Sid is thinking:

Everybody is gone, and the house feels so empty. How beautiful the ocean is with the sun going down in the distance.

I want to make love to Dorothy tonight. I thought about it while I watched her across the room, talking with her nieces and nephews.

When she danced with me I thought that tonight is our honeymoon night. So many years that we spent apart.

We danced together. I felt her familiar body through the thin cotton wedding dress, and I remembered how many years we were together in spirit but not in the sharing of our lives.

For so many years in the mornings I woke up alone.

Woke up alone. But almost every morning I walked to North Beach for coffee. There was usually someone I knew there, someone to talk with. Art, life, politics.

Tomorrow we leave for Flannagans Hill where there are no coffee houses within walking distance.
(the following morning lying in bed)
The luxury of lying in bed until noon after a memorable night is a pleasure I wish that Dorothy understood. But she is not here with me.

I imagine she is walking on the beach stopping to pick up shells. She is putting them in the pockets of her blue jeans. They are rolled up, and she is walking barefoot in the water. her hair tied back the way she wears it in the morning. While I lie here in the warm bed.

Dorothy is thinking:

Thank God the guests are gone! Tomorrow we leave for the mountains.

It is not as if this is the first time Sid and I have spent the night together. Yet this is different. Honeymoon night. Our age. What difference does it make? None whatsoever. Yet I feel as if I have waited all my life for this night.

Surprising. Not unhappy alone and always worried that if Sid and I...if this ever happened, I would lose the solitude so necessary for my work. This still worries me. Yet there is an elation. A happiness I did not know existed. As if the years of unacknowledged grief gnawed at my soul, and I responded with unending work. Every painting the center of my life while I was working on it. The time between painting. Empty. And then suddenly there is room for something else. This time with Sid we never had this. Yet not a loss of painting. Rather an opening of a part of my heart closed for so long. And still the painting continues. It too inseparable from my life.

(the following morning walking on the beach)

Such a beautiful morning. Feel of cold sea water on my bare feet. Sound of the waves going in and out.

Each shell lodged in the sand of interest. Have already picked up a few. A sand dollar, beautifully patterned as if etched by a renowned printer -- must remember to remove it from my pocket.

The sand -- always a question of whether to represent each grain individually or to see the whole as a shimmering field beside the ocean. Every painter seeing this differently.

Sid still sleeping. The temptation to wake him up always so hard to resist. For me, lying in bed after the sun is up is impossible.