His Wife Leaves Him

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He puts his hands under his head on the pillow and thinks about the first time they met. He left the party and saw her at the other end of this long hall. She was standing in front of the elevator, waiting for it to come. Then she must have heard him behind her. No, she definitely heard him. They talked about it sometime later. She said her first thought was that someone was about to grab or attack her, and that she’s usually not so paranoid. That his feet stomped as he ran as if he were wearing combat boots. He wasn’t running but hurrying now because he didn’t want her to get in the elevator before he got there and the door to close. Though if the elevator had come he would have yelled “Hold the elevator,” wouldn’t he? She then might have pushed the “open” or “6” button to keep the door from closing — not an easy move to do, as you got to think fast and have quick coordination — or held the door open with her hand. Or maybe she would have let the door close. Intentionally, because she still might have felt he wanted to hurt her, or because she couldn’t get to the right button in time. If that had happened, he thinks he would have run to the stairway and down the five flights. But by the time he would have reached the ground floor, she would have been out of the building. Would he have tried, if he had run out of the building and saw her on the street, to catch up with her? Doesn’t think so. Wouldn’t want to startle or scare her. But he could have just walked fast — that is, if she hadn’t stopped in front of the building — and then slower when he got near her, and said something to start a conversation, like what? “Excuse me, but we were at the same party tonight. My name’s Martin Samuels, I’m a friend of Pati’s, and I hope I didn’t just now startle or scare you in any way.” Ah, why’s he speculating on something that didn’t happen? Because it’s interesting, going through all the possibilities that could have happened and then zeroing in on what actually did. And what the hell else he’s got to do now? And he likes the idea of, well…of, that he was going to meet and get to know her no matter what. What’s he mean by that? That if all else flopped — if the elevator had closed with her in it and she wasn’t on the street when he got there — he would have asked Pati if she knew the slim blond woman with the beautiful smile and her hair in a chignon, if that’s what that is when it’s knotted or rolled up at the back of the head. Or knew someone at the party who did — the person she came with — and if she could fix them up somehow or just give or get him the woman’s phone number, if she isn’t married or engaged. Or if married, not separated. And, of course, she wasn’t married or even seeing anyone then. And Pati would have got him her number and he would have called, or asked Pati to call her first about him, and then called and arranged to meet her for coffee or a drink. Anyway, on the sixth floor, waiting for the elevator, she heard him and quickly turned around, looking a bit startled. He said something like — or he also could have asked Pati for the woman’s name and address or whereabouts in the city she lived, if she knew, or just what borough, and he would have got her number out of the Manhattan phone book because it turned out she was the only person in it with her name. But he said something like — definitely the “leaver” part, though; that he definitely remembers, his first attempt at trying to be funny or clever with her—“Don’t worry, it’s just me, a fellow partygoer and now — leaver, and also a friend of the host. That is, if you are a friend of Pati’s and weren’t brought to the party by someone who is or who knows her in some other way — a colleague at her magazine, let’s say.” She said something like “No, I know Pati quite well.” “That so?” he said. “May I ask from where?” and she said “Grad school. She was a few years ahead of me but we became friends.” “I only met her this summer. At Yaddo — you know, the artist colony, or art colony, or whatever they call it.” He said that to let her know right off he was an artist of some sort and serious enough at it to get into that place. He thought, maybe because he assumed she was interested in the arts, he thinks, she’d ask him what he does, and then, because he also must have assumed she was getting or had gotten a doctorate in some kind of literature at Columbia, like Pati, what he was working on up there and was it a productive stay and so on. Probably not the latter. But she just as easily could have assumed he was working on nonfiction. Pati had gone straight from getting her doctorate to working for Partisan Review and was at Yaddo the exact same time period he was — they even took the bus back together — writing a biography of an influential eighteenth-century French thinker whose name he forgets. Starts with a T, his first name. T-s, T-z, T-p — but it’s not important. He never read anything the guy wrote, though Pati had loaned him a couple of his books at Yaddo and then at the party asked for them back. Such a stupid move, though, trying to impress Gwen fifteen seconds after he met her with that “leaver” remark and then the Yaddo business. Thierry, that’s it. He should have thought at the time — maybe he did, but just couldn’t stop himself — that she was very smart — she certainly looked it, and her voice, if he can put it this way, was very smart too — to see through his inept maneuvers. She might even have thought “What bullshit this guy’s trying to hand me.” Not “bullshit” but some other word. “Hokum”; “bullcrap”; “baloney.” Can’t think when she ever cursed, and he bets she also rarely did it in her head. Though once, when she was very sick, she cried out “Why the fuck did this have to happen to me? Excuse me; I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be vulgar. But I’m fed up with my illness; fed up.” But about that first night, she later said — weeks later, maybe months, when they were seeing each other almost every day — that she knew — he’d asked — he’d made the Yaddo reference to impress her. He’d said something like “I thought so. And what a dummy I was, too, because it doesn’t take much to get into Yaddo — a few publications and a couple of good references — and you probably knew that. It was so desperate, but it shows how eager I was to get you interested in me, at least to the point where you wouldn’t brush me off when I asked, and I was intending to, if we could meet for coffee sometime or a drink. I’m just glad it didn’t do any lasting harm. It didn’t, did it? And she said — now he remembered: they were having dinner at her apartment; he’d brought food from Ozu, a restaurant he’d discovered and which became, more for dining there than takeout, one of her favorites for a couple of years—“What do you think?” “What about my ‘leaver’ remark from the same night?” and she said “‘Leave her’? ‘Leaver’? ‘Lever’ like the handle?” “As in ‘fellow partyleaver,’ one of the first things I said to you when we met at the elevator after leaving Pati’s party. Also said just to impress you?” She said “I think I didn’t understand what you meant with that leaver but didn’t want to question you on it, so I let it go. Now I see what you were getting at—‘partygoer, partyleaver.’ I can be slow — and I’d say it’s so-so to maybe a-little-more-than-that clever. At any rate, original. I’m not aware of anyone else who’s used it. So you are, to the best of the little I know, a coiner.” For a while after that, when he called her, he’d say “Hi, it’s your coiner calling,” or just “It’s the coiner” or “your coiner” and once or twice “your coiner calling from a corner,” till she stopped laughing at any line with “coiner” in it, so he stopped using it. Anyway, sixth floor, after he mentioned Yaddo and got no verbal response and he doesn’t think any visual reaction to it either, “So, I assume that, like Pati, you went or still go to Columbia for your doctorate?” and she said yes. “Went? Go?” and she said “Went, although I’m still very much there.” “So you’re not completely done with it? Or you are — orals, dissertation, defense of it, if the orals and defense aren’t the same thing,” and she said “They’re not, and I am done with them.” “Literature, also, like Pati?” and she said “Same language but literature of a different century.” “What are you doing with it? Or maybe I should say, why are you still at Columbia, if that’s not too personal a question?” “I’m doing a post-doc and also teaching a humanities course as part of their Great Books program.” “That should be interesting,” he said. “And a feather in your cap and gown, I guess, and no doubt a terrific addition to your vita for a possible job there or somewhere else, though I’m not sure what a post-doc is.” “It’s short for post-doctorate,” and he said “No, that my little pea brain figured out. But it’s not another degree, is it?” and she said no. “So what were your thesis and dissertation on? And it is a dissertation for your Ph.D. and not a thesis, right?” and she said yes and gave the title of her thesis and he said “You’re not going to believe this, though I don’t see why not, but he’s just about my favorite nineteenth-century fiction writer. Maybe favorite of any kind of writer and of all centuries and millennia, not counting whichever one Homer was in. though he only wrote, if we can call it that, two books, while your guy filled up volumes and everything I’ve read of his shines,” and she said “You of course know he extended into the twentieth century, though not by much, but is considered primarily a nineteenth-century writer.” “Right,” he said, “the late great stuff,” and gave a couple of the titles. “As the title suggests, I wrote about his long stays in France and his friendships with intellectuals there and all things French. He’s not who I wrote about for my dissertation,” and he said “Oh, and who’s that?” and she said, and he said “This is amazing. He’s one of my favorite contemporary writers, and I’m not just saying that.” She smiled, not, it seemed, at what he said but as if that was to be the end of their conversation, and turned to face the elevator. “Tell me,” he said, “and if I’m talking too much or you no longer want to talk, tell me that too, but have you been waiting long? I mean, more than the three minutes or so we’ve been standing here?” “Not that long.” “So what should we think, the elevator’s broken or stuck?” “It was working fine when I got to the party. I’d say it’s not working and that if it doesn’t come in the next minute we should think about walking downstairs. It’s only five flights.” “You walk,” she said; “I don’t mind waiting. And I’m sure it’s being held up because someone’s loading or unloading a lot of things off it and that it’ll eventually come. Besides, I don’t like those stairs.” He said “Why, what’s wrong with them?” and she said “They’re unusually long and insufficiently lit and also a bit creepy. And the one time I walked down — not because the elevator didn’t come — I couldn’t get out on either the ground or second floor.” “In that case, you’re right, and I’m glad you warned me. But it’d seem locking those doors would be against some fire regulation.” “I don’t know if they were locked or, as someone explained to me, it had something to do with humidity and air pressure. But I thought the same thing about a fire regulation being violated and told Pati and she said it’s happened to her too, more than once.” “Someone ought to complain, then, in case there is a fire or something like that,” and she said “Pati did, several times, she said, and the situation hadn’t been corrected when I walked down the stairs, so you can see why I don’t want to take the chance.” “I’ll be with you,” and she said “No, thanks.” “I was just kidding, of course,” and she said “About what?” “Nothing. I thought I might’ve sounded pushy,” and she said “I didn’t think so. You were trying to be helpful. Thank you.” The conversation went something like that. More he talked to her, more he knew he didn’t want to leave her without getting her phone number and some assurance she’d meet him sometime for coffee or a drink. He still didn’t know if she was married or engaged or had a steady boyfriend. She had gloves on now but at the party he got close enough to her to see she wore no ring on either hand. He remembers thinking at the elevator What a beautiful voice she has, clear and soft, and a lovely face and good figure. And she speaks so well, he thought, and is obviously very smart and seems gracious and he likes what she does: teaching and getting a Ph.D. in literature and at Columbia. They’d have lots to talk about if they started seeing each other. He was never a scholar but he did like to talk about books and writers and he often read literary criticism of novels and stories he’d recently finished but felt there was more to them than he got and wanted somebody else’s take