"Oh Jesus," Annie said when she heard Miranda shout at Kit. "Oh Jesus," she said when she saw Miranda give him a crack across the face.

"What, dear?" her mother asked, turning from an animated conversation with Lou. "Is something the matter?"

"No, no," Annie said, standing to block her mother's view.

Roberts, who had clearly seen the contretemps, looked up from his chair at Annie standing above him, a pained expression on his face.

The band broke into a rousing rendition of "That's Amore."

"Oh, I love this song," Betty said. "Where's Miranda?" she added, looking around.

Miranda was standing very still beside a glistening cliff of oysters, weeping.

Roberts hopped to his feet. "Would you like to dance, Betty?" And he swept her safely away into the tightly packed crowd of couples.

Kit had whispered to his astonished fiancee, given a bemused smile to his table of gawking friends, and then walked quickly after Miranda, his head lowered the way men walk when they're being arrested. When he reached her, he put his hand on her shoulder. She was crying without moving a muscle, as if she were not personally involved with the tears at all, standing quietly while they made their way of their own accord down her cheeks.

"Miranda, I'm sorry. I should have told you. I know I should have. It's just that things happened so fast. And what you and I had together... it was so much of the moment, wasn't it? But still, I know I should have, well, warned you. But it's been a total whirl." He gave a swift little boyish smile. "I'm going to be in her next movie. Did I tell you that?"

Miranda shook her head.

"You know what that means to me, you of all people. You understand me so well, Miranda. A feature film? After all these years?"

The tears had stopped. Miranda neither spoke nor moved.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

They were blocking the mountain of ice ornamented with its large silver oysters in their large iridescent shells. Several people approached, shifted their feet a bit, then gingerly reached around them to scoop oysters onto their plates.

"I love oysters," Miranda said.

"I know."

She shrugged.

"I'm so sorry, Miranda."

"I know."

Miranda's progress toward her own table was slow, violent, and almost magisterial, her stride measured and regal, her head held high as she pushed aside stray chairs that lay in her path with unthinking, clattering nobility. Annie saw the other diners turning their eyes away, trying not to stare. When she reached her own chair, Miranda kicked that aside, too. It tipped, fell listlessly on its back, and lay with its legs sticking up. Miranda, silent and ashen, was trembling.

Annie took her sister's hand, as much to prevent her from making a further scene as to comfort her.

"Darling, what's happened?" Betty said, returning with Roberts from the dance floor. "Are you all right?"

"Food poisoning," Annie said. The first thing that came to mind. What a Jew I am, she thought, seeing a tray of clams go by.

"Seafood in the desert," chirped Rosalyn. "It's unnatural. Just what my father was saying."

Her father wagged his finger at her. "It shouldn't stink of herring," he said.

Roberts and Annie took Miranda back to the house in Amber and Crystal's golf cart. Miranda got into bed and fell asleep almost immediately. Annie came back to the main house to find Roberts smoking a smelly cigar outside by the pool.

"Does this bother you?" he asked.

Annie shook her head, but he put it out anyway.

"Thank you," she said.

"Bad habit."

"I didn't mean the cigar." She stared up at the bright pulsing stars. Why had she allowed Miranda to talk them into coming to Palm Springs? Why had she allowed Miranda to talk them into going to Westport in the first place? Why did she ever listen to Miranda about anything at all? Her job as the reasonable older sister was to protect Miranda, not to indulge her.

"I'm a lousy sister," she said.

"I don't think this really has much to do with you," Roberts replied softly. "You can't do everything, Annie."

Then the others trooped out from the house through the sliding glass doors, noisy with wine and dancing.

"My housekeeper's nephew was killed by a coyote," Rosalyn was saying. "In Mexico, crossing the border."

"They attack people?" Crystal said. "Oh my God, Amber..."

"Not the animal coyote. Don't you watch CNN? God."

"How is my baby?" Betty asked Annie, looking around for Miranda. Her voice was a little thick.

She must have had quite a few glasses of wine. Just as well, Annie thought. "She's better. She went to bed, though."

"You won't believe who we saw," Rosalyn said. "At Seafood Night, too!"

"Zink!" cried Crystal. "We saw Zink! Kit Maybank, the actor! He's even better-looking in person. I can't believe you know him. Did you see who he was with? Ingrid Chopin? He's moving up in the world. I knew he wasn't gay. In real life, I mean."

"She's about ten years older than he is," Amber said.

"She is not. Jake Gyllenhaal just dropped out of the project she's doing. Maybe Kit Maybank will be her co-star."

"This is so Palm Springs," Rosalyn said happily. "I expect Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford to come through the door any minute."

"Well, there is someone coming," Lou said. "But it's Mr. Shpuntov. Not the Rat Pack exactly."

"Just the rat," Rosalyn muttered.

Roberts gave a short laugh. "Plenty of rats to go around out here."

"There are rats everywhere," Betty said, thinking of Joseph.

"So," Annie said. "And how is our friend Kit?"

"I wish Miranda had been there. He must have been so confused to see us all out of context. I told him Miranda went home with a headache — I didn't want to say food poisoning, it's so unappetizing, and there they all were looking so healthy and sporty and glamorous..."

"What did he say, though?"

"He didn't say much of anything."

"Do you think he's shy?" Crystal asked. "A lot of actors are shy."

"Rats are shy, too," Annie said.

"I just don't care for rats," Betty said, and the party broke up.

