- Chapter 8 brings us back to the life of Clarissa Vaughan, who returns to her West Village apartment just in time to catch her partner, Sally, on her way out the door.
- Sally tells Clarissa that she's off to have lunch with the famous actor and gay activist Oliver St. Ives, and she dashes off as Clarissa heads into the apartment alone.
- Inside, Clarissa reflects on the great good luck that brought them their apartment, which has "two floors and a garden," "pine-planked floors," and lots of light (8.22). Looking around at all of their things, she thinks, just for a just a teensy little moment, of how easy it would be to "slip out of this life" and find another one (8.22).
- As Clarissa starts to putter around, she thinks about Sally's lunch with Oliver St. Ives. She feels slighted because she wasn't invited, and it bugs her to imagine that Oliver must think of her as a boring old wife rather than an interesting woman in her own right.
- Soon, Clarissa's thoughts turn back to that fateful summer when she was eighteen years old and she and Richard were lovers. She thinks about the tangled love triangle that she and Richard and Richard's other lover, Louis Waters, had created, and she reflects on all of the love and pain that it brought them.
- Clarissa wonders, too, if she missed out on something by choosing not to stay with Richard in the end. What might her life had been like?
- Looking back now, Clarissa feels that there has never been another moment in her life that was as perfect as the moment when she and Richard first kissed.