on them. He could reread her writer or read some of the work he hadn’t read or she recommended and what she thought were the best translations of it, and later talk about it with her. He liked the way she smiled and laughed at the party — not loud, and the smile warm and genuine, and the intelligent look she had when she seemed to be in a serious conversation. She usually had a guy or two talking to her and one time three or four men surrounding her, each, it seemed, vying for her attention. That made him think that maybe there wasn’t one particular guy in her life, but of course, he thought, it could be that her husband or boyfriend hadn’t come to the party. She was the beauty there, that’s for sure. He remembers when she came in — alone, took her coat and hat off in the foyer, probably her gloves too, and went in back with them and, he assumes, put them with most of the other coats and where his was too, on Pati’s bed. When she came back out and waved to some people and went over to them, he said to himself something like “Jesus, what a doll.” He practically stalked her at the party, losing sight of her only when he went to the bathroom or into another room for a drink. He was waiting for a chance to go up to her and introduce himself or say anything to her, just so long as they started talking, but she was always with someone, mostly men but sometimes a woman or two. She never noticed him staring at her because she never turned his way when he was. He wanted her to and then, he thought, he’d give an expression with his raised forehead and some other thing with his face that he was interested in her or had been wanting to talk to her but didn’t want to barge in and could she free herself for a moment? How he was going to get any of that in with a look, he didn’t know. But he thought he could — maybe just smile in a way that suggested he wanted to meet her — and she might even come over to him or at least gesture in some way — hand or face or some move with her head — for him to come over to her. Then she was gone. A man tapped his shoulder from behind, and he turned around. “Aren’t you Donald Boykin?” the man said, and he said no and the man said “You look just like him; sorry.” When he turned back to the spot he’d been watching her at, she’d disappeared. He looked for her in the room he could see from the one he was in, but she wasn’t there. He went through the entire apartment looking for her. He’d made up his mind; he was going to go over to her even if she was with other people. He didn’t know what he was going to say; something, though. Maybe make up a woman’s name — Dorothy Becker — and ask her if she was this woman and then say “Sorry, haven’t seen her in a long time and I used to know her fairly well and I thought she’d think I was ignoring her if I didn’t say hello. And now that I think of it, you couldn’t be her because her resemblance to you is from more than ten years ago when she was around your age. Stupid mistake on my part. But may I ask your name? Mine’s…I was thinking of saying I almost forgot it, but that’d be such a dumb joke. Martin Samuels,” and he’d stick his hand out to shake. If she was with someone, he’d ask that person’s name and shake hands. If she was with two or more people, he’d just say hello to them. The joke part, only if she was alone. Or probably not the joke part; too silly, so he’d just give his name. He actually thought of this while he was looking for her. If she wasn’t alone, he’d first apologize to her and whoever she was with for breaking into their conversation. He didn’t know what he’d do after he asked her name and gave his. It could be embarrassing, being the stranger of the group and just staying there, but he’d take the chance. Maybe he’d say “Well, nice meeting you all,” and walk away and try to catch her later if she was alone, now knowing her name and the introduction, of sorts, out of the way. Then he thought she might be in the hallway bathroom. When he passed it to look for her in Pati’s bedroom, the door was closed and he could see through the crack at the bottom that a light was on inside. Although someone could have left it on after using the room. He didn’t want to try the doorknob to see if it was locked. He didn’t want to give the impression he was trying to get the person inside to finish sooner. He stood outside the bathroom. This almost had to be where she was, he thought. And if she was in there, this’d be a good opportunity to speak to her alone when she came out, but another woman came out. He said “Hi,” went in and locked the door. He didn’t want the woman to think he’d been waiting outside the bathroom for nothing. And as long as he was in here, he thought, he should pee. He was going to have to do it soon anyway, what with the three or four Bloody Marys and bottle of water he had, and then he really might have to go and both bathrooms might be occupied. He peed, then went through the apartment looking for her again. Nah, it’s hopeless, he thought. He went into the bedroom for his coat. He didn’t see any reason to stay, now that she was gone. He knew nobody at the party but Pati and she was always getting or taking away things or introducing people. Birdbrain, he thought. For that’s what he should have done: got her to introduce him to that woman, but too late for that. He really hadn’t met anyone on his own here because he spent most of his time trying to meet that woman. He started to look for Pati to say goodbye. Then he told himself he’d call her tomorrow or the next day — probably tomorrow — to thank her for inviting him and to ask about this woman he tried speaking to but she was always surrounded by other people, and left. They waited for the elevator for about five minutes, maybe more. No, had to be more. There were long stretches when neither of them spoke and she looked mostly at the elevator, he mostly at her, and every so often she turned to him and smiled a bit mechanically and then looked back at the door. One time he said something like “We should seriously think about using the stairs. I’m sure the door down there will open or just need a good shove.” And she said “I told you: you go. I’ll go back to the party and tell Pati the elevator’s not working — yes, I concede; you were right all along,” and he said “Maybe I wasn’t.” “Anyhow,” she said, “she can call the super. But I’m not walking downstairs to get out of the building, at least not yet.” “It’s not that you’re in any way apprehensive of me,” and she said “Do you mean afraid of you? Of course not. You’re a friend of Pati’s, so why would I think that?” The surprising thing, he now thinks, was that they weren’t joined by anyone else from the party or floor, which had about eight apartments to it and it wasn’t late. The elevator came around then. He said “Like tie-ups on highways, no explanation when traffic finally gets moving,” and she said “I know, but hurray.” They got in the elevator and the door closed. “Think it’s safe?” she said, and he said “I now bet it was just someone unloading a whole bunch of packages or furniture.” “No,” she said, “it took too long.” “A huge piece of furniture could’ve got stuck in the elevator door or the person or persons kept the door open with something heavy while they carried some stuff into the apartment, and then got caught up in a phone call there,” and she said “Please, let’s get traffic moving.” He was nearer the button panel and said “Which floor should I push for you?” She looked at him as if she found the line peculiar or she didn’t quite know what it meant or something else but she didn’t smile or laugh, and he said “Just trying to be funny. I don’t know why I feel I always have to crack you up.” She said why would he want to? and reached past him and pressed the button for the ground floor and the elevator started moving — and he said something like “Before you think I’m entirely ridiculous or nuts — I’m not, the second one, anyway — let me in as adroit a manner as I can manage under the circumstances tell you why.” He said that what he was about to say must have been obvious to her at the party. He’d wanted to introduce himself to her since she got there but, and these were his exact words, “I didn’t have the guts.” Also, “and believe me, none of this is a line,” she was always talking to someone or several people and looking as if she was having a good time and he didn’t want to butt in. He must have made her uncomfortable, though, staring at her so much, and he apologized for that. They had to have been out of the elevator by now and might have been walking to the outside door. She said his staring, as he called it, wasn’t obvious to her because she didn’t remember seeing him at the party, and he said “Oh, you had to have, at least my shirt,” and opened his coat. “You see, I didn’t know it was going to be so formal an event.” His shirt was a long-sleeved rugby type, blue and yellow stripes with a white opened-neck collar. “I thought it was going to be a small informal get-together of friends Pati made at Yaddo this summer. I thought that because the day we left there, that’s what she said she was going to do this fall. I didn’t see anybody from Yaddo there. But I didn’t know she knew so many well-known painters and writers and high-powered critics and book editors and the like. I didn’t get to meet any of them but overheard people saying they were there and a couple of them I recognized. In fact, I was talking briefly with some writer a few years younger than I, who cut me off and said ‘Excuse me, so-and-so publishing bigshot just came in and I was told I should meet him.’ What a schmuck.” “He was only trying to push himself a little; that’s not too bad. But what I find curious is that I still have no recollection of you at the party.” He remembers she took a while buttoning her coat and wrapping her muffler or scarf around her neck and maybe even adjusting her gloves and cap before they went outside. “Oh, I was there, all right,” he said. “I know, but what I’m saying,” she said, or at least something like this, “is that I think I would have remembered you, as you said, from your shirt. I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable, either. I certainly hope I’m not. Your shirt is just fine, and that it has long sleeves, even better for a late-fall party. But it does stand out in its own way and would have contrasted with all the jackets and ties and dress shirts. Were we ever in the same room together?” and he said “Oh, yeah. And by the way, you were very diplomatic just now and I don’t at all feel uncomfortable in what you said. At first I felt a bit odd at the party in this shirt, but I quickly got over it. But I even got so close to you in a couple of rooms — I’m afraid to even admit this bit of snooping, but here goes; I’ve just about told you everything else except, maybe, how surprised and disappointed I was when I saw you were suddenly gone from the party — that I… where was I? That I was able to see — that’s it — that you only half-finished your glass of red wine and left it on a coaster on a credenza and that you seemed to favor the smoked salmon and carrot sticks, but with no dip on them, of all the hors d’oeuvres and crudités on the food table. I also like carrot sticks, but with the dip. Anyway—” They had to be outside by now because he said something like “So, here we are. Which way you going? I live on the Upper West Side and was going to take the Broadway train.” “So do I,” she said, “—Upper Upper. But I’m taking the Lexington Avenue line to meet someone on the Upper East Side.” “Someone important?” and she said “If you mean in my life, a good friend.” “Which subway station, the one on Astor Place?” “There’s a closer one near Prince. I know how to find it from here.” “Would you mind if I walked you to the subway?” and she said “It isn’t necessary and would take you too far out of your way. And the streets down here on weekends are always crowded at this time, so I feel perfectly safe going alone.” “No, I’m sure you do. It’s just I only suggested it because I’ve enjoyed talking to you and I’d like to — you must’ve known this was eventually coming — for us to meet again. And not meet accidentally, at a future Pati party, let’s say, but intentionally. Willingly. Something. Prearranged. For coffee. Would that be okay with you? You can check with Pati first to see what she thinks of me. But she wouldn’t have invited me to her party — the only acquaintance from Yaddo there, as far as I saw, though maybe the others couldn’t make it — if she thought poorly of me. Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’ve killed it, haven’t I?” “Why do you say that?” and he said “Because I’m just bumbling, bumbling.” “Really, you’re too tough on yourself. Sure, we can always meet for coffee one afternoon when I’m not teaching or busy with something else and you’re also free.” “Afternoons are good. Mornings too. I’m pretty much unemployed now except for my writing and what I make off of it, so I can meet anytime. It’s easy, and I don’t mind, breaking up my workday, because I can easily get back to it and usually with fresh ideas and better ways of saying what I was working on that I wouldn’t’ve had if I just continued writing without that break. I don’t know if that was clear, what I said, but I call them, these breaks, constructive interruptions. Anyway, I’m holding you up. So, great, we’ll meet. How should we arrange it?” and she said “Call, since I won’t know till I get home what my schedule’s like the next few weeks other than for my classes and office hours.” She gave her last name and the spelling of it and said he doesn’t need her address to find her in the Manhattan phone book since she’s the only Gwendolyn Liederman in it. “Nice to meet you, Martin. You go by Martin and not Marty, am I right?” “Always Martin. Kids called me Marty when I was young and I never liked it. I always pictured this tubby shlub, which I never was. Otherwise, I’m not so formal. Then I’ll call you, Gwendolyn. ‘Gwendolyn’ and not ‘Gwen’? They’re both nice.” “‘Gwen’ is fine,” she said, “although I like Gwendolyn better. But either. Goodnight.” She put her hand out, he shook it, and she started for the Prince Street station. “Sure you don’t want someone to accompany you?” he said. And she stopped and turned around. “I absolutely don’t mind going out of my way. It’s not that cold and I like to walk and I’ve nothing to do now but go home. Oh, that must sound ridiculously pathetic. Or pathetically ridiculous. Neither is what I intended it to be. It’s just that it’s still so early.” “Go back to the party, then,” and he said “No, I’ve already said goodbye to Pati. It’d seem too peculiar, coming back, ringing up to be let in, putting my coat on the bed again, etcetera. I’m happy to go home. I’ve plenty to do.” She nodded and resumed walking and he headed for the subway station on Canal Street. He looked back a short time later and she was gone. He remembers thinking she walks fast and disappeared as quickly as she did at the party. He hoped she wasn’t hurrying to meet up with a boyfriend. Weekend night; it makes sense. But if she was, why would she agree to meet him? Maybe to get rid of him and when he calls she’ll say she changed her mind and doesn’t think it necessary to give a reason why. Or the reason is that she’s seeing someone or she’s too busy with her work to meet anybody now, even for coffee. Or she might have agreed to meet him because she likes to take a break herself and the boyfriend she can always see in the evening. It’s all innocent, in other words, he thought, walking to the subway station: tantamount to nothing. She has no plans whatsoever in getting to know him better than as someone to meet once, and if she finds him interesting enough, maybe meet for coffee a second time, but just for talk. But he was so inarticulate and clownish with her, what could she have thought they could talk about? Her authors, for one thing, but she must know ten times as much about them than he does. He should have asked if she was presently seeing someone, he thought. Well, he sort of did, she skipped around it, and anything more on his part would have been prying. Later — a couple of months or so — he was thinking about the first time they met and said to her “If you were seeing some other guy when we first met, would you have agreed to meet me for coffee or even told me how to get your phone number?” “I doubt it,” she said. “I knew you were interested in me and I wouldn’t have wanted to lead you on. Of course, it all would have depended on how serious a relationship I was in.” “As serious as the one you’re in now?” and she said “Then, no.” “Semi-serious?” and she said “Maybe. Or maybe it would have had to be several notches below ‘semi.’ A relationship that wasn’t going anywhere or I was coming out of, with no chance of going back.” “Can I ask why you did agree to meet me?” and she said “The usual reasons. I wasn’t seeing anyone, hadn’t in a while, and I found you attractive and pleasant and smart—” “Smart? You thought I was smart? I acted like a complete putz.” “No, you didn’t. Let’s just say I saw past what you called that night your bumblingness.” “I didn’t say it that way exactly, but you were close. I’m surprised you remembered even that much of it.” “I also liked your nervous approach. You weren’t cocky or presumptuous or anything like that. But another thing that interested me was that you were a writer.” “Writers turn you on, eh?” and she said “No. But writing about them and their work is a lot of what I do. So I think I was interested in talking to you about your work and what got you started at it and how you go about doing it and what keeps you at it, and so on. I didn’t at the time have much of an opportunity to speak to a live writer.” “I’m sorry,” he said, “that was a stupid thing for me to say.” “It wasn’t one of your brightest remarks,” she said, “especially because you knew the answer.” “Okay, I won’t make that mistake again, or I’ll try not to.”

So what happened next? he thinks. As he walked, he probably looked back for her a couple of times, even though he must have known she wouldn’t be there. He was also probably thinking What a doll, what a doll. This has got to work out, it just has to. Got to the subway entrance and started down the stairs and then thought something like What’s the big rush to get home? Walk till you get tired or bored with it and then take the subway or bus. Walked all the way home. Took him about two hours. Doesn’t remember being cold. Remembers a full moon. No, why’s he making that up? But he does think there was a brief fall of light snow and he looked up at it and thought how pretty it was and romantic. Probably also thought Wouldn’t it be nice walking with her now in the snow? Starting from when he was around seventeen he’d wanted to hug a woman from behind while it snowed, burrow his head into hers, but just never had a chance to, and of course a woman he was in love with. Later, after they’d been seeing each other a few months and were walking along the park side of Riverside Drive in a much heavier snow, he got behind her and hugged her and nuzzled his nose into the back of her neck and she said “What are you doing?” and he said “What do you think?” And she said “We’ll slip; let go. You want to kiss,” she said after he let go of her, “that’s different, though my lips are probably cold,” and they kissed. First time for that during a snow? Doesn’t think so. Could have got home quicker but stopped at a bar, sat at the counter and ordered a draft beer and asked the bartender if she had a Manhattan phone book. Remembers she was tall and striking-looking and young, around twenty-five, or looked young, and was built and moved around behind the counter like a dancer and had short blond hair almost the same color as Gwen’s but not looking as real. He really remembers all that? And he means the hair color real. Yes. He still has a vivid picture of her and the bar but can’t recall what streets it was between and avenue it was on. Somewhere between Houston and Eighth Streets, he thinks, in the middle of the block on the west side of the avenue. Good-looking and trimly built as she was, if he can put it that way, he had no interest in her and wouldn’t have even if she had come on to him, which she never would have. First off, on her part, the age difference, and on his part, she came off as hard and tough, qualities, if that’s the right word, he disliked. Maybe she was just acting hard and tough because she was a young attractive female bartender and felt she had to put up that kind of front with her male customers, especially the ones sitting at the counter. She also smoked, another thing that put him off, and ground out her cigarettes in an ashtray full of butts, but he might be imagining the last part of that. But most of the rest did happen, or close to it. He recounted to Gwen several times what he did that night after she left him. And one of those times he said something like “Of course, in telling you all this, I’m saying that I fell for you immediately — maybe even while stalking you at Pati’s party — which is one more reason I had no interest in the beautiful bartender.” “With me,” she said, “I knew I liked you after our first two dates and thought that something could possibly develop between us. But falling for you took a much longer time.” “How long?” and she said “I forget. Maybe weeks, once we started going together.” “Why so, do you think?” And she said “Innate cautiousness. Self-preservation. Because of my early history, perhaps, of jumping in too fast and getting burned when the man’s feelings for me went sour and flat. I’m not quite sure why, but that’s the way I was since my senior year in college.” “Well, we went to bed pretty quickly — third date, and first was just a short walk and cup of coffee, but in reverse order,” and she said “That’s something entirely different. I liked our foreplay, I got very much in the mood, and I felt you weren’t the type to get too terribly hurt if I decided not to see you again or for a while.” “Why would you decide that when we were really just starting out as a couple and had just slept together and, as I recall, it was pretty good lovemaking for both of us, and everything seemed to be working out fine?” and she said “Because I might have thought I’d reverted to my old self-destructive propensity of jumping in too fast and risking getting hurt and I needed time alone to think more about it. I know it makes no sense, especially the part about not seeing you again, and how I’m explaining it is only muddying matters, but for now that’s the best I can come up with. If you want, ask me again some other time and I might have a clearer answer. Anyhow, my sweetie, things continue to go well with us, don’t they? And I haven’t just now troubled you unnecessarily, right?” and he said “I don’t see how you can say I wouldn’t be terribly hurt if you had broken up with me then or said you didn’t want to see me for a while. I know what the last part means. In the past, whenever a woman said it I knew she was just giving me time to adjust to what was actually her cutting me off and that she had no intention of resuming anything with me. As for your question do things continue to go well with us, yes.” He’s also written a lot about their first meeting. Self-contained chapters of novels and parts of or complete short stories, changing it around some each time. In three or four of these pieces the party’s in different kinds of buildings in SoHo and TriBeCa: a three-story brownstone, a tall modern apartment building, a warehouse or factory — he forgets which — that’s been converted to six floor-through artist lofts, with a fancy women’s shoestore occupying the entire ground floor. Other times he meets her in a theater lobby with a mutual friend, at a subway token booth where he tells her he forgot his wallet and could she loan him a token or money to buy one and he’ll mail one back to her if she’ll give him her address, at a rally for the Solidarity movement in front of the Polish consulate on the East Side, at a book signing in an academic bookstore on the Upper West Side, with the Gwen character the author of a biography of a not-very-well-known avant-garde twentieth-century Russian fiction writer. He came into the store to browse and look at the literary magazines and maybe buy one or a book if they weren’t too expensive. A table was set up with Georgian wine and chilled Russian vodka and various pickled herrings and a small dish of caviar on a plate with little squares of black bread around it. The Gwen character — he thinks her name was Margo — was seated behind the signing table — no, it was Mona — with stacks of her book on it. A lot more copies were in two large cartons on the floor. Oh, boy, he thought, would he ever love to meet her. Beautiful face and smile, trim figure, nice-sized breasts, he liked the simple way she was dressed, and no doubt a big brain too. Also, the way she graciously and unhurriedly made conversation with each of the four people on line who wanted her to inscribe her book for them. “Take as much as you want,” she said, when a woman said she’s taking too much of her time; “I’m not going anywhere for the next hour and I’m truly enjoying our little chat. Thank you.” He looked at her hands and saw she wore no engagement ring or wedding band — an action he used, he thinks, in every piece he wrote about their first meeting, and also in each she had long blond hair, sometimes hanging loose over her shoulders or in a ponytail, but mostly pinned or rolled up in back, with a big enough clump there that he knew it was long. So let’s see, he thought, what could he do to meet her? Got it, and he grabbed her book out of one of the boxes and read the jacket copy and checked the price. Book was more than 400 pages and had lots of photographs