“Too early in the day. But I want to take you to dinner tonight, if I may. Somewhere along the coast.” “I’d like it very much.” “Do you know of a place?” She suggested several. Then we went inside and she showed me a room where I might change into my bathing suit; we were to swim. We walked through the trees to the main road on the other side of which the beach glowed white in the sun. It was deserted at this point although, in the distance, other bathers could be seen, tiny figures black against the startling white, moving about like insects on a white cloth. For a time we swam contentedly, not speaking, not thinking, our various urgencies (or their lack) no longer imposed upon the moment. At such times, in those days, I was able through the body’s strenuous use to reduce the miserable demands of the yearning self to a complacent harmony, with all things in proper proportion: a part of the whole and not the whole itself, though, metaphorically speaking, perhaps that which conceives reality is reality itself. But such nice divisions and distinctions were of no concern to me that afternoon in the sun, swimming with Iris, the mechanism which spoils time with questioning switched off by the body’s euphoria. And yet, for all this, no closer to one another, no wiser about one another in any precise sense, we drove that evening in silence to a restaurant of her choosing on the beach to the north: a ramshackle place filled with candlelight, the smell of tar, old nets: “atmosphere” which was nearly authentic. After wine and fish and coffee, we talked. “Clarissa is bringing us together.” I nodded, accepting the plain statement as a fact. “The matchmaking instinct is, I suppose....” “Not that at all.” Her face was in a half-light and looked as it had when we first met: pale, withdrawn, all the day’s color drained out of it. Above the sea, Orion’s belt dipped in the deep sky. The evening star all silver set. We were early and had this place to ourselves. “Then what? Clarissa’s motives are always clear, at least to herself. She never does anything that doesn’t contribute to some private design ... though what she’s up to half the time I don’t dare guess.” Iris smiled. “Nor I. But she is at least up to something which concerns us both and I’m not sure that she may not be right, about the two of us, I mean ... though of course it’s too soon to say.”