Unlike Sylvia, Katie had no mixed feelings about putting out. She walked into school on a Monday with a giant hickey on her neck and Gabe Thrush on her arm. Sylvia watched the two of them walk through the double doors, practically oozing postcoital smugness, and felt as snubbed as Katie’s nose. That was in April, just before they all found out about who got in where. Since Sylvia was no longer speaking to Katie or Gabe, she had to hear the good news from Mrs. Rosenblum-Higgins, their largely ineffectual college counselor—wasn’t it just great, going to Brown with her friends? They were friends, weren’t they? It was that weekend that Sylvia went to the party and got too drunk, that weekend when all the photos were taken, that weekend when Facebook exploded and she considered ratting out someone in the Mafia just to be put into witness protection.

The car did another shimmy, as if threatening to go on strike, and Joan turned abruptly up another steep hill—the road had no guardrails, no fences, nothing separating them from plunging to their depths if Joan had to suddenly veer.

“How far are we, Joan?” Sylvia asked. The scenery outside the car’s windows looked much the same—sunny and bright, with houses the color of rustic pottery. They passed a field of gnarled and twisted trees, their branches heavy with enormous lemons.

“Deià is a few kilometers more. We are nearly there.” Joan was dressed down, in a simple cotton T-shirt, but he was still wearing his cologne. Sylvia could smell it from the backseat. She thought about Gabe Thrush trying to wear cologne, standing in the middle of a crowded floor at Macy’s, getting spritzed by hundreds of overeager young saleswomen, and laughed. If either of them tried to get anywhere near her in those lonely first days of college, she would set them on fire in their sleep. They didn’t deserve her. No high school boy did. She was better than that, Sylvia knew, bigger and better and ready to shed her skin like a snake.

“Good,” she said, arranging herself as sexily as possible in the backseat. “I’m sure my mom has to pee.”

The house was just past Deià proper, on the road that led out of town. It had been a museum for just half a dozen years, but like many writers’ homes that are open to the public, great pains had been taken to make the house look little changed since Graves’s prime. If anything, newfangled items had been removed and replaced by their earlier counterparts, so that the house felt like something of a time warp, still punctuated by the clacking of typewriter keys instead of laptop computers. Jim admired the simplicity of the house, which was like most others in the area, a pale stone building with curved brick doorways and cool floors. They’d somehow beaten the native Mallorcan and the girls, and were already wandering around the small museum’s grounds. A friendly woman led them around the two halves of the wide plot, pointing out the highlights of Graves’s impressive garden. The heavy floral smell of jasmine floated over the bright faces of the zinnias and the massive tangles of bougainvillea. Charles fancied himself a naturalist and bent over to fondle the colorful leaves of the violets and the cosmos.

“I would kill to have a garden like this.” Even at their summer house in Provincetown, they had only window boxes. In the city, their apartment overlooked the Hudson River, but the patio was dark most hours of the day, pointing as it did into the cold backs of several taller buildings.

Lawrence laid a hand on his shoulder. “We could always move out of the city for real. Buy a bigger place on the Cape. Less dunes, more dirt.” He could so easily picture Alphonse staggering among the planters, picking a tomato with his chubby baby hands. That was the kind of parent Lawrence wanted to be: encouraging and adventurous. Let the baby play in the dirt, let the baby explore.

“Please,” Jim said. “Good luck getting him out of there.” For a moment, Lawrence thought he meant the baby, but no, of course not. He looked toward Charles, relieved that their limbo status was still a secret. It was probably the way straight couples felt in those first tender weeks of pregnancy, when the egg and sperm had mingled but were so vulnerable that they might not take.

There was a hooting noise at the front entrance, and then a loud laugh as Franny scrambled up the shallow incline toward them. “Are we all moving here?” she asked. “Because I don’t think I can do that drive again.” She kissed Charles on the cheek, as if it had been weeks since she’d seen him last. “Poor Joan had to deal with us screeching and praying the entire time.” She turned around and winked at Joan and Sylvia, now a few feet behind her.

“Would you like the tour of the house?” the docent said kindly, perhaps wanting to hurry them out of the way. Franny puffed out her lip and nodded enthusiastically, as if Robert Graves had been her favorite writer for her entire life and she could hardly believe her luck, being on this sacred ground. It was one of the things that drove Sylvia the craziest about her mother, the mad look on her face when she wanted someone to think she was paying special attention. The woman led the adults through to the house, and Joan and Sylvia followed behind.

When they were enough feet away from her parents that they wouldn’t be able to hear her, Sylvia said, “I’m sorry about my mother.”

“She’s not bad,” Joan said. “My mother is a little, eh, too.” He wiggled a hand by his ear, the universal sign for crazy.

Sylvia couldn’t imagine Joan having a crazy mother, let alone a mother at all. Or a father. Or ever needing to use the bathroom. Or blowing his nose. He stepped aside to let her follow the group into the house, and she got a mouthful of his cologne, which, mixed with the garden jasmine, made her breath catch in her throat. Joan was too much, a water fountain in the middle of the Sahara, a long-shot horse winning the Triple Crown. She couldn’t take it. Sylvia hurried toward Charles and took his hand, elbowing Lawrence slightly out of the way.

They looked at the sparse living room, the kitchen with its gorgeous AGA stove, the pantry full of British cookie tins, their bodies crowding together in the roped-off sections of the floor. They trooped upstairs and looked at offices that could have been abandoned long enough to fetch a cup of tea. They marveled over the tiny bed, where Graves had successively slept with two wives and a mistress.

“Can’t be the same bed,” Charles said. “No woman would accept that.”

“This is not Manhattan, dear,” Franny said. “I don’t think there’s a mattress store on the corner.” She swiveled around, looking for the docent, but the woman had left them to their own devices. “I guess we’ll never know.”

“What do you think, Joan?” Franny said, making eye contact with the tutor. “Have you been here before?”

“On a school trip, yes,” he said, nodding. “We learned one of his poems, ‘Dew-drop and Diamond.’”

“Do you still know it?” Franny pumped her hands together, beckoning Joan toward her. He squeezed through the doorway, past Jim and Charles and Lawrence, until he was standing in the very center of the room, his body pulling the caution rope taut. “Go on,” Franny said, “go on. I just love poetry.” Sylvia shrank backward and stared at a spot on the floor.

“‘She like a diamond shone, but you / Shine like an early drop of dew . . .’ That’s in the first part, I think. What is the word, stanza?”

Joan closed his eyes for a moment, running the words over again in his mind. “Yes, that’s how it goes.”

Franny reached out and grabbed his biceps. “Good Lord, boy.” She let go and fanned herself. “Is anyone else getting warm?” She looked up at Jim and had a sudden flash of the girl, that stupid girl, and felt her cheeks get even warmer. She let go of Joan’s arm.