and was published by a university press, so it was very expensive. Really worth buying it? Hopes so, but if his plan doesn’t work out he could always, when she wasn’t looking, and before he paid for it, slip it back into the box. He got on line with it. When his turn came — there was no one behind him — he said to her “Hi, how’s it going — exhausted by all this yet?” and she said “No, and I’m fine, thanks.” And then something like “I first want to say — and I’m going to buy your book, by the way — but how unusual it is for a bookstore, or maybe it was your publisher who sprung for it, to put out such a generous spread. Usually, and not that frequently these days — publishers and bookstores alike are cutting back — it’s crudités without the more expensive veggies, and cheap white wine. But caviar, and all the appropriate accompaniments? They must really love you. For me, and here I’m talking about just once, it was pretzels and tortilla chips with no salsa or dip, and nothing to drink.” “Well, I’d like to give this store and my publisher credit for this modest spread — it’d certainly look better for me — but I happen to be the sole provider of it. I thought it the least I could do for anyone who’d make a special trip or stop what he was doing in the store to hear me.” “You read? I’m sorry, I didn’t know, and I missed it.” “You bet, I read. To standing room only, but that’s because the store manager said she had just one chair to spare — I’m sitting on it — and nobody wanted to sit on a cold uncarpeted floor. Around six people attended the reading. I’m sure half of them were store employees told to put on their coats and look like customers so I wouldn’t think the audience was too small. Believe me, I came with no illusions there’d be a crowd, and was simply doing what my publisher asked of me. But nothing will go to waste. I can always take home the unopened wine and recap the vodka bottle. As for the food, I perhaps overbought, but I love pickled herring of all sorts and it takes a while for it to spoil. I can’t say the same for the caviar, though, if any’s left, so you should go over there and have some now.” “I will, and some of your vodka too, if you don’t mind. But to change the subject, I also want to tell you how much I admire biography writing. It’s got to be the most difficult and time-consuming form there is. All that research before you even get a word down, and the traveling you must’ve done in the Soviet Union. And no doubt dozens of interviews with people who knew him and going through archives and having to read twice, three times, maybe more, all of his fiction, and according to the flap copy, he was very prolific, in addition to the thousands of letters it says he wrote. The copy also says this is the first book-length bio and exegesis of him and his work in any language. That means you had to retrace his life and get all the facts and such yourself and couldn’t crib some details, as a legitimate shortcut but in your own words and citing where all the references came from, from other scholars’ books. By the way, did this book come out of your Ph.D. thesis at Columbia, or was that on someone or something else? But I’m prying, which I usually don’t do, and as one of the women before said, taking too much of your time. I also probably don’t know what the heck I’m talking about as to what goes into writing biographies. So let me buy your book already before the store closes. But would you do me one favor, though? I don’t know how you’re going to take this — maybe you saw something like it coming long before — and if it’s wrong of me or wildly misdirected, and not because of anything you said or did, and you feel offended or just put off by it in any way, I apologize. But could you, when you inscribe the book to me, if you’ll still be willing to after what I’m about to say, put your phone number under your name?” She said “Now there’s an approach I never heard. And I’m not offended. I in fact think it’s funny. But I’d rather not have my phone number near my inscription or anywhere else in the book. I can just visualize it. You forgetting the book on a bus and some sleazy guy picking it up and calling me. No, that’s carrying it too far. But all right, if you want to get in touch with me to have coffee together one afternoon, you know my name and I’m the only one with it in the Manhattan phone book. Now tell me yours, in case you do call, so I’ll know who you are when you give it, and can I make the assumption you teach on the college level too?” “Nope. I just write what others teach, although nobody’s ever taught my work, far as I know, or written about it except in a few small mostly negative book reviews.” And he’s said a number of times to Gwen and their daughters and a friend or two and once in a taped phone interview — right after the call he had misgivings he said it and called the interviewer to delete that part when she edited the tape for radio and she said she would but didn’t — that his first meeting with Gwen was the single most important thing to happen to him. “Event” was the word he used in the interview. “How could it not be,” he said, or something like it, “for look what it led to. The deepest most enduring love relationship in my life and the marriage and children I always wanted and at least a dozen fictional pieces and a whole novel and about half of another one based on that night. I even took a teaching job I didn’t want and have held on to it for more than twenty years now so I could support a family and get good health insurance for them and send my daughters to college no matter how expensive and buy a house with lots of trees around it and no neighbors close by and do some traveling with my wife and spend summers in Maine in a nice rental cottage near the coast and have a good retirement plan and then when I’m retired, enough money put away to shell some of it out to my kids, and so on.” But maybe he’s saying — he means, what he’s saying is that he might be getting some of what happened in that first meeting with Gwen mixed up or in with what he changed or took liberties with in the writing of it. He thinks he finally got that thought straight. Anyway, that can happen and has several times, especially with something he’s written so much about. But where was he going before, regarding the bartender? Not so much her but the bar. He was excited at the possibility of seeing Gwen again, if just for a coffee and maybe a walk. That’s what he thought as he headed home soon after he left her. He’d gone into the bar to look her up in the Manhattan phone book to see if she was really in it with the name she gave. If she wasn’t in the book, what would he have done? Not think she intentionally misled him; she didn’t seem the type for that. If she didn’t want to give him her phone number, he would have thought, she’d have told him straight off that for one reason or another, or no reason given, she’d rather he didn’t call her. He wouldn’t have liked it. He probably would have thought at the time “Too bad, what a loss, first woman in a long time I’m really attracted to and think something could come of our seeing each other, but nothing I can do about it: she’s not interested, so that’s that.” Or maybe he would have pressed her a little — sure, that’s what he was like then — and said “Listen, what’s the harm, just for a cup of coffee, and, if the weather’s okay, maybe a short walk. Or forget the walk; just a coffee. Though maybe you don’t want to meet because you’re presently tied up with some guy and you don’t want to lead me on. If that’s the case, not that I have to tell you how to act, you should say so, although I still think it shouldn’t stop us from meeting sometime for a longer conversation about your work and past studies and European literature in general, even, over coffee,” or something like that. Also, if she wasn’t in the bar’s Manhattan phone book, he would have checked the cover of it for the period it was printed for. If it was even a year out of date, it might have meant she had an unlisted phone number then or had only recently got her apartment and didn’t have a phone yet at the time the book was printed, or did have one but it was too late to get her listing in it. If it was an old book — last year’s or later — and she wasn’t in it, he thinks he would have gone to another bar farther uptown, ordered a beer and asked the bartender for the Manhattan phone book, if it’s the current one, or looked for it at the pay phone there, if they had one, or just gone home and looked her up in his phone book. The phone company dropped off a stack of Manhattan phone books once a year in the vestibule of the brownstone he lived in then and he always picked one up and brought it to his apartment, so he was sure to have the current one. If she wasn’t in any of the phone books he looked at, current or out of date, he would have called Pati the next day for the phone number, saying he met Gwen for the first time at the elevator after they both left the party, they seemed to hit it off, at least enough so that when he asked her if he could call her sometime to meet for coffee or lunch, she didn’t so much give him her number as tell him how to get it in the Manhattan phone book, but he couldn’t find it. He looked in several other Manhattan phone books and her number wasn’t in them either. Would Pati have it? If she gave it to him right away — she might have said something like “Let me see if it’s all right with Gwen first, even if I’m sure it will he, based on what you just said”—he would have called Gwen that day or the next and said it was Martin Samuels from the other night, Pati’s friend from Yaddo. He couldn’t find her name in the phone book where she said it’d be, so he got it from Pati, if that was okay. She still interested in having a coffee or something one day? If she is, then maybe they should just set a time and date. He also probably would have thought before he called Pati or went into another bar for a current Manhattan phone book or looked in the one he had at home, that maybe he got the spelling of her last name wrong. Then he would have looked up in the Manhattan phone book in the first bar, even if it was an old one, all the possible spellings of the name he could think of: Leaderman, Leiderman, Leederman, Lederman, even Liedermann and Leadermann and so on. But before he looked up any of those, he would have dialed Information from the pay phone in that bar and given the spelling of the last name he thought Gwen gave him and said he thinks it’s under “Gwendolyn” but it could also be under “Gwen” or just the initial G instead of a first name and that the address, if it’s listed, is an Upper West Side one, most likely around a Hundred-sixteenth Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Riverside Drive or even on Amsterdam or Riverside Drive — anyway, near Columbia University: a Hundred-tenth to a Hundred-twenty-fifth — and got her number that way. The bartender said there was a Manhattan phone book by the pay phone just past the entrance to the bar. He said he saw the phone when he came in but not the book, and she said the book’s got to be there unless someone’s stolen it again. “It’s attached to the phone stand by a chain, but a flimsy one,” he thinks she said. “Or it could be hiding in the little cubbyhole in the phone stand.” He went to the entrance. Chain but no book. He actually hadn’t seen the phone when he came in and doesn’t know how he could have missed it, but didn’t want to admit to the bartender he was so oblivious. Could be all he had his mind on was Gwen and getting into the bar and asking for a Manhattan phone book to see if she was listed in it, and if she was, to write her phone number down. Pen and folded-up sheet of paper he always had with him. But what does he do now, he thought, or something like it, go to another bar for a phone book? He also might have thought he should forget it for now — and dealing with the bartender, just from her harsh looks and voice, could turn out to be unpleasant — and pay up and leave the bar and go straight home and look in his phone book there. He really didn’t want the beer he ordered — he’d already drunk plenty for the time being. When he gets home, especially if he walks all the way, he’s sure, he may have thought, he’ll want a beer or two or couple of vodka and grapefruit juice drinks, something he started drinking when he was a bartender two years before, though he told his manager and customers if they asked, that it was plain juice to keep his energy up and just to drink something, and drink them while he sits in his easy chair and reads a book or the Times. He only ordered the beer, with no intention of taking more than a few sips of it, so the bartender wouldn’t think he came in just for the phone book. “Pain in the ass,” he could imagine her thinking, “making me look for the fucking book and then put it back.” He’s still like this. If he’s on