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front of my body against some kind of holy moonlit wonder. I had been dragging myself through the days attached to a burlap sack full of bad history, of mourning, and somewhere in Diem Bo I had cut it loose. It was trying to reattach itself to me at that moment, but I wouldn’t let it. I was going to have one night of not feeling bad, no matter what happened with this girl.
    I went back to treading water, my body turned away from the boathouse. Janet stopped floating, and treaded water, too. Her hair was slicked down on both sides of her face.
    I edged over a bit closer: “I have towels at my place. I’ll make tea. You can take a hot shower.”
    She coughed and coughed and said, “You didn’t do that on purpose, did you?”
    “Absolutely and completely not.”
    “Alright. I’m done being angry.”
    “Good,” I said. “I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you with the hot shower and the tea.”
    “Well, I’ve never been propositioned before in the middle of a river. It’s very romantic.”
    Blue lights blinked behind us, scampering across the water. Before I could turn around she said, “The good news is the boat hasn’t floated away. The bad news is there are two policemen on the dock shining flashlights.”

6
    T HERE WAS NOTHING TO DO but swim back to the dock, climb out, and stand dripping and shivering on the boards.
    “Nice night for a dip,” one of the officers said sarcastically. He was a BU policeman, portly and jowly, with big fleshy hands, one of which was wrapped around a three-foot-long flashlight. He was looking at Janet’s chest. Behind him, also looking at Janet, was a state trooper in his gray Stetson. When she’d been out of the water a minute or so, Janet had a terrible coughing fit, by far the worst of the night. She walked off to the side of the dock and spit loudly there, which only made me feel worse than I already felt. I was showing the officer my somewhat out-of-date, damp, Boston University Alumnus ID and explaining about my key, my very good friend Coach Florent, and our arrangement. But it is not easy to appear respectable when your clothes are dripping. And, to complicate matters, the officer was acting tough and all-business in front of the state trooper—making his mouth stern, glaring at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows, and so on.
    When Janet came back she put her arm inside my arm and said, in the direction of the trooper, “Allen?”
    “It’s the governor’s girl,” he answered, not very nicely. “What’s this, a stunt to get votes?”
    “No, a first date.”
    “Another in an endless series,” the trooper said.
    I looked at him then. The BU cop looked over his shoulder at him, and Janet was looking at him, and for a little empty stretch of seconds no one said anything. There had been a splash of meanness in his voice, and so much naked hurt that I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed for him or angry. Backlit by the boat-house lights he was still mostly standing in the shadows, his face and the whole front of him in the river darkness, big shoulders, big arms, a big neck, a posture of pure aggression.
    I don’t like aggressive people. And when I’m even a little upset, I tend to say things without thinking about them first. So I said, “Why don’t you do something useful and get her a towel instead of making remarks?”
    “What’s that?” the trooper demanded, though even with the gentle knock and squeak of the dock hinges and even with the cars humming past on Memorial Drive, there wasn’t a chance in a thousand he hadn’t heard me.
    “There are towels inside. Why don’t you get her one instead of making remarks like that?”
    It was a very hard look he fixed on me then. I looked back at him. The boathouse lights made a small fuzz at the edges of his shoulders. “Pass that over,” he said to the BU cop, and he took my ID and marched up through the bays. We could hear his boots on the steps, then the heavy wooden front door slamming