You, or the Invention of Memory

SEVEN

It’s a presumption, she thought, for someone you’re no longer with and no longer love to write a book addressed to you. It’s equally presumptuous perhaps to assume that an unnamed character with whom you share, if only metaphorically, certain behaviors is intended as you.

Still, who else can You be if not her? More than 50 percent of the character’s attributes are hers or close enough. JB gets off on getting intimates seriously pissed off at him and she’s hardly the rule-affirming exception. That’s all she will say at the moment without her analyst in the room or at least an impartial third party, which excludes most of the people who’ve passed through the revolving doors of their story.

First things first: her name is V. Lois Lane. The V stands for Virginia and is only used on her driver’s license. She is a former Lifestyle Editor of The Daily Metropolis and is currently Articles Editor for the hippest monthly on the newstands, The Magazine.

There will be none of the evasions of anonymity in her text, though she is a shy person, who tries to disguise her shyness by saying whatever comes into her head no matter how outrageous or indiscreet. She doesn’t censor her conversation, that’s not her style, because if she did, she sorely doubts she’d ever get anything said.

What the text provisionally called YOU never mentions is that Jay and I actually lived together for an extended disputed, depending on your source, period of time. The meeting in an elevator repeatedly, circumstantially, as a means of bringing us together is pure fantasy — or literary conceit if you will. Jay and I met through an ad in, of all places, The New York Review of Books. After I broke up with Roger, my childhood sweetheart and first husband — yes, his name was actually Roger — my sister, presumably concerned about my state of mind, took out a Personals ad on my behalf in The New York Review. The idea was to interview the various respondents until she found someone she deemed suitable for me and then bring us together in a way that would seem uncontrived. Delores was in a relationship herself at the time so there was bound to be some awkwardness inherent in the procedure.

Jay, who claims never to have answered a Personals ad before, was the fourth or fifth respondent and the first to pass Lorrie’s test. Why it required six separate dates for Lorrie to settle on him as “perfect” for me remains one of those mysteries better left unexplored.

In any event, for their seventh date, Lorrie invited Jay to dinner to meet me, not mentioning to either of us at the outset the disguised intention of the invitation. In fact, we were both somewhat annoyed at the other’s unexpected presence until Lorrie, during the dessert course, offered us a slightly fictionalized version of what she had been about. “This is my sister,” she said as if that were title enough for anyone. “This is Jay sometimes called JB.”

I have a confession to make before I go any further. I was the one, the well-meaning officious one who took the ad out for my sister, who had been going through a man-hating phase. Therefore the reason for the six dates was not quite the mystery I made it out to be earlier, though I was never really sure of my motives. Why hadn’t I turned Jay over to Lorrie earlier? I can only give you my reasons at the time, which were these. There was something about him that I found elusive, even remote. Who was JB really beyond the pose of his self-presentation? With each date, I said to myself the next date will decide my course of action one way or another. And maybe — I’m not quite ready to admit this — I didn’t want to relinquish him.

Still, when I gave the dinner in which the two of them met for the first time, I was clear about what I was doing, or clear enough. I stood up during the dessert course, which was an apple crisp (from a new, untried recipe) I had made for the occasion, and announced myself. “I have an explanation to make to you, Jay,” I said. “The person I described in the ad you answered was not really me; it was my sister Lorrie. I’m sorry about the deception, but I knew Lorrie would never take an ad out on her own. So. Also, the bio I gave you about myself was Lorrie’s bio and not my information — Lorrie is the actress who day-jobs as a dental hygienist.”

At this point Lorrie interrupted. “This is unbelievable,” she said in a mild voice. “What right did you have to do that?” Jay, I noticed, seemed unruffled, continued to negotiate his crisp, though at a more meditative pace. His indifference, if that’s what it was, was more troubling to me than the anger I anticipated.

“I had hoped you would understand,” I said to him. “The person you were interested in you only thought was me when essentially it was my sister, Lorrie. I have a good feeling about you two, I do. Anyway, I’m already in a long-standing relationship and I’d be bending the truth if I said I didn’t love my partner.”

By that time we were both staring at Jay waiting for him to show his colors.

He had to swallow and then wipe the corner of his mouth with his napkin before he could speak. We waited and waited to no avail.

“I have had it up to here with both of you,” Lorrie said. “I’m going home now if there’s no objection. If I stay, I’m likely to say something you’ll both find unforgivable.”

“I’ll see you home,” he said, getting up from the table, making a point of not looking in my direction.

“I think that’s a good idea,” I said.

“I’m not going anywhere with him,” Lorrie said. “I got here by myself and I can see myself home or any place else for that matter.”

After Lorrie left, promising to call when she felt better about things, Jay and I got naked together for the first time. It started with a friendly kiss. Afterward, he said, “Was that you as yourself in bed with me or you as your sister?”

I wondered myself, but I saw no point in acknowledging the question as worthy of response.

“Will I see you again?” I said to him as he was getting ready to leave. It was the kind of question that just asks for grief, but I uttered it despite myself, oblivious to better judgment, and so was stuck with the consequences.

“Whenever you want,” he said, which might have been the most generous thing he ever said to me.

Nevertheless (it seemed only fair, didn’t it?), I was prepared to hand him over to Delores if that’s what they both wanted.

By the time Lorrie called, two days had intervened and I was in another place in regard to Jay, an emotional backwater hitherto uncharted. It was the tone of Lorrie’s call that made me aware that I was now unwilling to accept the terms of the arrangement I had authored. When she announced with muted enthusiasm that all things considered she might be willing to get together with Jay for a drink some time, I said, “No, no, forget it, please. I made a mistake and I apologize for it.”