a city street and he has to pee, which he’s recently been having to do frequently, and goes into a bar to use its restroom, he always first orders a beer, if he doesn’t have to pee real bad, and leaves most of it. If it’s a coffee shop he goes into, he orders a coffee at the counter and drinks it after he pees. If he has to pee real bad for both those or all the stools at the counter are filled, then he goes straight to the restroom and usually leaves without ordering anything. Leaves fast, though, without looking at the person behind the counter. In other words, he never likes to use something in a bar or coffee shop or place like that, without buying something, but the cheapest drink they have, and when he does, he always leaves a tip, even if he only drinks a little of the coffee or beer. Part of that’s because…because of what? Lost the thought. Not tired, either. He thinks something to do with…about how relieved he is to have peed. That he was able to find, he probably means, a restroom that was free. He went back to the bar in the bar, the counter, whatever it should be called here so it’s clear what he went back to — suddenly he’s having trouble not only remembering what he was saying but putting his thoughts into words — and sat on a stool at it. Other customers in the bar? Thinks so; doesn’t remember, but can easily picture it. Bartender put his glass of draft beer in front of him — so she knew what she was doing, not drawing and putting it down before — and said something like “I was right, right? The phone book’s in the cubbyhole or dangling on the chain,” and he said something like “Chain’s there, book’s not, so it was probably stolen like you said. Look, I was once a bartender — not too long ago, either — and we always kept the Manhattan phone book under the bar’s counter. In fact, four of the five boroughs’ phone books. We didn’t keep Staten Island’s. I think we even had the Manhattan Yellow Pages, but all of them in case a customer wanted to look up a phone number or address.” “Then you must’ve not had a pay phone in your bar,” and he said “I think we did, in the three I worked at, and with the Manhattan phone book and Yellow Pages by it or resting on top of the phone. The books under the bar were mainly for the convenience of a customer who didn’t want to get off his stool to look something up. If he wanted to make a call, though, he had to use the pay phone.” She asked where he worked and he said “Main one was a restaurant-bar on West 57th between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Lunch-hour drinkers, mostly, and sort of the runoff from the Coliseum trade shows, and also the after-work crowd starting around five for a couple of hours. Subway entrance was right there, and for a while, at happy hour, we had a buffet table with free hors d’oeuvres.” “You must’ve made a bundle,” she said, “getting regulars. Here, it’s more than not customers I’ll never see again, so I usually get stiffed. Okay, though you’re making more work for me, so don’t be next asking me for Brooklyn,” and she went to the end of the bar, opened a cabinet under it and got out the Manhattan phone book and gave it to him. He checked, and it was the latest edition: 1978–79. He looked up Gwen’s name in it and it was there as she said it’d be: the only Gwendolyn Liederman in the book, at 425 Riverside Drive. Way uptown, he thought. Past Columbia? It could be that enormous curve-shaped Columbia-owned faculty residence he’d been in once, a few blocks south of 125th. He forgets the building’s number, if he ever knew it, since he was taken to this private piano recital by someone who was invited. The area didn’t seem that safe, and it might worry him going there to pick her up or take her home, if it ever came to that. But she did it, though maybe during the day it was safe and at night she always took a cab to her building, or called one from it, or got off at the 116th Street subway station on Broadway and then got a cab. Or the Riverside Drive bus — the number 5?—stopped right in front of her building and same with the downtown one across the street. But he remembered a way to figure out what street her building was at. For about two years when he was fourteen and fifteen, he was a delivery boy for a food market and catering service in the West Seventies. To help him make his deliveries, he had a street-location guide to find the cross-street a building was closest to for every avenue on the Upper West Side. He only delivered the smaller orders; the larger ones and anything to the East Side or any area that would have taken him a long time to get to, were delivered by truck. Central Park West and Riverside Drive were the two easiest avenues to use on the guide, and he still remembers how to do them now. For Riverside Drive, just lop off the last digit of the building number and add 72, the street the Drive started at, to what was left. For Central Park West, it was add 60. West End Avenue he remembers as being complicated to do, and he rarely delivered — maybe never — anything to Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, since those two hadn’t been gentrified yet, and the place he worked for was kind of fancy and expensive. He used the guide for Gwen’s building number and came up with a hundred-fourteen. So it might be Columbia-owned, he thought, and if so, a better and more convenient location and probably a more attractive building too than the institutional-type one near a 125th. He wrote her name and phone number on the folded-up sheet of typing paper he took from one of his pants pockets — most likely one of the back ones, which was where he usually kept it and still does, whenever he goes out; the pen, then and now, always in a side pocket so he doesn’t sit on it. He thinks he finished his beer and thought something like Hot damn — well, maybe not that. Just: Oh, boy, she was leveling with him after all. Now, what he wouldn’t give to have their first date, so to speak, and he could call it that because why else would she have given him her number if not to see him again, but to go well and then to start seeing each other regularly and for it to become serious between them and for them to start sleeping together exclusively, if he can put it that way—nobody else—and everything like that and for it to only get better and them closer and marriage, even, and for it to never end. It’s about time, and he can visualize it; foresee it as a possibility; something. For everything about her; everything; he just knows. And with a name like Liederman, he remembers thinking — maybe not the “Gwendolyn” so much, and not from anything about her mannerisms and face and voice and way she spoke and what she said — she’s probably Jewish, so even better. For all the women he got serious with and the three he lived with the past fifteen years, except one, Rhoda, whom he gradually didn’t much care for but it took a while to finally stop seeing her because she kept calling and was so good in bed, were Gentile, and most had a kid or two — actually only one had two — and the relationships always soured or sputtered out. And she didn’t seem to have a kid. In fact, it was obvious she didn’t; it would have come out. Good, because he already told himself after his last bad breakup more than a year ago that if he did get involved with another woman, and he was beginning to doubt he ever would, he wanted it to be with someone who had no kids and was a nonobserving Jew, among all the other things he wanted her to be — smart, interesting, sexy, gentle, and so on. Pretty, genuine, slim, intellectual. Was that asking too much? Was it asking for the wrong things? No, he doesn’t think so. The change could be good. And he wants to be happy with someone and have a relationship that’s easy for a change and lasts and goes on and the rest of it, and she seems perfect for him — again, in the short time they spoke and long time he observed her at the party, everything about her, everything, so this has to work. It’s got to, he means, got to. He put the folded-up sheet of paper into one of his pants pockets, paid up, gave an extra large tip for a single draft beer, said to the bartender, when she took the phone book off the bar to put it back in the cabinet, something like “Much thanks for the use of the book. You’ve no idea how important it was to me, which must sound silly to you but it’s the truth,” and left.

So what’d he do once he got home? And he did walk all the way, right? As he said: why it took him so long to get home. And it was late enough that he was able to get the early edition of the next day’s Times at one of the kiosks on 72nd Street and Broadway, the only places in his neighborhood he could buy it at that hour, and read the headlines, which he always did unless his hands were full, as he walked up the three flights to his apartment. Once in, and maybe even before he took his coat off, he probably went straight to the bathroom to pee. He and his brother always had a notoriously weak bladder, they called it, inherited from their mother, they thought, if such a thing can be passed down to your kids — maybe it was just a smaller-than-normal bladder she passed down — who frequently raced through the apartment from the front door when she came in, dribbling piss along the way to the bathroom in back on the first floor. “Oh, I did it again,” she sometimes said, coming out of the bathroom and pretending to be ashamed. “Awful, awful of me.” Then, if someone hadn’t already taken care of it — one of them or the housekeeper — wiping the urine off the breakfast room and kitchen floors with a rag. The dining room and foyer were carpeted, so little she could do about the urine there till she got them professionally cleaned, which she seemed to do every other year or so, along with the carpeted bedrooms and living room upstairs. Actually, he’s sure he would have peed right before he left the bar as a precaution to having to pee before he got home. But even if he had because he drank the entire beer there and the drinking he did at the party, he might also have had to pee badly as he went up the stairs to his apartment, or even on the street as he approached his building, the urge getting worse the closer he got to his front door. And then struggling to hold it in — this happened a number of times and happens even more today — as he fumbled with his door keys in one hand, his other hand squeezing the head of his penis through the pants to keep from peeing. Not always succeeding, either, and a few times, partway up the stairs or standing in front of his door, but never on the street, giving up and peeing in his pants till he completely relieved himself, later — as quickly as he could do it — cleaning up the mess he made on the stairs or landing. Now — the last two years or so — he pees a lot in his pants. Just short spurts till he reaches the toilet. He just can’t hold it in as well as he used to, even normal pees. After he peed in the bathroom, he probably took off his clothes, which had to be smelly from all the cigarette smoke at the party. It seemed half the people there smoked, so her hair and clothes would have smelled of it too, something he never thought before. If they had somehow hit it off big that night — at the party, not at the elevator: that wouldn’t have been possible unless they continued to talk outside, which they did, and then went someplace for coffee or a snack or drink instead of separating on the street. And ended up at her apartment and necked or slept together — that never would have happened with her the first night, the sleeping together, no matter how much she might have been attracted to him, though it has happened with two or three other women — he would have smelled the cigarette smoke on her, just as she would have smelled it on him, unless they showered before they started necking or got into bed and also washed or thoroughly wet their hair. So? Nothing. Just saying. And it’s ridiculous what he’s thinking. They never would have showered before they started necking. And they would have necked before they got into bed. And the shower, if they thought they should take one because they didn’t like the smell of cigarette smoke on their bodies and in their hair, would have had to be taken separately. She said, the one time he suggested they shower together, that it was dangerous and unnecessary and unappealing for other reasons and not at all erotic. When she was much younger, she said, and against her better judgment, she once let a boyfriend convince her to do it, and it practically ruined what was up till then a very nice relationship. “The lucky bastard,” he said, “just that he was able to shower with you and wash your front and scrub your back and whatever else went with it,” and she said “You don’t know what happened. We both slipped and it nearly killed us. He broke his nose, gashes in our heads, my front tooth went through my lip; everything.” He then