Before leaving for the beach we’d agreed, with sighs of grateful relief, to indulge our mutual disinclination for sleeping in the same bed with anyone; the bed at the condo has a mattress too soft for her lingering back injury from her last job, so she asked to sleep on the couch.  I’d wanted the couch, because I also hate the mattress, but as a gentleman and as a good host, of course I let her have the couch.  At two in the morning she crept into the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and whispered into my ear: “You have to get up and look outside.”

Mildly irritated though I was by being awakened, I was suitably astonished at the panorama outside the window — the sea was flat and calm in a windless night, and the full moon cast a silvery veil over the water. 

“The ocean looks smaller in the moonlight, doesn’t it?” she said.  “It’s not as impersonal.  I almost feel like I could understand it, looking at it like this.”