Three months after JB and Lorrie started dating, Roger and I agreed to a trial separation., which from my perspective was merely a halfway house for ending our seven-year marriage. It was a few days after we double-dated with Jay and Lorrie that I found myself displeased with almost everything Roger did. I thought it can’t be all my fault, can it, though it probably was and it had something to do with Jay. Whatever that something was I had been aware of it for a while without acknowledging it to myself. That was about the time that Lorrie was on the blower with me virtually every day, thanking me to obnoxious excess for bringing the two of them together.

On the other hand, Jay never called to thank me for delivering Lorrie to him. Was there a message there? Maybe he still hated me for having lured him into a relationship with someone else.

I was riding in the elevator up to work and I noticed the notorious novelist whose latest self-importance I had just completed and admired (while disliking) and I felt I owed him something, a smallish smile at least, for having bad-mouthed his book to an office associate. Anyway, we exchanged smiles as we were getting off at the same floor and I said to myself let’s see where this will lead. I was up for a flirtation with this notorious chauvinist, something to make me like myself more, whatever it took to improve the weather of my self-esteem.

Lorrie announced over lunch at Zero’s that she couldn’t decide whether to move in with JB or not and then if she did (decide), whose place should it be, his bigger, hers better located and better put together. I entered the discussion with willed good faith as if we were not talking about a man I wanted (perhaps) for myself. “You know,” she said, “when we were younger, I would hardly have trusted you concerning Jay.” Funny that she thought that. My recollection was that she was the one — in high school in particular — who made a practice of going after boys who had shown interest in me first.

He asked me to stop by his place after work for a drink and I took down the information on the back of the Publisher’s Weekly I was carrying, knowing (and not allowing myself to know) what it would likely come to. He had a carelessly nurtured reputation to uphold. The rest of the day I regretted having accepted his invitation, though I confess I was curious to see how he lived. The chance to eavesdrop on the secret life of his apartment was irresistible.

“Was this his idea or yours?” I asked Lorrie, who mused over my question before changing the subject. Her evasiveness indicated to me that the suggestion to live together had not come from Jay. Later she said, “He’s been hinting in that direction but hasn’t exactly gotten around to asking.” “You barely know each other,” I said, “but of course that doesn’t mean anything.” “You see that, don’t you,” she said, “that it doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve always trusted your perceptions, Lois.”

During the prolonged displaced courtship I had with Jay, I asked him a lot of questions about himself, which he seemed more than willing to answer. He seemed less curious about who I might be, but that may only have been because it was not the real me I had on the table. Of course he didn’t know that then.

During lunch break, unable to cope with the wilted salad in front of me, I called Jay to ask his advice about Bill Worth’s invitation. “I’m in the middle of a sentence,” he said, “can I call you back?” “It’ll have to be in the evening,” I said, “when I get back from visiting Bill Worth’s place. I don’t take personal calls at work.”

“I don’t like the idea of you going to Bill Worth’s place,” he said. He had called me back at the office despite what I said to him about personal calls. “I can’t talk now,” I said, “but I appreciate your brotherly advice.”

Bill’s place was even more ostentatiously tasteful than I allowed myself to anticipate. It was also impeccably neat and, outside of the one room with book-lined walls, without much personal stamp. Even the paintings on the wall, mostly abstractions, some by painters whose names I didn’t have to go to art school to recognize, seemed relatively anonymous. In all, it was a set designer’s vision of a successful writer’s apartment. He offered me a glass of wine from what he said was a very good bottle and, after giving me ample time to drain my glass, asked if I’d like to go to bed with him. I said, “No,” and that was it. The subject was never mentioned again, though it was not an especially long visit. Forty minutes later when he saw me to the door, the feeling in the room was that he had been the one to turn me down.

That night, latish, after my uneventful visit to Bill Worth’s Village apartment, Jay called, wanting to know if my virtue was still intact. He asked in fact if I was all right, but what else might that mean? “Why this concern?” I asked.

“I feel protective toward you,” he said.

How would I have felt if Bill Worth hadn’t asked? I wondered. Would I have lied to Jay had I accepted Bill Worth’s offer? Questions concerning roads not taken tend to occupy me long after those roads are no longer on my map.

Jay was ten minutes late for our luncheon date at the Terror, a recently opened Middle Eastern restaurant with a provocative menu three blocks from work. Fortunately, I had a manuscript with me to edit, and I was marking it up with outraged queries to pass the time. When a man arrived, conspicuously out of breath from apparent running, I barely noticed his sliding into the seat opposite me, or at least I gave a good imitation of not noticing. We each waited for the other to introduce the not easily definable subject that occasioned this meeting.

“I’ve missed our lunches together,” he eventually said, an intrusion on our discussion of some movie we had separately seen.

“I don’t know if I missed you or not,” I said.

“If you don’t know then you probably haven’t,” he said as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

I couldn’t help contrasting Jay’s reaction to Bill Worth’s. Bill Worth didn’t really care a lot whether I accepted his proposition or not. You couldn’t reject him in that situation because there wasn’t enough of him at risk. On the other hand, Jay’s apparent cool was obviously worked-up. Though I might respect a man who showed his vulnerability, I was never particularly attracted to whatever it was disguised as indifference.

I had the sense, like a buzz at the back of the neck, that I would say something to Jay — that it would flame from my mouth without premeditation — something so unforgivable that he would get up and leave the table and never talk to me again.

“What if,” I said, “what if I told you I had slept with Bill Worth? Would we be here now drinking watery coffee?”

“Did you?” He took his glasses off to unleash his X-ray vision.

“Have you been sleeping with my sister?”

“What does your sister tell you?”

“We don’t discuss you in that way. I suppose I don’t want to know the answer or I know it already and don’t want to think about it.”

“So you slept with Bill Worth to get back at me for being with your sister, which, let me remind you, was your project in the first place.”

“But I said I didn’t sleep with Bill Worth.”