probably — this was what he always did when he was living alone and came home from a party or bar with his clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and he wasn’t too sleepy or a little drunk — half-filled the bathroom sink with water and soaked his shirt and pants in it and wrung them out with his hands as much as he could and hung them up on hangers or off the shower curtain rod over the bathtub. That was how he washed all his clothes then. He never had his own washer or dryer till he and Gwen married and moved into a fully equipped apartment in Baltimore. Sometimes he rubbed soap on the clothes in the sink or put laundry detergent in with them and washed them by hand. That took a long time, though, rinsing and dunking the clothes in several sinkfuls of water to get the soap or detergent off, and it always seemed to make a mess on the floor. If he also washed his socks — and for them he always used soap and put a sock on each hand and rubbed them into each other — he hung them over the tub faucets after he soaked them and wrung them out. If he came home a little high or sleepy from a party or bar in smelly clothes or just didn’t have the energy to soak or wring them out, he left them on a bedroom chair, maybe brushed his teeth, took two aspirins or an Alka- or Bromo-Seltzer or that Italian antacid drink an old girlfriend had introduced him to — Briosci; something; he liked the taste better than the others but it was a lot more expensive — and went to bed and soaked the clothes in the morning. The only things he washed in the Laundromat were linens and towels and sometimes clothing that was too dirty to wash by hand. He had two sets of sheets and pillowcases and changed them every other week unless he knew some woman was going to spend the night at his place. Sex was always better on fresh linens, he thought, and when she laid her head down he didn’t want the pillow smelling of his hair. He’d originally bought the second set of linens so he wouldn’t have to go to the Laundromat more than once a month. When he moved in with Gwen he pooled his linens with hers — they both had double beds and only slept on cotton sheets — and used her building’s laundry room for washing everything. Before he soaked his clothes that night — and he’s almost sure he did; the cigarette smoke smell took weeks to go away unless washed or soaked, and he came home sober and alert and full of energy — he took out of his pants pocket the piece of paper with her name and phone number on it and put it by the phone on his night table. Now that he thinks of it, if he did smell from cigarette smoke when he got home, he would have showered soon after he took off his clothes and taken them into the shower with him and dropped them in the tub and sprayed or soaked them there while he was showering and then, standing in the tub with the shower off, wrung them out and hung them from the shower curtain rod, maybe later on hangers. Then he probably put on the terrycloth bathrobe he had then. It had been his father’s for god knows how many years and now his for six: wide blue and white vertical stripes and quite frayed. When he was alone in the apartment late at night he liked to lounge in it with nothing on underneath, the belt, what there was left of it, untied and his genitals exposed, which he’d play with from time to time, usually without looking at them. He probably read awhile in the Morris chair he bought used before he met Gwen — she’d had new cushions made for it while she was recovering from her first stroke — and finished that day’s Times or started tomorrow’s while sipping a couple glasses of wine or a grapefruit juice and vodka drink or two. Or read from one of the Gulag Archipelago books he was reading then. He read all three, one after the other, took him a few months. Gwen had asked the next time they met what Solzhenitsyn he was reading. He always brought a book with him to read when he was going someplace by subway or bus, and she only saw because of the way he was holding the book and then put it down on the drugstore’s luncheonette counter, the author’s photo: a full-face shot that took up the entire back of the cover. Did he intentionally keep her from seeing the front of the cover? No reason to, so doesn’t think so. He had a different book with him the night he first met her. A paperback of contemporary German short stories, thin and small enough to fit in his coat pocket or squeeze into his back pants pocket. He didn’t bring the Solzhenitsyn to read on the subway — which he would have wanted to — he always liked to finish a book or just stop reading it before he started another — because it was an expensive library copy and he felt he wouldn’t know where to leave it once he got rid of his coat and he was also afraid of losing or forgetting it at the party and even of someone taking it. Why would he even bring a book along if he was going to meet her at a drugstore a few blocks from his building? Not to impress her, that’s for sure. He thinks he thought their afternoon coffee date could end up with — at least this might have been what he hoped for — a long leisurely walk uptown along Riverside Drive on the park side, since it was a very mild day for December. Maybe even to the door or lobby of her building if they really got involved in their conversation and agreed to spend more time together than the hour or so they’d planned to, and then he’d take, because she lived forty blocks from him, a subway or bus home. “Agreed” to spend? What would be the right word there? Can’t think of it. And why stop at her building’s front door or lobby? If he walked her that far, he must have thought, he’s almost sure she’d invite him to her apartment for tea or glass of wine or something, but nothing more. But what’s he thinking? He couldn’t have thought she’d walk that far with him. She made it clear in his first phone call to her when they arranged the meeting that she was especially busy with school work these weeks and didn’t have that much time to spare. So they’d walk twenty blocks, he could have thought, or half that, and then she’d take the Riverside Drive bus the rest of the way and he’d take the Broadway bus home. That couldn’t have been it, either — still too far a distance and she didn’t have the time, so he doesn’t know what. Maybe he thought, before he left his apartment to meet her, that after they separated at the drugstore or the closest bus stop or subway station for her, he’d go to a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue near his building — there were one or two of them then — and get a double espresso or something and read there. He held the book up to show her the title on the front cover. She said she liked much of Solzhenitsyn’s early novels and that collection of short stories and prose poems and especially the novella in it—Matryona’s House?…Home?…Hearth? he thinks? What the hell’s the name of it? — a lot more than his nonfiction other than the Nobel Prize speech. She got less than halfway through the first Gulag, never touched the next two, so was curious what there was about the book — maybe she was missing something in it that he could tell her — that made him go on to the others, so it must have been number three he took with him that day. One thing he knows he did that night after he got home…Wait, what’d he answer her? He thinks he said that Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of life in the gulag and how the prisoners got there and what they went through and did to survive and also the many accounts of those who slave-labored till they died were some of the most powerful and harrowing writing he’s ever read, good as anything in any novel by any writer; House of the Dead included, and in such clear strong prose. At least that’s what he remembers now of his reading of the three books almost thirty years ago, so probably some of that is what he told her, and no doubt a lot more if he was feeling talkative that first date, for he had only read them the last few months. Although he has to admit — and he may have told her this at the luncheonette counter if it was the third Gulag he held up for her — that Gulag Three was slower than the first two, maybe because it was beginning to read like more of the same. It could be, and he doesn’t think reading them in order was necessary to understanding and appreciating the books more, though he could be wrong on that — he forgets — that if he’d started with Gulag Two and then gone to Three, he would have found One the least interesting and not as powerful and Three more interesting, powerful and readable than he did. But he read them all, he’s certain of that, and he thinks Three was the last thing he finished of his. A few years later — they were married by now, subletting a large beautiful apartment in Baltimore and she was nursing their first child. Morning, rocking chair, newspaper and books on an end table next to her, mug of coffee or tea on the floor by her feet so she wouldn’t spill it on the baby; doesn’t know how he remembers all this, but he does. Even what it was like outside: bright and cheery; he thinks it was early spring. Actually, she wasn’t drinking even decaffeinated coffee then because she was nursing. Only caffeine-free herbal tea, and at dinner, instead of her usual glass of red wine, Guinness stout because she’d read or her obstetrician had said it helped produce more breast milk. And she said to him — he’d just entered the living room, on his way to school, he thinks, for office hours or to teach — a new Solzhenitsyn novel was reviewed in today’s Times. She knows how much he admires that writer, so would he like her to get it for him? He said if it’s new — said something like this, of course — it’s probably very long and expensive because of its length and he’s about had it with that guy’s work. His last two novels, he thinks he went on, read and were written more like history than fiction, so he couldn’t really get in to them. Good history, but not what he wants to read. Then he probably kissed her and the baby too. More than probably. Doesn’t think he ever left the apartment, if he was going to be out awhile, without kissing her goodbye. Except maybe, and this rarely happened then, they’d had a disagreement that wasn’t quite settled, or he, not because of anything she did, was in a foul mood. He remembers saying something like this around that time “We don’t seem to have any major problems in our marriage. It’s looking good. I hope it lasts.” One thing he knows he did that night after he came home and maybe before he showered or soaked his smelly clothes or even took them off was look up her name in the Manhattan phone book, though it seemed the same one the bar had but in much better shape, and of course it was there. And Matryona’s Home is the title of the novella, he’s ninety-nine percent sure. Then he looked up his own name in the book for no better reason than he hadn’t since he got it and one year, a couple of years before, the phone company made the mistake of not putting him in the book. At the time, the only way someone who didn’t have the number could get it — well, if they knew a friend of his or how to reach his mother or something like that, they could — was by dialing 411. Then he checked the number of the page his name was on and went to the page she was on and got its number and thought something like the two of them — he and Gwen — are so far apart in this book. L and S, more than a thousand pages, he figured. And then — he thinks he did this — he subtracted his page number from hers; rather, hers from his, and got the exact number of pages that separated them. A pointless thing to do, if he did it, but she was on his mind almost constantly when he got home. Then for no good reason he could explain to himself later, although he knows it’s a dopey and absolutely ridiculous and even bordering-on-the-nuttiness move he remembers thinking then and thinks now, he tore out the page with his name on it and put it face down on hers. There, he thinks he thought or said, but definitely something like that, the pages with his and Gwen’s listings are pressed together and everything that suggests or implies till he gets next year’s Manhattan phone book from downstairs and throws this one out. Later, he thought — it was the same night — suppose things work out between them and she comes over here one day, or things work out between them enough for her to come over here one day and she asks to use the Manhattan phone book and he gives her it and she sees, because he’d forgotten how he’d left them and didn’t pull his page out before he gave her the book, those two pages pressed together like that. It could happen. She’ll think him peculiar, and he went back to the hallway coat closet where he kept the two phone books he had, the Manhattan and Yellow Pages, and took his page out and threw it away. Then he probably just drank and read and went to bed.

