation.”

“Man, you should have called me, I had no idea. What are you guys doing on this street anyway? Buying an engagement ring?”

“Yeah, ha ha, right,” Joey said. “What are you doing here?”

Casey fished a watch on a chain from his vest pocket. “Is this cool or what? It used to be my dad’s dad’s. I had it cleaned and repaired.”

“It’s beautiful,” Connie said. She bent over to admire it, and Casey shot Joey a frown of inquiry and comic alarm. From the various acceptable guy-to-guy responses available to him, Joey chose to produce a sheepish smirk suggesting mucho excellente sex, the irrational demands of girlfriends, their need to be bought trinkets, and so forth. Casey cast a quick connoisseurial glance at Connie’s bare shoulders and nodded judiciously. The entire exchange took four seconds, and Joey was relieved by how easy it was, even at a moment like this, to seem to Casey a person like Casey: to compartmentalize. It boded well for his continuing to have an ordinary life at college.

“Dude, aren’t you hot in that suit?” he said.

“My blood is Southern,” Casey said. “We don’t sweat like you Minnesotans.”

“Sweating is wonderful,” Connie offered. “I love sweating in the summer.”

This obviously struck Casey as a too-intense thing to say. He put his watch back in its pocket and looked down the street. “Anyhow,” he said. “If you guys want to go out or something, you should give me a call.”

When they were alone again, in the five o’clock flow of workers on Sixth Avenue, Connie asked Joey if she’d said the wrong thing. “Did I embarrass you?”

“No,” he said. “He’s a total dork. It’s ninety-five degrees and he’s wearing a three-piece suit? He’s a total pompous dork, with that stupid watch. He’s already turning into his dad.”

“I open my mouth and strange things come out.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you embarrassed to be marrying me?”

“No.”

“It kind of seemed like you were. I’m not saying it’s your fault. I just don’t want to embarrass you around your friends.”

“You don’t embarrass me,” he said angrily. “It’s just that hardly any of my friends even have girlfriends. I’m just kind of in a weird position.”

He might reasonably have expected to have a little fight then, might have expected her to try to extract, via sulking or reproach, a more definitive avowal of his wish to marry her. But Connie could not be fought with. Insecurity, suspicion, jealousy, possessiveness, paranoia-the unseemly kind of stuff that so annoyed those friends of his who’d had, however briefly, girlfriends-were foreign to her. Whether she genuinely lacked these feelings, or whether some powerful animal intelligence led her to suppress them, he could never determine. The more he merged with her, the more he strangely also felt he didn’t know the first thing about her. She acknowledged only what was right in front of her. She did what she did, responded to what he said to her, and otherwise seemed wholly untroubled by things occurring outside her field of vision. He was haunted by his mother’s insistence that fights were good in a relationship. Indeed, it almost seemed to him as if he were marrying Connie to see if she would finally start fighting with him: to get to know her. But when he did marry her, the following afternoon, nothing changed at all. In the back of a cab, as they rode away from the courthouse, she wove her ringed left hand into his ringed left hand and rested her head on his shoulder with something that couldn’t quite be described as contentedness, because that would have implied that she’d been discontented before. It was more like mute submission to the deed, the crime, that had needed to be done. The next time Joey saw Casey, in Charlottesville a week later, neither of them even mentioned her.

The wedding ring was still stalled somewhere in his abdomen as he breasted through the churning warm sea of travelers at Miami International and located Jenna in the cooler, calm bay of a business-class lounge. She was wearing sunglasses and was additionally defended by an iPod and the latest Condé Nast Traveler. She gave Joey a once-over, head to toe, the way a person might confirm that a product she’d ordered had arrived in acceptable condition, and then removed her hand luggage from the seat beside her and-a little reluctantly, it seemed-pulled the iPod wires from her ears. Joey sat down smiling helplessly at the amazement of traveling with her. He’d never flown business-class before.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing, I’m just smiling.”

“Oh. I thought there was some schmutz on my face or something.”

Several men in the vicinity were checking him out resentfully. He forced himself to stare down each of them in turn, to mark Jenna as claimed. It was going to be tiring, he realized, to have to do this everywhere they went in public. Men sometimes stared at Connie, too, but usually seemed to accept, without undue regret, that she was his. With Jenna, already, he had the sense that other men’s interest was not deterred by his presence but continued to seek ways around him.

“I have to warn you I’m a little grouchy,” she said. “I’m getting my period, and I just spent three days among the ancients, looking at pictures of their grandkids. Also, I can’t believe it, but they make you pay for alcohol in this lounge now. I was like, I could have sat in the gate area and done that.”

“Do you want me to get you something?”

“Actually, yes. I’d like a double Tanqueray and tonic.”

It seemed not to occur to her, or, fortunately, to the bartender, that he was under age. Returning with drinks and a lightened wallet, he found Jenna with her earphones in again and her face in her magazine. He wondered if she were somehow mistaking him for Jonathan, so little was she making of his arrival. He took out the novel his own sister had given him for Christmas, Atonement, and struggled to interest himself in its descriptions of rooms and plantings, but his mind was on the text that Jonathan had sent him that afternoon: hope it’s fun looking at a horse’s ass all day. It was the first he’d heard from him since calling him preemptively, three weeks earlier, with word of his travel plans. “So I guess everything’s come up roses for you,” Jonathan had said. “First the insurgency and now my mom’s leg.”