He held out his hand and I grabbed on to it before it got away, a gesture in complete opposition to what I was feeling about him at the moment.

“Where does this leave us?” he said.

“Well,” I said,” I’m not going to go to bed with you if that’s what you think.” In taking back my hand, I jarred my coffee cup with my elbow, about half of the cup overflowing its bounds sopping paper napkins in its wake.

“Why don’t you just throw the coffee in my face?” he said, getting up, dropping some money on the table and walking out in a way that begged for a recall.

“Bill Worth’s is bigger than yours,” I called after him, turning at least one waitress’s head.

That night, unable to sleep, I called my sister’s number and hung up when Jay answered. My memory is short. But I couldn’t remember having behaved so badly before. There were two consolations. One, that Jay was to blame, and two, that I secretly knew that I was a better person than the one on display.

A week later, Lorrie called and caught me in a less dangerous mood. It took twenty minutes of idle chatter before she found her way to the point of her call. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said. “Jay and I have decided it wasn’t meant to be.”

I felt immediately sympathetic and inexplicably anxious. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I appreciate your saying that,” she said. “I felt bad because you gave him to me as a kind of gift and I think it’s just terrible to throw a gift back in the giver’s face, but I think he preferred your imitation of me to the real thing. We were never really on the same wavelength.”

“I don’t think I ever understood what that expression means,” I said.

When Lorrie took pains to explain the expression to me, I knew she wasn’t suffering Jay’s loss to any terrible extent. “Would you mind a lot if I dated Jay?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I might. Could you at least wait a couple of months?”

I thought I could, but when it came down to it I couldn’t. My plan was to let a month pass and then take it from there, call him or e-mail him, depending on how I felt at the time. It seemed to me a reasonable plan and I probably would have held to it if I hadn’t impatiently phoned him three days after Lorrie reported their split. It was not a random headstrong act, my call. I woke up during the night, taken in hand by a dream in which Jay came to the door to sell me the O-Z volume of an anatomical encyclopedia, which I refused to buy unless the A-N was also included. I asked myself: Why would Jay have broken up with Lorrie so soon after our edgy lunch unless he was sending me a message? The message, as I read it, was, “I’m available to you.” It seemed only good manners to respond.

I had to call three times before I circumvented his answering machine and even when I got him live so to speak, my first impulse was to return the phone gently to its cradle. In answer to his bored “Hello,” I said in a somewhat accusing voice, “Why have you broken with my sister?” And then, listening to myself in echo, I laughed crazily.

“Are you asking for yourself,” he said, “or as a spokesperson for the local chapter of the dating police?”

“I won’t do anything that will hurt my sister,” I said. “If we’re going to see each other — is that what you want? I hope so because it’s what I want — we’re going to have to be circumspect for a while. I hate lying, I do, but I don’t want to hurt Lorrie. Do you want to come by tonight? There’s a Moroccan takeout down the street that three different people have recommended to me.”

He didn’t answer right away, which I never quite forgave him for. “Am I really smaller than Bill Worth?” he said.

“Oh come on,” I said. “I never saw Bill Worth’s. I was just …”

For three weeks or so, we got away with it or at least no one — certainly not Lorrie — let me know she knew what was going on. Many of our mutual acquaintances assumed she and Jay were still an item and it wasn’t my business, was it, to tell anyone it wasn’t so. My semi-regular conversations with Lorrie probably showed some strain, though Lorrie for her own reasons refused to notice. It was our habit to touch base virtually every other day and eventually Jay’s name popped up, Lorrie going back and forth in her feelings about him, mostly glad it was over, wishing he would call some time, aggrieved that he hadn’t cared enough to try to patch things up. When she talked against him, even mildly, which was Lorrie’s style, it was all I could do not to argue in his defense.

Deceiving your own sister is no fun or too much guilty pleasure for any decent person to acknowledge her exhilaration.

I didn’t believe I was doing anything wrong, but I longed to confess, wrote Lorrie an apologetic letter which I very nearly posted.

In the end it was Roger who blew the whistle, mentioning it to Lorrie as a by the way, assuming (so he said) that she already knew.

“I don’t think I’ll ever talk to you again,” Lorrie said to me on the blower and then stayed on another fifteen minutes to chat.

Right after Lorrie found out about us and stopped talking to me (except those times when she absolutely couldn’t avoid it), Jay and I had a series of fights leading to a period of estrangement — a kind of irrevocable breakup — that lasted eight days by my count and nine by his.

We broke up again a few months later — this time for two weeks, a period in which we both dated other people — and after that we talked about moving in together.

There was a lot of possibly unfounded distrust going on between us, often taking the form of jealousy, and for our first six months together we kept looking for evidence (and finding it) of betrayal and bad faith. One thing I had come to know about myself was that if I didn’t even the score with someone who had done me wrong (the melodramatic phrase says it all) I would be unforgivingly unhappy with us both.

It was an intuitive thing. I lived my life as if reprisal, or the threat thereof, was a necessary deterrent to betrayal.

An example: When Jay told me some old flame of his has invited him to lunch to ask his advice about some live-in boyfriend who no longer lived-in. I said it would make me unhappy if he went to this lunch.

“I’m not going to break this appointment because you’re unreasonably jealous,” he said. “I promise you it’s just advice she wants from me.”

“You don’t have to go,” I said. “You can’t be the only source of wisdom in her life.”

“I can’t not go just because you don’t want me to,” he said.

I didn’t understand why not and remain to this day thoroughly puzzled by his explanation.

So when he went to lunch with Francesca — I believe that was her name — I called Bill Worth at his unlisted number and teased another invitation from him to his apartment. After soliciting the invitation, I couldn’t in clear conscience turn him down a second time, could I?

Some time later, wanting to heal the rift I confessed the Bill Worth episode. “I did it because you went to lunch with thing,” I said.

