Sex would be fun, Rosemary thinks. Rick would be fun. He’s grown a little plump and more suburban, but he still laughs well. He’s surprisingly nervous, she knows. He has an acid stomach and hand rashes. He’ll ever be married and bored with good Charlotte. He’ll ever be attracted to Rosemary, or to a woman like Rosemary, who won’t be true to him. But he’s boyish, self-deprecating, fun. And he knows how to get into making love.

Rosemary would like some fun. She’s generally pretty happy but she’s often too responsible. Thinking about it, she can only remember a few days in her life that she can call purely fun. The first wasn’t just a day; she remembers a full week of it. When she was seven. When she and her brother Hank were the only children of her parents, two years before the twins. Their family of four went with another family to the shores of Lake Winnepesaukie, in New Hampshire. They had a cabin right on a pier which stretched out over the crystal clear water, and the kids were free to run down that pier and jump into the lake any time of the day. Rosemary remembers swimming underwater as long as her breath held out, opening her eyes to that fresh cool water, scanning the sea of big boulders on the lake bottom. Her father called her a mermaid when she surfaced with her seal-sleek head and sparkling eyes. He called her a pearl fisher when she brought him little treasures from below. She remembers her dad so happy that week. He was usually too busy being a father and an architect to laugh. But that week he joked around with his friend Jim. They smoked cigars together. They played tricks on their wives. They drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and carved birch walking sticks for the kids. They hooked arms and danced around the cabin porches, singing. Rosemary had never seen her father carefree before. And she who with her brother Hank was so closely monitored by parents, she’d never felt so free herself.

She remembers another purely fun occasion: her brother Hank’s wedding. She was with her second husband Ray then, when Hank married her friend Carol. That night, Rosemary danced with Ray, and Rosemary had fun. She and Ray could really move together, fighting a bit for the lead, pulling and swinging one another so hard that their armpits ached pleasantly the next morning. They danced so well that the rest of the wedding guests backed up into a circle around them and applauded when they were done.

Ray was usually an uptight man, very high energy and nervous. He had a lot of responsibilities and he took them with military seriousness. He was a suburban patriarch. Rosemary used to say that Ray couldn’t relax without losing consciousness, and the one time that wasn’t true was when Ray was dancing like they did that night. Dancing hard and knowing they’d have good sex later. Ray relaxed. Rosemary felt so free she laughed with joy.

That was ten years ago. Ray and Rosemary have been divorced for six. Rosemary’s thoughts shift back to Rick. Should she or shouldn’t she? She doesn’t consider his wife Charlotte. Rosemary and Rick had an affair 20 years ago, when she was with her first husband, and their antics didn’t have anything to do with their marriages. Her time with Rick was sideways-time: sweet warps out of their normal workaday/parental/marital schedules, when they only paid attention to each other, when they only had to be perfect for a set little amount of time. Why not? It was fun…