"Pssst!" Amber said, waving Annie over, looking furtively around as she did so, then repeating the comic-book sound: "Pssst!"

Amused, Annie walked the three steps to her side.

"Yes?"

"We have to talk," Amber whispered.

"We do?"

"Tomorrow. Ten a.m. Fifth hole. Come alone."

"But what... ?"

"Tomorrow," Amber hissed, then squeezed Annie's arm with sober urgency and was out the door.

Miranda's breathing rose and fell with an easy regularity that belied the crumpled figure arranged across the bed in a tangle of legs and arms and sheets, an arabesque of despair. Alas, this was a world in which a kind and generous and fiery woman could not love in peace. It seemed neither fair nor natural. Then again, when had Miranda ever chosen to love in peace? Miranda found peace banal.

Annie allowed herself to imagine a peaceful love. Two people in a bed. Lovemaking had taken place, of course, wonderful love-making. But that was a while ago. That morning, perhaps. Now it was night. Two people, their heads propped up on pillows. They each read a book. Now and again, one would glance at the other and smile, reach out, perhaps, lay a hand on the other's hand.

Perhaps that was banal. But how luxurious, then, was banality! thought Annie, who had spent so many nights alone in her bed with just the book. To love enough and be loved enough, to love and be loved in such quantities, such abundance that you could squander whole nights in simple companionship — that was a richness she could hardly fathom.

The man in the bed next to her in her imagination was Frederick Barrow, of course. He turned to her with that almost amused blaze of desire, as if he had surprised himself with his own need and intensity, and he took hold of her arms, pinning her to the bed, as he had done in the dark in New York, the smoke detector blinking overhead.

Women in love, Annie thought as she climbed into bed. She gave a rueful smile, thought how little she liked D. H. Lawrence, wondered what Frederick thought of him and if she would ever have an opportunity to ask him. An owl hooted outside the window. Another owl answered it. Annie realized she had never heard an owl in real life before. Was this real life, though? Sometimes her life struck her as a mistake, not in a big, violent way, but as a simple error, as if she had thought she was supposed to bear left at an intersection when she should have taken a sharp left, and had drifted slowly, gradually, into the wrong town, the wrong state, the wrong country; as if she returned to a book she was reading after staring out the window at the rain, but someone had turned the page. The owl hooted again, one owl. It was a beautiful nighttime sound, and she fell asleep.

In the morning, Cousin Lou wanted to take them all out for pancakes. Annie could not imagine how she would escape and be able to keep her secret assignation with Amber until Miranda refused to get out of bed.

"Should I stay and keep an eye on her?" Annie asked her mother. "I think maybe I should."

"Poor bunny," Betty said, kissing Miranda before she left with the others.

If Miranda looked like a bunny, it was the road-kill variety, Annie thought. Overnight her lithe frame seemed to have become merely angular, skeletal. Her cheekbones appeared to have sharpened, to jut coarsely from a gaunt face, while her eyes, her remarkable eyes, sagged with apathy where they once had curved, enigmatic, playful.

"Oh, just please go away," Miranda said to her.

"I'll take a little walk?"

Miranda gave a barely perceptible shrug.

Annie was no golfer and had to Google the country club and study a diagram of the golf course in order to figure out where the fifth hole was and how to reach it from Lou and Rosalyn's house. It was uncharacteristically hot for December. She walked along in the crisp winter sun, the desert outline distinct, legible against the hard blue sky, and wondered what Amber could want.

She did not have long to wait to find out. At the crest of a little green golf hill, as prominent as a general on his magnificent stallion, Amber sat in the yellow golf cart surveying her domain.

The general wore a pink floral-print blouse; nevertheless there was something warlike about the girl's bearing. She dismounted and strode over, her carefully tapered eyebrows drawn together in a purposeful frown. "You're the only one I can trust," she said.

"Thank you," Annie said uncertainly. She wished she had worn a hat. She put up a hand to shade her eyes. "Can we sit in the golf cart? Out of the sun?"

Amber nodded gravely and led the way to the cart.

"Now," Annie said, noting Amber's determined little frown. She thought of her heartbroken sister, her heartbroken mother, her own heartbroken self, and she felt a rush of sympathy for this girl, whatever the problem might be. She put her hand on Amber's tanned arm. "What is it?"

Another golf cart, bearing an older man and woman, puttered by. The couple were pretending to argue, laughing and pointing their fingers at each other.

"We have a friend in common," Amber said.

"We have several."

"I mean another one."

The grass shimmered in the light. Annie waited. Amber had beautiful hands, a short shapely manicure. Annie looked down at her own blunt nails.

"Do you know Gwendolyn Barrow?" Amber asked.

"Gwendolyn Barrow?" What could Frederick's daughter have to do with Amber? "Well, yes, I've met her. Once or twice."

"What do you think of her?"

"I don't really have an opinion, Amber. As I said, I met her just a couple of times. Do you know her?"

"No, not her, but I know someone very close to her. And I know him very well." She pursed her lips and gave Annie a sly look.

"Oh," said Annie. "You're friends with her brother Evan?"

"No, no, not Evan," Amber said. "Freddie."

Amber had rather humid eyes, Annie noticed. Big, moist brown eyes. Like an animal, a hooved animal. "Freddie?"

"The father. Frederick, Freddie."

Annie willed the blush away. "Ah, Frederick. Yes, I know him. I didn't realize you did, too."

Amber pulled her mouth again into the little simpering smile. She tilted her head and, from that angle, caught Annie's eye. "I know him, all right," she said.