We were walking in the street at the time, going to a dinner party at our friends, the Powers, and Jay turned his back on me and crossed the street. I crossed over, and when I caught up, put my arm around his shoulder, regretting everything particularly my confession. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “but you know it didn’t matter.”

“I didn’t sleep with Francesca,” he said.

“But you might have,” I said. “She probably wanted you to. You probably wanted to yourself.”

He pulled away and stomped on ahead and I trailed behind as if we were attached by invisible wires.

We rode different elevators up to the party, or Jay walked up — I forget (I forget a lot of things) — the point being that we didn’t talk all night. Or the next day either.

While I was at work, I called him at the place we shared, not to check up on him — that was not my intent the first time around — and got no answer. I called at a time he was almost always at his desk, writing — it was his habit, his willed commitment, to sit in front of his word processor for four hours every morning — so his not being there had its ominous aspect. I waited an hour, though it was a closing day on The Magazine and I didn’t have time for craziness, and then tried to reach him a second time, and a third, and a fourth. So he was out and about, getting back at me. It wasn’t so much that I was furious at him, which I suppose I was, as I was mortally disappointed. I mean, this is a man who has his hero say in a novel, “Everything is forgivable.” On the other hand, I tended to believe that what isn’t tolerable isn’t forgivable.

I didn’t ask him where he had been. I saw no point in inviting further deception. Instead, I only pretended to leave for work in the morning and instead hung out at the subway station — anyway, I had some manuscripts to read — and sure enough at a few minutes after eleven o’clock he appeared. Jay rarely noticed his surroundings and this morning he was even more preoccupied than usual so I had no problem following him without his being aware of my shadowing presence.

I was planning just to note the station he exited and then go on to work, but I had come this far so I got off the train — I had been in the car behind his — to see where the trail led. I had barely taken a step when he turned suddenly in my direction and came toward me, unaware of me until we were barely a foot apart. He seemed pleased to see me and we hugged before negotiating the issue of what each of us was doing there. My story was that I was meeting a writer but that I had confused the time. He offered no explanation, suggested we go somewhere for coffee.

We walked with our arms around each other and I forgot, let myself forget, the reason for my being here. After coffee, we hugged as though we were separating after an illicit meeting, a desperate extended hug, and, in love, I went off to work at The Magazine and he went … wherever he went.

And when we came back together at home at the end of the day, I asked him in an unguarded moment, a teasing smile on my face, if he had been meeting another woman when we ran into each other.

He said, “Of course not,” and I wanted to believe him, I would have believed him, I almost believed him.

“Then what were you doing on Chambers Street?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“It matters if you refuse to tell me,” I said. All this was going on in a bantering, friendly way, though making me extremely anxious at the same time.

“Maybe you’ll just have to trust me,” he said.

“Or not,” I said. “What would you have said if I had said the same thing to you?”

The conversation ended, as so many of them did the first year we lived together, when one or the other of us walked into the next room. It eased the tensions and made it possible for us to go on together.

I told Leo of the difficulties Jay and I were experiencing and he asked — Leo had also been Jay’s therapist for a while — if I thought a joint session might be useful. I said it wasn’t something I was interested in pursuing right now.

“Why is that?” he wanted to know.

I had my reasons but I was not ready to share them with Leo, whose natural sympathies were with the male figure in the relationship.

I bring this up now because Leo figures more importantly later in the story.

So we had no family counseling from Leo and we failed to talk through our problems, but after the first year, after my sister forgave me and Roger came back into the fold as a friend, we settled into a routine of comforting conflict. Leo would say in later years that we swept our problems under the rug, but for a while there it seemed as if the metaphorical rug had kind of lifted off the ground on its own.

Anyway, that’s my version of the story of how we got together.

EIGHT

This was the first (and she hoped, last) ad she took out in the Personals section of a magazine and she wanted to put her best foot forward without setting up her respondents for disappointment. This was the second draft: “40ish woman, sometimes thought beautiful, creative, cunning, quirky, with advanced degree in English literature, wants to meet intelligent man between 30 and 50, who listens more than he talks.” In the third draft, she dropped “sometimes,” replaced “cunning” and “quirky” with “original” and added “feeling” between “intelligent” and “man.” She also added, “Right wing zealots need not apply,” but then decided “intelligent” and “feeling”—maybe change feeling to humane — would obviate against closed-mindedness. Still, she barely recognized herself in the description she was issuing, which concerned her only for the limited time she thought about it.

Before placing the ad, she called a few friends on the phone and read them the possibly final draft, writing down the best of the suggestions for improvement, though turning in the notice pretty much as was. As soon as the Personal was out of her hands, as soon as it appeared in the paper, the whole business filled her with revulsion. She vowed to herself not to pursue the matter.

But when a few days passed and an envelope arrived with twenty-seven responses and two days after that, another with nineteen more, making it — addition had never been her strong suit — forty-five or forty-six in all, she piled them on her desk and began to read them like an eavesdropper or, more to the point, like an editor.

Some she discarded after reading a line or two. An ax murderer with a good prose style was preferable in her view to an uninteresting mind. More often she read them from beginning to end and found herself mildly curious as to who the writer might really be behind the calculated disguise of his prose. She warmed to those writers who avoided salesmanship and were just a little self-deprecating. At some point she found herself sorting them into piles.

The discards were filed away under the categories, Bores and Serial Killers, sometimes mutually inclusive. The third category, the survivors, found themselves under the all-purpose rubric: Others. She let a week pass before reassessing the nine surviving respondents.

The first one she read, the one arbitrarily sitting at the top of her “Others” pile, moved her but she couldn’t say why afterward. When you looked at it with a cold eye, it seemed barely a cut above ordinary. She put it aside, then read two others that were much cleverer, and a fourth that had a distinctive if unlikable voice, then returned to the first.

