It was inauguration day, and our state's new governor stood on the platform and waved. My husband was his second cousin, and we sat in a section cordoned off with red ribbon.

There were snipers with binoculars on the parapet of the state capitol, and I looked up and wished I could make a sudden movement, see if they were paying attention, but my husband had his arm through mine. A tether. "You look great," he said, and kissed the top of my head.

The governor was being sworn in by a judge who was a boyfriend of mine when I was in college. Now we were forty-six, married, with daughters in high school. I tried to catch his eye when he looked my way, but my sunglasses were on. He'd studied pre-law in my dorm room, while I wrote my term papers, the imposed quiet like foreplay before the foreplay.

A helicopter circled overhead looking for a car that didn't fit in with the traffic flow and I wondered how we looked from the air, this crowd of well-wishers, and how many of us were remembering other kinds of sex?

Four F-18s appeared out of nowhere for a flyby. They tickled my ear drums. I'd had a summer affair with a navy pilot. I met him in Pensacola at the gym when he walked up and told me I was lifting the dumbbell wrong. He took me out for drinks at a bar called Maggie's Inca Hoots, and bought me my first martini, which I sipped at first cautiously, and then threw down, saving the olives as my reward.

The children's choir sang God Bless America and the crowd broke up. The Stoney Hill University Band led a parade of people down the street to a grassy area so they could spread out and play some more. I followed them. My high school boyfriend had been the drum major. We were the Bayou La Batre Bobtails and after school I'd sit in the empty stands and watch band practice, laugh as he tried to bend all those players into a cat. When it got dark he'd see me home, kissing me every half block, which turned a five minute walk into an hour's and made me want to live farther away.

We left the swearing-in and walked the quarter mile to the governor's new mansion, where trustees from the state prison passed canapes on silver trays. My husband toothpicked grilled andouille sausage, barbecued shrimp, and I munched on celery and then gave myself over to liver wrapped in bacon and one-bite crawfish quiches. I had a lover in graduate school who was allergic to eggs, and when I baked him cakes they came out dry but he ate every bite, washing the crumbs down with chocolate milk.

I'd never completely stopped loving any of them. They were part of a continuous scratchy film loop that ran around my heart, whether I was remembering them or not.

My husband took my hand and pulled me out of the mansion. "No one will miss us," he said. "I want you to myself."

I followed him to our car. He drove to the edge of the glistening lake on the Capitol's grounds. We shared a crisp, green apple he'd taken from the gubernatorial fruit bowl. The morning was cold and sunny. Couples walked by holding hands, and some looked in the windows of our car, but it felt dark in there with him, private, the light a kind of moonshine.