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bond trading seemed like a huge sham.”
    Dave came home that afternoon with his shirt and pants covered in blood. He couldn’t stop talking about the crash site, and about the attempted suicide on Amsterdam the ambulance had been called to after that, the heart attack victim at Lincoln Plaza. “I’m quitting my job,” he said over dinner. I congratulated him. I thought he was finally going to pursue his dream of being a photographer. When he told me he’d decided to be an EMT, I laughed. I thought he was kidding. You marry someone with certain expectations, certain beliefs about the kind of person he’ll turn out to be. Of course, you never know for sure; it’s always something of a gamble. Usually though, you have a good sense of all the possibilities. With Dave, it seemed like an easier bet than most: he loved photography, he took photos constantly, the walls of his apartment were filled with beautiful black-and-white scenes, each a completely different story.
    Above our bed, there remains a photo he took one summer in the Bronx, of three children playing on a jungle gym. Two of them are upside down, arms dangling. The other child, a girl, stands in the foreground, one hand on her hip; she looks straight into the camera, smiling. After Dave left, I spent hours looking at the photo, trying to imagine how the girl must have perceived the strange man behind the camera, what my husband looked like in her eyes. Now, watching Stacy, I’m struck by the same question: What does she see? Someone a few years older, experienced? Does she look at his ring finger, bare, and realize that he is a man who has lost faith in his marriage? At one point her eyes linger on a faint scar that stretches over the bridge of his nose, and I find myself wondering if, like me, she finds this imperfection attractive, disconcertingly sexy.
    Dave and Stacy spend the meal in private conversation, laughing every now and then at some shared joke while our table companions, a middle-aged couple from London named Winifred and Mack, regale me with long meandering stories about their annual vacations to Alaska and Hawaii. “We went ice-fishing through a hole,” Winifred says, “just like real Eskimos!” Mack nods and says enthusiastically, “On Molokai, we met an actual leper!”
    After dessert, Dave stretches and yawns. “Can’t seem to shake this jet lag. I think I’ll go take a nap.”
    “I’ll come with you,” I say, imagining an afternoon seduction—twisted sheets, sweaty limbs, cries so loud that people passing in the hallways pause briefly to envy our passion.
    “Suit yourself,” he says. I feel something at the core of me shrinking. As he’s leaving, he turns to Stacy. “Why don’t you join us for dinner in Nanjing?”
    She looks at me. “You don’t mind?”
    “The more the merrier,” I say, with as much nonchalance as I can muster.
    “Then it’s a date.”
    After lunch I wander the ship searching for Graham, feeling foolish. What will I say if I see him? I find him standing at the rail in the same place we met last night. He grins. “You found me.”
    Something tells me to walk away, to make some excuse, to stop this thing before it starts, but then I think of Dave and Stacy at lunch, leaning close and laughing. I think of the ease with which he talked to her, while every conversation he has with me seems to be an effort. I think of the woman he meets each month at the café in Chelsea, I remember him carrying her up the cliff from her burning car that afternoon on the Palisades, how she lay limp in his arms like a bride, how he stood on the side of the highway, panting from the climb, looking down at the burned and bleeding woman with something akin to love. I think of how easy it is for him to be unfaithful to me in a million innocent ways, and I take my place beside Graham at the rail.
    The sun has emerged from behind a dark layer of clouds, and the river slides swiftly beneath us. Hills slope away from the river,