It was not so much the letter itself that needed revisiting as her uncharacteristically sentimental response to it. Its appeal was in the kind of risk the author seemed to take, though the letter was pseudonymous, signed, of all things, “Lonely on Livingston Street.” The second (or was it third?) reading moved her almost as much as, perhaps even more than, the first, and she wrote an e-mail letter in response. She might have phoned — he had also given her his phone number — but it seemed appropriate to take small steps, small sure steps, rather than throw herself headlong into something she might later regret.

Dear Lonely on Livingston Street (she wrote),

I admired the directness and simplicity of your letter, and I was touched despite my native skepticism by your undisguised defenselessness. I will try to offer the same spirit of openness in return. Very few of the men I’ve known would have had the courage to make the kind of admissions you have openly offered in your letter. I know from personal experience how desolating loneliness can be, but it’s also important — I hope you see this as I do — to be independent and self-sufficient. Being with someone in a mutually-fulfilling relationship is desirable, but a relationship should not be used like wallpaper — you see that, don’t you? — over disintegrating walls. I’ve been there too. I’m beginning, I know, to sound a bit psycho-babblish here and I apologize or, to be wholly honest with you, don’t apologize. I am a bookish person who prefers movies to theater, chamber music to opera, conceptual art to traditional painting — I know what I like and my tastes tend to be passionate. Still, I try to be open whenever possible to what I don’t know. I have the capacity to change my mind, though sometimes it takes awhile. People tell me I am an intuitive person and it pleases me to think so. My politics tend to be liberal, but I also tend to vote the person — that’s the intuitive part — over the apparent issues. I come from Baptists on my mother’s side and atheists on my father’s and my own religious leanings lie somewhere in between if such an unlikely territory exists.

If I sound like the kind of person you’d like to meet, I’d appreciate receiving another letter from you.

Yours sincerely,

Caring and Companionable in Chelsea

And those were the first volleys of what turned out to be an extended correspondence between C&C and the man who signed himself Lonely on Livingston, whose name, he eventually confided, was Saul. Two and a half months passed before they made an appointment to meet the following Friday night — it was her idea not his — and she wondered as the time got closer if she had set herself up for disappointment.

They agreed to meet at a café on the outskirts of Soho at 6 o’clock, each to be dressed all in black to facilitate identification. The first plan was to wear yellow carnations in their buttonholes, but the idea was more clichéd than she could bear and since she had just gotten herself a new black sweater, the in-black plan was a last-minute modification. No matter, it was still too “Shop Around the Corner” and therefore a tad embarrassing.

In any event, she wanted to observe Saul first, see what kind of appearance he made no matter the beauty of his spirit, before she presented herself. To this purpose, she arrived ten minutes late and peered warily through the blue-tinted window of the café. A little more than half the tables were occupied, mostly in groups of twos. There were a few single women waiting apparently for dates or husbands, but not an unattended man (dressed in whatever color) waiting for a woman in black. Saul had seemed so eager when she suggested the meeting and yet, unless there had been some mix-up regarding the place, he had seemingly not turned up. More likely, he was just delayed. A meeting postponed as long as theirs was fraught with all kinds of anxiety. Instead of entering the café and taking a table, she decided to walk around — look into shop windows — to give Saul opportunity to arrive at Café Retro before she made her entrance.

She was four blocks away when she hurried back, not wanting to make Saul feel that he had been deserted. Again, she peered through the window to assess the crowd. This time there was a man seated by himself, a man of Saul’s age perhaps, which he said was forty-seven, interestingly ugly if something of a pudge, but he was wearing faded jeans and a dark blue (almost black) turtleneck. He was studying the menu as if he were trying to decipher a coded message.

She entered the restaurant and walked slowly past the man’s table, before seating herself at the vacant one adjacent to his. He had not looked up when she passed him, which meant what? She was in no mood to guess. Which meant most likely that he was not expecting someone. Or, as his correspondence indicated, he was painfully shy.

It was only after the waitress arrived to take his order that he raised his head. She looked over and smiled and the man (Saul?) nodded to her in acknowledgment.

Collecting herself as it were, menu in tow, she edged over to his table, but his head was down again and she had to clear her throat to attract his attention. “May I join you?” she asked, a question he studied a moment without answering. She tried again. “Are you waiting for someone?” she asked.

“I’ve been waiting for someone all my life,” he said.

That confused her, but as she was already in the process of joining him, she took a seat. “You’re not dressed in black,” she said.

He gave his clothes a surreptitious glance before answering. “I guess not,” he said.

The waiter was hovering so she ordered a decaf latte and a blueberry-apricot tart while her companion glowered at the menu in apparent disappointment. He eventually settled unhappily on a medium-rare burger and an iced tea. “These places never have what I want,” he said.

“What do you want that they don’t have?” she asked.

“That’s just it,” he said. “I never know what I want until I see it on the menu.”

“And so there may be nothing that you want,” she said. “Or something so out of the ordinary …” She left the sentence unfinished rather than say something impolite.

After about a half-hour of missed cues and mostly nonsequential conversation, she began to look over her shoulder for the possible emergence of the real Saul. And yet every once in a while, her companion would allude to something that very possibly referred to some matter from their five-month correspondence. It was disconcerting, and she considered asking him directly who he was, but the context, if there was one, restrained her. She liked the way their mutual shyness played off against the other.

“I don’t usually invite myself to other people’s tables,” she said or told friends she said after the event, or non-event, was over.

“I never thought you did,” he said, finishing his hamburger before she finished her tart.

When he got up to leave, he offered his hand to shake, wiping it thoroughly with his napkin before presenting it. The gesture seemed to parody itself, but she played along. At least that’s the way it happened in the story she told to her handful of confidantes.

Saul was silent — no e-mail from him the next day or the day after that, no apology, no explanation — and she assumed (what else?) that this episode in her life was concluded.

