The Pacific shimmers a radiant electric blue and the wind rustles our hair. Crystal has put the top down on the red Nissan 350Z roadster. The engine sings a sweet harmonic note as we trace the tight curves of the Pacific Coast Highway.

“Speed under control,” she says to me, her dark sunglasses reflecting the horizon. The bare skin on her shoulders is the color of vanilla ice cream. “You learn how fast you can push it. I had this Yamaha R6 for a time; I took it to Laguna Seca. There’s nothing like hitting a curve at seventy and feeling the bike respond underneath you.”

In the meadow to our right, stud horses stand in uffish thought, meditating upon the silver-white waters below them. We fly past them like wind.

“I did love Anthony at one time,” she said. “I was in Reykjavik, he was in Boston. We kept in touch with e-mails and Internet chat messages. I didn’t speak the language. And through the ones and zeros I found a sympathetic voice. We wrote to one another. First it was once a day… ‘how’s your day been’ and that sort of trivia. Then we started to discuss our favorite books, our philosophies, our childhood memories, and ultimately, our darkest sexual fantasies.”

“Hey, watch –” I said. A rental truck whooshed by, swerving a little. Crystal had veered into the left lane. Crystal gave me a look of subtle reproach, then continued.

“Three years after I was married to him, I met Blaine. He worked in the cubicle next to mine. With him, in person I felt something I never felt with Anthony. I knew we were going quickly, but it was my choice to do so.”

Coyote brush, sage scrub, strawberries, roses; a thousand scents pass us in a microsecond. Crystal checks her rear view mirror and gently touches the accelerator. The tachometer tweaks and the engine changes key.

“I broke up with Blaine in April. He had already decided to divorce his wife. Monday mornings, I see him at the coffee maker and nod politely. We’re civil to one another. I don’t regret anything and neither does he. The break was a clean one.”

I decided to change the subject. “Do you still ride your bike?” I asked.

“I crashed my bike a few months ago. Took a turn at Thunderhill a little too fast. A fracture in my ankle. It swelled up larger than my kneecap. I couldn’t walk for a few weeks after that. But you know something, John?”

Crystal kicked the accelerator and the little car howled like a nest of bees: ninety, one hundred. An indicator on the tachometer flashed.

Crystal dropped her sunglasses and showed me her dark eyes. “You have to push it,” she said, smiling gently at me. “You have to learn what’s possible and what’s not.”

Amanda has a supersweet languorous smile, and conversations always stall when she enters a room. She has laser-beam hazel-green eyes, full of attention and sense; whatever they focus on warms perceptibly. Her hair, long and soft, is a living part of her body, and she flicks and flows it like a filly flirts with her mane. At night, when my renegade brain ticks away, unsolving and unresolving dilemmas of money and unwork, there’s always the warm flesh of Amanda, spooning against my back and touching me, holding me. She calms me, addresses me, makes me sane.

Amanda, Mandy to friends, is far smarter than you or I. If I’ve lost something about the house, my wallet or my guitar capo or my open can of soda, I’ll ask her, and her terabit brain ticks for a picosecond and she says, “Why, on top of the mantle, sweetie,” and there my wallet or my guitar capo or my open can of soda will be. Her ability to do this, repeatedly and perfectly, gives me no end of cheap entertainment. It’s the perfect parlor trick.

Mandy sings, only for me, in a copper-plated alto. Unlike me, she remembers all the words to any song, and we’ll sometimes spend Saturday nights on the couch, with my guitar eviscerating random rock songs, and Mandy will plug into her vast mental library of throwaway-music lyrics, and we’ll joyously and raucously sing for an hour or two. Our great friendship smoothes the rumpled folds of our bed sheets, and so I consider our California king-size a place of refuge, or a nest. With a glass or two of cheap Merlot in her, she’ll forget to forget, and she can see her own sultriness reflected in my shining eyes.

She tells gentle blue jokes, twisting her tongue to the side of her ample lips in a punctuation mark of irony. I have never, in my fourteen years of association with her, known her to be spiteful or cruel to any living thing. She is a fine wife, a gentle and sweet and intelligent wife. I love my wife; more than that, I like her.

Adam’s Cardinal is winging us into a dazzling sunrise. Over his shoulder I read airspeed 110 knots, heading 40. He trims the pitch a fraction of a degree by flicking his thumb. You can practically hear the organic chemistry in his brain: pitch level vertical horizon freq pitch NAV1 pitch set VOR squawk 1200 level throttle pitch correct.

I look at the dashboard of N30304. The blue vinyl has cracked and withered from years of wind and sun. The gas gauge has a bit of masking tape on it. Adam has manually recalibrated the gauge so when the gauge says half full, it?s really got a full tank. The plane is almost exactly as old as me. The engine farts and growls and picks us up.

“We’re going to be plenty early getting to the RZ camp,” he says. Adam is thin and sharp featured, and his voice is soft and staccato. He speaks in the clipped, precise grammar of the Silicon Valley alpha geek. “We have the time and fuel. Would you like to try some maneuvers?”

“Maneuvers? As in loops and rolls?” I ask.

“Sure,” says Adam. “I’m instrument rated. I’m legal to fly in all sorts of meteorological conditions. That?s where the VFR pilots get themselves into trouble. They get into a cloudbank, and then their inner ears tell them they’re flying straight and level. And they get out of the bank and the earth and the sky have switched places, and they’re doing a slow spiral towards earth. Bad news, most definitely.”

“Sounds like bad news,” I say. “Hey, is that the Great Mall of America down there?”

Adam tips the airplane thirty degrees to the right and looks over my shoulder. My nose hits the windshield and I let out a syllable.

“No, that’s not the Great Mall,” he says, righting the plane.

“You’re not really going to do any rolls, are you?” I ask.

“Darn, I forgot to secure my bag in back. Can?t roll right now. But you know, the Cardinal is quite a stable plane for other sorts of maneuvers.” Adam pushed in the throttle and the engine reduced speed to a low rumble. “Now, consider this low-speed flying situation. You see that our air speed is reduced to ninety. Now eighty. And there it goes, that’s the stall alarm, you hear that warning horn? And so you don?t have enough lift on the wings, and so the plane quite literally falls out of the sky–”

My heart hits my chin. The vertical speed indicator shows we are dropping at fifteen feet per second. In ten seconds, we drop twenty-five stories.

Adam gingerly pushes the throttle. The Cardinal coughs and clutches at the air. The airspeed picks up to one hundred.

“Adam, I’m actually a bit afraid of flying?”

“Oh, me too,” said Adam. “I don’t like to do the dangerous stuff. I’m a total wuss.”