He had a strange dream that night. He had several dreams that night, not unusual for him, but this was the only one he woke up and remembered having that interested him enough to want to write it down. He always kept a piece of paper and a pen or two on his night table — still does — to write down things that came to him in his sleep or he thought of while lying in bed. If he used up that piece of paper or took it to his writing table to work off of, he replaced it with another one when he went to bed that night. The room was dark when he woke up from this dream. He thought about the dream awhile and then wrote the dream on the paper and probably got out of bed and had a glass of water and peed and went back to sleep. He read what was on the paper when he woke up in the morning and then a number of times the next few days — usually after he first got into bed, since the paper was still on the night table — and then thought this dream is worth saving. If he doesn’t save it he’ll lose the paper somehow — it always happens — and eventually forget what the dream was about. He kept a notebook in the top drawer of his night table — still does, in the same drawer of that night table but a different notebook from the one of that time. That one, he filled up and put someplace. It was the first notebook he ever filled up — took him around fifteen years — and he now doesn’t know where it is. Doesn’t matter. Well, he’d like to have it, but it really doesn’t matter. Whatever he could take from it, he thinks he did, and he’ll probably come across it sometime, not that it’ll be of any use to him. He has a theory — nah, forget that. But it has to do with if something’s lost, it’ll emerge someday if it’s important enough. He means in his mind, an idea or something he wants to add or take out or replace in a work he’s working on and sometimes even in one he’s finished but hasn’t published. Or hasn’t in book form. Anyway, he wrote that dream down in the notebook and got it out of the drawer a few times that week to read it. He did get rid of the piece of paper the dream was originally written on. Didn’t think he needed it anymore now that the dream had been transferred to the notebook. He also read that dream once to Gwen a short time after they got married, all of which is why — the number of times he read it — he remembers the dream so well and doesn’t need the notebook to remember it. How many times does he think he read it? A dozen or so, and he doesn’t know why it took him so long to read it to Gwen or even tell her about the dream. Maybe he thought it’d alarm her in some way, or make him out to be somewhat odd, having that dream the first night they met. Or else he didn’t think it’d be interesting to her — this could be possible — and then something came up that made the dream seem more important or applicable to their lives. The whole thing’s a blank. His sister died of a rare kidney disease. Something with “neph” or “nephr” in it. Another of those words he can never remember when he wants to use it no matter how many times he’s said it, or almost never remember. “Demagogue”—he got it now — but it almost always trips him up. “Demagogic,” “demagoguery”—anything with “demagog” in it, the same. For about a year before she died she was confined to a wheelchair. “Confined”? Doesn’t seem the right word for what she was. “Restricted to” would be even worse. At first she could get around in the chair by pushing the wheels herself. Then she didn’t have the strength for it anymore and someone had to push her in the chair. He used to push her outside to Central Park. A few times across the park to the Metropolitan Museum. Someone said to him — maybe Gwen; he seems to picture it, but long before her first stroke — that it must have been difficult pushing her so far, all these dips and hills, up and down curbs. He said it wasn’t, except for maybe crossing the bridle path in the park. The chair had wheels, for God’s sake, and he was much younger and stronger then, and his sister was a lot lighter by the time she became bound — that’s the word — to the wheelchair, down to sixty pounds from around eighty. She looked awful. Emaciated face, bony shoulders slumped forward, ankles swollen to almost twice their normal size, other things. It was before wheelchairs had seatbelts on them, so he had to tie a sheet around her waist so she wouldn’t fall out if he hit a bad bump or crack in the sidewalk or navigated a curb poorly, yet she did once and cut her hands and forehead. Just like what happened to Gwen, but in the house, seatbelt buckled by him but obviously not well, and she broke her nose and had trouble breathing in her sleep from then on. Kept him up so much at times that he left the bed to sleep in another room. She said once “I patted your side of the bed early this morning but, sadly, you weren’t there. I patted and patted in the dark in the hope I’d find you, till my arm couldn’t reach any farther. I’m sorry I make so much noise.” But the dream. He and his sister are walking down a dimly lit windowless hallway. This, just around eight hours after he first met Gwen and almost twenty years after his sister died. Low-wattage lights with dark shades on the walls. He says to his sister “My God, you’re walking, when before you were stuck in your wheelchair and someone had to push you. An overnight cure or miracle must have taken place.” She smiles at him but doesn’t say anything. Like Gwen and his parents and his brother and his best friend Mischa, and his sister in other dreams — none of them said anything to him when he dreamt of them after they died. Actually, not so. His father did once, if it was his father; it certainly was his voice. And in one of the many dreams he had of Gwen last night and this morning, she could have said something to him and he forgot. But with his father in that dream of just a couple of weeks ago, he was sleeping alone in this bed when the voice said “Martin!” just as his father used to do when he didn’t like how he was behaving or wanted him to do something for his mother or him right away or some household chore he’d been assigned to and his father thought he was avoiding or stalling. One, when he was a boy, he remembers hearing a number of times: “Martin! I’m surprised at you. Take the garbage out already. And this time line the pail with newspaper when you bring it back. For some reason only you know, you’re always forgetting.” He woke up, in the dream, though it seemed more like from it. He doesn’t believe in spirits or ghosts, but the truth is he came closest to thinking one of those could be so after he had the dream. Anyway, he was lying in bed, in or out of the dream, and saw a gray amorphous — smoky would be the best word for it — figure, no definable feature or form and taller by about six inches than his short father was and with his father’s rough voice, moving back in a slow curling motion to the corner between the picture window and closet and then come apart, the last bit of smoke disappearing where the head would have been. He stared at the spot he last saw the figure at and then sat up and turned on his night table light — he was now definitely out of the dream — and looked at the time — he’d already guessed it by a few minutes: three-fifteen — and lay back in bed with the light on, thinking about the dream and how real it was and what it might mean. His treatment of Gwen those last few weeks and especially the last night, that’s for sure. What else could it mean? Oh, he could come up with something, but that one’s probably it. His father was saying “Shame, to treat your wife, and so sick, that way. Where’d you ever learn such behavior? Certainly not from your mother or me.” He could just hear him. And what would his mother say, if she knew? “Oh, Martin.” So his sister smiles at him, doesn’t say anything, and they continue walking down what’s turning out to be an endless dimly lit hallway, with no doors in the walls either. “What do you think will be the outcome of all this?” he says. She smiles and shakes her head in a way that says “Not to worry, dear brother; you’re going to like what happens.” They start walking up a long steep flight of stairs similar to ones he remembers in the London underground, or maybe it was the Metro in Paris, where he and Gwen, on a short visit there more than twenty-five years ago — and he’d been to Paris and ridden the Metro long before he met her — decided to walk up them rather than take the elevator or escalator. “You’re right,” she said, when he suggested the idea, “we could use the exercise. Too much good food.” She also said, between her first and second strokes, or second and third, “I’m sorry we didn’t live more in Paris. Now we can’t chance it.” He and his sister go around another landing and start walking up another long flight. At the top of the stairs is a fireproof door that looks like the one that opened onto the roof of the building he was living in when he first knew Gwen. “Ah, at last: fresh air and natural light,” he says, and sees he’s now talking to Gwen. “Miracle of miracles,” he says, unbolting the door and pushing it open, “not only was my sister alive and walking but she’s turned into you, when before you were paralyzed from the waist down.” “That is something, isn’t it,” she says, “since the only time I’ve ever been sick in my life was with chicken pox: twice.” They go outside and from the middle of the roof—“Don’t go any farther,” he says, taking her hand. “It’s dangerous and I wouldn’t let you go out there alone and we could fall off”—and look at the city all around them. “Tell me,” he says, squeezing her fingers, “which—” and she says “Ouch, that hurts.” “I’m sorry. I thought I was being gentle,” and lets go of her hand. “But I was saying, out of all these buildings, if you had the choice, which one would you want to live in with me if you wouldn’t want to live in the one we’re standing on now?” and she says “I have a very nice apartment uptown, big enough for both of us and with a view that rivals this.” The dream ended then and he woke up. He doesn’t think he turned on the night table light — no, he had to have, but later, to write everything down. At first he just lay in bed in the dark thinking about the dream and what it might mean and how quickly she entered his dreamlife — that must mean something, he thought. Then he turned on the night table light — there was only one, on the same side of the bed he sleeps on now, the left. At least he thinks it’s the left. He’s always had trouble with that one. For facing the bed, it’s the right. But it’s got to be the left. Left side of the road, right side of the road. That doesn’t work. Maybe it’s just that he’s a little more tired than usual right now, and the whole terrible day. Nah, the last is just an excuse. Tired, maybe. He once even asked Gwen, when he got confused again as to which side is which — it had to do with something he was writing — and she told him and he knew she was right — she didn’t hesitate when she told him and she looked at him as if he were kidding — and he probably said something like “That’s what I thought,” but forgets which side she said was which. He also doesn’t remember how they decided which sides of her bed they should sleep on after they made love the first time. It wasn’t that after they were done and had uncoupled they stayed on the sides of the bed they ended up on. And he, probably with his weak bladder, no doubt got up to pee so he wouldn’t have to an hour or two later. He thinks he remembers her saying she sleeps in the middle of the bed when she sleeps alone. And he thinks he remembers saying he sleeps on only one side of his bed, and it’s a double bed like hers. She must have first said, when they were getting ready to go to sleep, “Which side of the bed would you like to sleep on?” Or he asked her which side of the bed would she like him to sleep on. Or it could be, when he got back from peeing and maybe washing his face and rinsing his mouth, that she was already on what he’ll call the right side of the bed or on the right side close to the middle. But he doesn’t recall that. He recalls one of them asking the question and his saying something like “Either side’s okay with me. Though at home, because the night table’s there, though I guess I could always move it to the other side — there’s room — I sleep on what I think’s the left,” and pointed to that side. He doesn’t remember her correcting him, so that time, unless she was just being polite or didn’t think it important enough to correct him at the time or thought it the wrong time to — their first time in bed — he thought he knew. If she had had only one night table by her bed he would have known which side she preferred sleeping on when she slept with someone. But she had matching night tables on either side, with the same kind of lamp on them. One of these lamps — the other he broke when he was trying to put back the plug that had come out of the socket behind the bed and pulled the cord too hard and the lamp fell — is on the night table now. She bought a different lamp for her side, one for two bulbs, though it was his lamp he broke, and gave him hers. Next he took the piece of paper and a large hardcover book off the night table — probably one of the Gulags—and placed the book against his upraised thighs, flattened out the paper on it and wrote the dream down on both sides of the paper and also what he thought the dream might mean and other things about it — that he’d never met anyone who entered his dreamlife so quickly, for instance, and that must mean something, and so on. He filled up both sides of the paper, knew he could write even more about the dream, but this was enough for now, he thought, and he was getting sleepy. He turned the page over to the first side and wrote in printed letters in the little space not written on at the top of the page and underlined it: “This dream is significant. 