She spent a few restless nights concocting scenarios as to why Saul had stood her up, the worst of them infiltrating her dreams, and then she willed herself not to think about him at all.

The following week, out of some impulse she didn’t understand, though perhaps it’s the nature of impulses not to be understood, she revisited the café she had been to the week before. She had hoped to show up at the same time as last week, but the impulse to revisit, which took over at the last possible minute, delayed her arrival.

There were no hesitations, no peering through windows, this time around. She merely entered the café as if she was meeting someone there (well, she was, wasn’t she?) and headed directly toward his table.

She was all but positive that the man sitting alone at the same table with his back to the door was the same man she had joined last week and she took the seat across from him before discovering to her unacknowledged embarrassment that it was someone else altogether.

“How are you doing?” he said as if he knew her.

“Do I know you?” she asked. “You do look familiar.”

“I was wondering the same thing myself,” he said. “Jay.” He offered his hand, but she had already gotten up.

“I thought you were someone else,” she said. “Sorry.”

“I am someone else,” he said, “but you’re welcome to stay. There aren’t any other free tables.”

She hesitated, was about to turn around and check out the room, but that seemed rude and so she slid back into her seat.

It was the same ritual as last week except with a different partner and at the end of the meal, Jay, if that was his real name, insisted on taking her check.

“I’m the intruder,” she said. “I ought to buy you lunch.” She held out her hand, expecting to be rebuffed but instead found herself holding both checks.

“I’ll leave the tip,” he said.

They walked out of the restaurant together and she said goodbye at the door, thanking him in her coolest manner for the pleasure of his company. Nevertheless, he walked along with her to the next corner, oblivious to her well-mannered dismissal of him.

“When will I see you again?” he asked at the corner.

She smiled, less at him than at the opportunity he was offering her. “Never, I hope,” she said, and instead of walking off as she planned, putting as much distance between them as possible, she waited for a response.

He seemed momentarily dismayed, though that may have been an illusion encouraged by expectation. In the next moment, the post-dismayed moment, he put his hand on her shoulder and urged her gently toward him. It all happened so fast or so slowly she didn’t have time to react or then again had too much time. Then he kissed her on the top of the head as if she were his niece for godssake, and moved off.

“Hey,” she called after him.

After a moment’s hesitation, he dutifully turned around and seemed to be returning without actually moving toward her. Then she realized that it was she who was approaching him. “Why did you do that?” she asked, arms crossed in front of her. She took no enduring responsibility for the belligerence in her tone.

He shrugged, then apologized half-heartedly and walked off. If she hadn’t felt compelled to get back to the office, she might have gone after him and given him the shaking he deserved. She hadn’t met a man she disliked so much in the longest time.

Lois developed a theory that Saul 1 and Saul 2 were somehow in cahoots with the probably pseudonymous Jay, who appeared at the same table Saul 2 sat at the week before. No acceptable explanation offered itself. Of course gratuitous nastiness could explain almost anything.

She promised herself that she would not return to the café at the same time the following Thursday, but when the time came she could barely keep herself from turning up. She had lunch in at her desk and read ten pages of a new Nadine Gordimer novel, actually reading five pages twice so as not to lose her way.

When she announced to her therapist that she was proud of her restraint he seemed unimpressed. “If it were me, I would have been curious to find out who was going to show up this time,” he said.

“I don’t like being the butt of someone’s deranged idea of a joke,” she said.

“How can you be sure it’s a joke?” he asked.

“I just know,” she said, regretting what seemed now like a missed opportunity.

The next day she appeared at Café Retro at the usual time — this time she was actually five minutes early — and found her table occupied by three women. There was no one there she recognized; eventually, she took a table by herself in the back.

It was one of those days when nothing on the menu appealed to her so she settled for a Caesar Salad and a Bloody Mary for her lunch, the salad to make herself feel virtuous and the drink as a reward for suffering the constraints of virtue.

If she were a food critic, and she had done some restaurant reviewing in the past, the salad would have gotten a C-plus/B-minus, losing points for the packaged croutons. For a second or two, she harbored the illusion that someone was casting a pall over her salad and eventually she looked up to see a familiar figure hovering alongside her table.

When he took a seat before asking permission and without invitation she realized that what she thought was a second anchovy had only been an aspect of his shadow. “Do you mind?” he said.

And what if she did? “Yes,” she whispered. Though she had not forgotten her instinctive dislike of him, she was also, if unexpectedly, glad to see him.

“I’d all but given up running into you again,” he said.

“This is not my usual place,” she said. And then she told him as economically as possible, the story of the two Sauls, searching his face to see if any of this was news to him.

The story seemed to confuse him and he questioned her on several of the details, seeming to miss the point or make something else, something more elaborate and complicated, out of it altogether.

“I’ll tell you why I don’t believe your story,” he said. “Someone like you would never take out a Personals ad.”

His presumptions knew no bounds, she decided, though perhaps his remark was meant as some kind of oblique compliment. “Why wouldn’t somebody like me take out a Personals ad?” she let herself ask.

If she were pressing for a compliment, if that’s what it was — she had the idea that she was trying to decode him — she should have known in advance, shouldn’t she, that he was hardly the kind of person to honor such unworthy requests. “You just wouldn’t,” he said.

She laughed at the persistence of his evasiveness. On the other hand, she tended to believe that he was on to her in some not easily defined way. Though she had of course taken out the ad, it was an uncharacteristic gesture. “Thank you, I think,” she said.

“If what I said translated into a compliment,” he said, “it was not exactly intended.”

“What an obnoxious thing to say,” she said. She found herself eating her barely tolerable salad in slow motion so as not to finish before his order even arrived.

