It was while he was eating breakfast that Charles Douglas glanced at his newspaper and saw the date. He took another bite of toast and looked again and put the paper down.

"Oh, my God," he said.

Alice, his wife, startled, looked up. "What?"

"The date. Look at it! September fourteenth."

"So?" Alice said.

"The first day of school!"

"Say that again," she said.

"The first day of school, you know, summer vacation's over, everyone back, the old faces, the old pals."

"Would I what?" he asked, in the dark, lying there easily, looking at the ceiling.

"You heard me," she said, lying there beside him with similar ease, holding his hand, but staring rather than looking at that ceiling, as if there were something there that she was trying to see. "Well. . . ?"

"Say it again," he said.

"If," she said, after a long pause, "if you could fall in love with your wife again . . . would you?"

"What a strange question."

"Not so strange. This is the best of all possible worlds, if the world ran the way worlds should run. Wouldn't it make sense, finally, for people to fall in love again and live happily ever after? After all, you were once wildly in love with Anne."

We were walking along the boardwalk in Ocean Park one summer evening, arm in arm, my friend Sid and me, when we saw a familiar sight on one of the benches just ahead, not far from the surf.

"Look," I said, "and listen."

We looked and listened.

There was this old Jewish couple, he I would say about seventy and she maybe sixty-five, moving their mouths and hands at the same time, everyone talking, nobody listening.

"I told you more than once," he said.

"What did you tell? Nothing!" she said.

Very late on this night, the old man came from his house with a flashlight in his hand and asked of the little boys the object of their frolic. The little boys gave no answer, but tumbled on in the leaves.

The old man went into his house and sat down and worried. It was three in the morning. He saw his own pale, small hands trembling on his knees. He was all joints and angles, and his face, reflected above the mantel, was no more than a pale cloud of breath exhaled upon the mirror.