3 a.m. or thereabouts, Nov. 21st, 1978. Do not destroy!!!” After he read the notes to Gwen — only what happened in the dream, nothing about what he thought it might mean and other things related to it — he asked what she made of it and also that he’d had it so soon after they met. “Literal interpretation, I suppose you want? Then nothing more than the obvious. The long hallway resembled the stairway in Pati’s building. You know: the one I told you of that I didn’t want to walk down. Drearily lighted, dank and scary, no windows, naturally, and in a way, no door at the end of it either, on the ground floor, since it was locked or stuck the one time I tried opening it. What I don’t think I ever told you was that at the time I was petrified that I wouldn’t be able to get out of any of the doors upstairs, once I got inside the stairway. I saw myself pounding on the door on Pati’s floor till someone rescued me, and for a few moments I even thought I’d suffocate there. Real panic. So, substitute bottom of the stairs, in my real-world experience, to us walking up the last flight of stairs to the roof in your dream.” “I don’t understand,” he said, and she said “The obvious, how could you not see what I’m saying? You? My guy who rarely lets anything get past him? Please, you have to be kidding. Dankness for freshness? Unknown for the known? Dark night without end, to daylight? Seemingly lost in that corridor, to finding one’s way to release? Bleak prospect for hope, and so forth, but maybe I’m going too far with that one. With the last three, probably, and I said I’d stay literal. Although your dream did end hopefully, didn’t it? For you: the two of us together, even holding hands for a while till you started crunching mine. Now what was that all about? Perhaps to show there’s a little pain in every relationship, even at the beginning, no matter how promising and good it looks. And then, with that big sweep of the city, talking about where we should live in it and my saying why don’t you move in with me. Another thing is how protective you were of me that night. In the real world, I mean — saying you’d accompany me down that horrible stairway, and later, that you’d walk me to my subway station or bus stop, I forget which.” “Subway,” he said. “Because you thought the streets might not be safe. And in the dream, warning me not to get too close to the edge of the roof — for all I know, the warning might have been about getting involved with you — and also sort of saying that if I did fall off, you’d go over with me. You weren’t alluding there to falling for me if I fell for you, were you? No, it would have had to be the reverse, since you fell for me first. So, not only protectiveness and concern for me, but already, in the dream, sticking by me in the worst of circumstances — the literal interpretation — all of which you still are today. Even, on occasion, overprotective of me, as if you think I can’t deal with certain things or, more to the point, look after myself in what to others might be stressful situations, and I need your help. And I’m not criticizing you, you understand. Better that attitude from you than indifference and neglect, and it’s just your way. Incidentally, the roof-edge part of your dream is like a very short story you wrote before we met and was only published last year. What I’m saying is it could have snuck into your sleep and influenced that scene. The one — are you still with me?” and he was thinking something like Boy, her mouth’s on a roll; he’s never heard her go on like this, but said “Why? Sure; yes.” “That has a man jumping out of a plane after his young daughter, who was sucked out of the door when it fell off. The father grabbing the girl in the air — you had it that he catches up with her because he falls faster, being three times heavier, but I don’t think it works like that in real life — and holding her close to him and their flying together like that at the end, chatting normally and admiring the beautiful mountains and rivers and forest from so high up till they can find, he says, a safe place for a landing. It was about, I think, a father’s feeling of invincibility regarding his child, something most mothers might not feel, but I could be wrong there. You know — and this is how I think you’ll feel — that he can get his kid out of any perilous situation when they’re that young. The same reason he’d run into a burning building to save his child even if, from a practical standpoint, there doesn’t seem to be a chance in the world his rescue attempt will succeed, so instead of only the child dying — tragedy enough — they both do, something the father would probably want anyway if he couldn’t save his kid. Or maybe, taking from the last thing I said — have we talked about this before?” and he said “All you said after you read it was that you liked it and that you had read something else of mine similar in plot, maybe too much so because some readers — not that I have many; you didn’t say that; I did — might think I was repeating myself.” “That wasn’t nice of me, and I now can’t remember what it reminded me of yours.” “Free-falling.” “Still no bell rings. Not even the title. Anyway, your story also might have been about that the father knew, even before he jumped out of the plane after her, that they were both doomed, but he wanted to alleviate her fear as much as he could by not having her go down alone. Did I get close that time?” and he said “Both are good but the second’s better. But at the end they’re still flying as if it’s a perfectly normal thing for humans to do, so I don’t know. The flying part could be an after-death fantasy — I’m the last person to ask — but what else about my dream?” “Something to do with elevators. Riding down in one. I’d have to have the dream read to me again or read it myself, something I haven’t the time now to do. I know the elevator didn’t come for a while when we were waiting for it in Pati’s building, which gave us time to start talking. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have continued to talk on the street and exchanged names and my telling you how you can reach me, and so on. By the way, do you ever hear of men running into hopelessly burning buildings to save their mothers or wives?” and he said “It has to have happened; it’s just not as dramatic or emotional a news story. As for wives running in to save their husbands — I’m sure many mothers have run in for their young sons — it probably almost never happens. They instinctively know, if the fire’s really out of control, that they’re not physically capable of carrying or dragging out what in all likelihood is a much heavier and larger man.” She said “Now as to my coming into your dreamlife so fast that night — you asked that — I don’t know what to say. Can I be a little immodest by saying I might have made a strong impression, maybe even more than that? But I’m only repeating what you’ve told me a number of times, just as I’ve told you I wasn’t that immediately taken with you. Interested, curious, at least open to meeting you for coffee? Yes. You were so awkward but I thought gentle and civil and even gallant and possibly deep, funny and smart. That’s right, I took all that in. As for your dream — and I really have to get back to my work, sweetheart — starting out with you walking with your sister in that hallway and ending with you going up the stairs to the roof with only me, and I assume I was on the same side of you as your sister had been, and entering and walking around it? I’m going over old ground, I think, but that was both…oh, shoot, I lost it. It’ll come back, and when it does I bet you’ll find it wasn’t all that sharp.” “Never,” he said; “everything you say.” “Sure. What else, though, but quickly? My suggesting in the dream you live with me in my apartment? And how would you have known it was large enough for two? Maybe you were fantasizing a life with me that could go, for want of a better expression, all the way to the top. The roof’s the acme of a building, no? So: meeting for coffee, next for a glass of wine or beer, couple of dinners out, later seriously dating, sleeping together, part of our first summer together vacating to someplace north of New York, professions of love, or that came long before. You know: ‘You know I love you,’ and ‘And I love you.’ ‘But I said it first.’ ‘But I mean it as much.’ Then the big kiss and long embrace and so on. You moving in. Summer after that first summer, traveling around France. Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, Braque, Chagall, Miró, maybe a chateau. Marriage, children, years and years of me till you’re sick of my wizening face and kick me out. Or, because it’s my apartment originally — no, by then we’d be joint lessees and we would have gone through several residences, maybe even owned a house— Anyhow, you leave and take up with a woman twenty years younger than I, which would put her around thirty years younger than you. That’s me now kidding, I hope; how come you didn’t laugh?” He said something and she said “I don’t know. My mother says I’ve become a lot funnier and my sense of humor has vastly improved, since knowing you,” and he said “So you’ve said, and I agree, but then you know I would never disagree with your mother. Oy, what am I saying? Bad joke, not even close to one — mine, and no offense to your mother, whom you know I really like and admire — and only kidding with my failed jokes too. Your sense of humor and flair for comedy and also your wit, etcetera — whatever I’m trying to say — were always tops. And you have, and not just compared to me — I’m hopeless, can’t even remember punch lines to jokes I’ve heard a dozen times — a great memory for the whole joke.” “I just thought of something,” she said. “In your dream did you have to unlock the roof door to get out? And he said “Wasn’t that in what I read you? It was one of those sliding bolts, no lock, same as in the brownstone I lived in. Why do you ask?” and she said “I thought there could be some connections to the stairway’s ground floor door in Pati’s building when I tried it from the inside and it seemed locked. And no alarm went off when you unbolted and opened the door? Although I think that only happens on roof doors of buildings when someone tries to break in from the outside, though in a dream anything can be the reverse of the real. All I’m saying is that if an alarm had gone off it could have been of some relevance to me. Think of it. The first night. We’ve just met. Hardly spoke. But your fantasy life’s been fired up. You’re already dreaming of me, and in the closest sorts of ways. So something self-protective could be warning you ‘Wait a minute, hold off, don’t jump in so fast,’ especially after you ended up so disappointed and hurt in what you told me were your last three relationships the past year. Not so much the long one with Diana — that one you said was already over, other than for you sleeping with her once or twice a month, when she broke it off completely with you — but the short one with Karyn and the quickie with whatever the third one’s name was,” and he said “Nadine, and no alarm, outside or in. If there had been one I think I also would have thought what you said. But it probably would have awakened me, as dream alarms do — ringing alarms, I mean — before we stepped onto the roof.” “So I got carried away a little, but not solipsistically, I hope you don’t think.” “Once again: you? Never.” “Sometimes I think you’d let me get away with or explain myself out of anything,” and he said “Maybe anything but sleeping with someone else, which you’ve said, and I’ve said too, you’d never do.” “Why would I?” and he said “Same here, so long as we’re together, which seems we’re going to be — I don’t know how it can’t be — for life, right?” and she said “I’m glad we got that cleared up and worked out, not that I was worrying. Holding hands was sweet. I’m talking about the dream. And squeezing my hand, in addition to how I originally saw it, I’d say it was you who got dreamily carried away with your ardor or some emotion — not ardor. What am I trying to say?” and he said “Beats me.” “It could have been just your uneasiness that I’d leave you for good if you let go of my hand — translate that as my not agreeing, when you called, to meet you for even a first date — so you felt you had to clutch it to stop me from pulling it away, and squeezed too hard. Anything in that?” “Would you consider it as even a slight act of desertion if I said I don’t think so?” “Whatever reason you did it, I forgive you for hurting me. And you did seem, from your account, to let go the second I showed pain, and were genuinely sorry. Just as you are in your waking life if you accidentally hurt me — stepping on my foot, that jar of olive oil you thought you’d tucked safely away in the cupboard, or even in sex when you go in too deep or poke around the wrong hole. I did like the line — I know, I said I had to go, and I do have to, so, much fun as this is, I’ll finish up—‘Which of these buildings would you like to live in an apartment with me’—what was it again: and he read it and she said “I liked it — the way it was worded, and also the rest of the line: ‘if you don’t want to live with me in the building we’re standing on now?’ Again, what was the exact wording? Though it’s something I remembered even that much of it,” and he read it and she said “Nice, uncomplicated, no trouble in understanding what it means. Oh! And then I’m really going. Your deepest wish, hence your sister turning into me as she went up the last flight of stairs to the roof, was that she hadn’t got sick and had stayed as healthy, active and ambulatory as me,” and he said “That makes sense.”