When the waiter asked if he might remove her plate, which had three orphaned leaves and a crouton remaining, she waved him off. There was work still to do. Ignoring the tempting fry dangled in her direction, she choked down the last leaf of grass, and mopped up the dregs of the dressing with a wedge of bread. Noting that he was halfway through his chicken and mozzarella sandwich, she signaled the waiter over, ordered a cup of coffee and studied the dessert menu as if she might be quizzed on it afterward.

“What looks good?” he asked.

“I never order dessert,” she said. “Reading the description is pleasure enough.”

After he claimed the check, getting no resistance from her this time around, she got herself together to leave. She expected him to ask for her number while planning to deny his request, the language of her refusal gradually forming itself in her mind.

“See you around,” he said.

Their encounter felt incomplete and she continued to sit across from him, imagining herself telling him that he was so not her type, he was beyond hope of alteration. It annoyed her no end that he refused to give her the opportunity she had been anticipating. “Well, goodbye,” she said. “I forget your name.”

“Sometimes I forget it myself,” he said.

This time, leaving the restaurant more or less together, they went off in opposite directions. She couldn’t help feeling somewhat insulted by his decision to honor her feelings in regard to him.

At therapy that evening, she talked about the incident with Leo, who seemed inappropriately amused at her account. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re angry at this man you barely know because he didn’t give you the opportunity to hurt his feelings.”

“When you put it that way,” she said, “it makes me sound like a bad person. All I wanted … well, maybe I did want to hurt him a little. He was so arrogant and he led me on. Anyway, I don’t have to ever see the son of a bitch again.”

“And unless you return to that café, you probably won’t,” Leo said. “So what is all this anger about?”

She was disappointed at Leo for being less than his most perspicacious self. “If you think it’s because I’m interested in that, you’re barking up the wrong tree this time around.”

He was silent for a change, gave her one of his severe looks. “Did I say that I thought you were interested in this guy you went back to the restaurant a second time to see?” he said. “I don’t recall saying anything of the kind. If this guy doesn’t matter, let’s talk about what does. In any event, I’m the person you’re angry at now.”

“I don’t like it when you manipulate what I say,” she said, struck by the recognition that she had said the same thing almost verbatim two sessions ago. “I’m not angry at you, damn it.” Hearing herself, she smiled ruefully. The guy does matter in some way, she thought, unwilling to say it, unwilling to let the thought linger. But he shouldn’t. “Can we change the subject?” she said. “OK?”

The following Wednesday, she went back to Café Retro with a colleague who had never been there before and was disappointed not to see her tormentor at his usual table.

About halfway through the meal — the food less inspired than the PR she had given it — she noticed the man she thought of as Saul 2, eating alone about five tables away. She got up abruptly, excused herself (or didn’t) and sidled between tables with exceeding grace (she imagined) to ask the question that had been obsessing her.

She had to clear her throat to catch his attention. “Oh hi,” he said, looking up, held by the short leash (she thought) of some hugely diverting internal life.

“Do you know a man about your age with a reddish beard who calls himself Jay?” she asked.

“No,” he said too quickly. “I don’t think so. Should I?”

She didn’t know him well enough to accuse him of being a liar. “I don’t know if you ever told me your name,” she said.

“I guess I didn’t,” he said.

“Look, if you see Jay, would you give him a message for me?” she said. “Would you tell him …?” But there was no message she wanted to leave and besides the reluctant messenger seemed to have retreated into the sanctuary of his inner life. She returned to her table without saying goodbye.

Was it the next day? More than likely several days passed before she got the unexpected phone call she had somehow been waiting for. The voice was familiar, though not so familiar that she placed it immediately. “I understand that you wanted to hear from me,” he said after first establishing that she was no other than herself.

“Now that I hear your voice,” she said, “I’m not sure that I do.”

“OK,” he said. “Look, I’ve been invited to a book party tonight — I’m not good at phone invitations — but if you’re into crowds and finger foods, I wouldn’t mind having you along.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Who’s the writer?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You never heard of him. If you don’t want to go, we can do this another time. Or never.”

“You bring an exceptional lack of grace to even the smallest things,” she said. “Will you pick me up or do I have to meet you there?”

“I don’t mind picking you up if that’s what you want,” he said, “though I think it might be more fun if we arrive at the party separately and pretend to be former lovers who had just run into each other after twenty years apart.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, almost amused by the idea. “And for whom are we performing this childish charade?”

A compromise was negotiated. He would pick her up at The Magazine and take her to the party — that is, take her to the building in which the party was taking place — and one of them would go on up while the other would walk around the block or go across the street for coffee before making an entrance.

The problem was, their agreement hadn’t stipulated which of them would do which and they got into a mild dispute on arrival when Jay suggested that she go up first. “I think I’d rather be the one getting the cup of coffee,” she said.

She could tell that he was not very adaptable because he worried the issue for almost a minute before offering a grudging, “Fine.”

So it was settled, but then she thought maybe it was better after all for her to be the one to go in first. “If someone asks,” she said, “who do I say invited me to the party?”

“No one will ask,” he said. “Probably a third of the people there will be crashers.”

“Who invited you?” she asked.

“I wasn’t exactly invited,” he said. “My agent suggested I come. You want her name? Her name is Marianna Dodson and she’s also what’s his name’s agent, the guy for whom the party is being made.”

“I know Marianna Dodson,” she said. “We’ve never met but I’ve talked to her on the phone and we’ve had e-mail exchanges.”

“So this is what we’ll do,” he said. “You’ll present yourself to Marianna and when I notice you talking to her I’ll come over and she’ll introduce you to me. And you’ll say we’ve met, but that it was a long time ago and I’ll say I remember but you’ll be skeptical. We can improvise from there. Did I tell you how much I like what you’re wearing?”

She waved him off and went into the building, noticing someone she knew slightly in the group going in ahead of her, a writer who had done a piece for her a while back.

Once she got into the crowded apartment and talked to a few people, some of whom she had met before, and got herself a glass of white wine, she let Jay’s scenario for her slide out of mind, though she looked around for him every once in a while, made uneasy by his absence.

Finally, an hour or so into the party, she spotted him for the first time, standing at the edge of a conversation between two men, neither of whom she knew, and she smiled in his direction but went unnoticed or ignored. She edged her way over, crossing his line of vision, and stood by his side, waiting to be noticed. He continued to ignore here.

“I believe we’ve met,” she said when he turned toward her, smiling without recognition, taken aback by her presence.

“Of course,” he said. “Anyone who’d ever met you before would not forget you.”

“I can see you don’t remember me,” she said, looking around her to see if anyone was listening in. “It was a long time ago. It was in another lifetime really.” Four or five people seemed to be eavesdropping on their conversation.

“Of course I remember you,” he insisted, but she could tell that he was bluffing and she was not inclined to let him get away with it.

“OK,” she said, “What’s my name?”

A woman came over — his agent she assumed — and took Jay by the arm, saying in this annoying way that there was someone she wanted him to meet.

She took his other arm, and said in the mildest of voices, “He’s meeting me at the moment.”

“And you are …?” the agent asked.

“Lois Lane,” she said.

“Of course,” the agent said. “Marianna Dodson. We’ve talked on the phone a number of times. I’m so pleased to meet you in person. You know, I thought I recognized the voice, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure.”

“This man and I knew each other twenty-one years ago and haven’t seen each other since,” she said. “I can spare him another twenty minutes.”

Marianna Dodson apologized for intruding and seemed to back away, absorbed by the crowd.

Twenty minutes later when they caught up with each other again their meeting had the aura of fateful good fortune.

What else could they do but leave the party together, their story, or snatches of it, bruited about in the shadowy corners of the room where only the eavesdropping imagination could overhear.

Once they had established a past, there was no point in denying themselves a present. She spent the night in Jay’s apartment and when she left in the early afternoon of the next day it had already been arranged that they would meet for dinner that evening.

Four months later, she sublet her apartment and moved into his place, which was marginally larger, for the short term. After a while, when his place began to seem oppressively small, they sublet a house together in Prospect Heights, a yet-undiscovered Brooklyn neighborhood in the throes of gentrification.

Two years later, when they found themselves caught up in an escalating, unacknowledged battle of wills, the word marriage insinuated its way into their dialogue.

NINE

In the revisionist version, after sharing an apartment for three years, they agreed in principle to get married, a fight-reconciling decision on a motoring trip through Canada that came hard on the heels of an agreement never to see the other again after they got back to the States.

The decision, a triumph of last ditch desperation, represented a rare unanimity but it was not without attendant issues. As Lois saw it, they needed to decide as quickly as possible whether to have a real wedding (and consequently who to invite and how many) or whether to get married on the road by a justice of the peace. Jay said it was all the same to him while she said that she would abide by his choice.

“I can go either way,” he said.

“I don’t care for big weddings,” she said, “but don’t you think the nature of the ceremony might have something to do ultimately with the quality of the marriage itself? As a case in point, Roger and I knew our marriage was doomed when the minister that married us — and he seemed a serious man at the time — ran off with the daughter of one of his parishioners.”

“I think I like the idea of getting married on the road,” he said.

“Do you really? Why?”

“Well,” he said, “if the minister misbehaves after the fact, we’ll probably never be the wiser.”

What he said made no sense to her though in the spirit of accommodation, she let it pass without comment. “If you want to get married on the road, if that’s what you really want, sweetheart,” she said, “then that’s what we’ll do. Is that what you really want?”

“I want to do whatever pleases you,” he said. “Would you look at the map to see where we might cross over into the U.S.”

She groaned. “You know how I hate reading maps. Isn’t it enough that I agreed to marry you? If I have to look at the map to make that happen, I’d just as well keep things as they are.”

They had had this conversation before or some variant of it and he wondered if whatever fight was in the offing, and he was dying to tangle, might be prevented if he kept his cool in the face of irresistible provocation. For no good reason, he turned left at the next intersection and after several miles of uninhabited desolation turned left again. That they were lost, or so it seemed, and that it was her fault, irritated him to distraction. And then, out of seeming nowhere, a sign appeared: US Border—14 mi.

“You see,” she said, “you can get anywhere you want without my having to look at the map.” Her flickering fondness for him returned in momentary abundance.

During the customs interview, when asked if they had anything to declare, she told the guards that they had crossed the border the other way just a few hours ago and were returning to the States to get married before resuming their trip. Before she could complete her story, the pleasanter of the two officials asked them to pull over to the building on the right. For the next several hours, their car was taken apart and their belongings ransacked.

They sat on a couch in the hut on the side of the road, holding hands during their detainment, glancing through the window behind them from time to time to see what progress was being made. There was an extended period during which nothing happened while the official assigned to taking apart their car took a lunch break.

Jay paced the room, suddenly impatient, feeling claustrophobic.

She got up after a while and walked alongside him. “Are you thinking the same thing I am?” she asked.

He finessed his answer. “It’s not worth it,” he said.

“Coward,” she whispered back.

When they were told they could go, she said to the woman official, who had initially seemed sympathetic, “Don’t you people have anything better to do with your time?”

Later, when they were on the road again, she thanked him for protecting her from her worst instincts and he had to turn away from the road, in momentary risk, to see that she meant it.

In some way it changed nothing. In almost every other way, it put a favorable light on all the things that disturbed her about being together. They got married at a justice of the peace in Presque Isle, Maine, the ceremony only unforgettable in its total absence of memorable detail. And then they recrossed the Canadian border to continue on the trip they had planned and unplanned during their carefree, bickering single days.

They both agreed that the ceremony was mercifully unpretentious and that, no doubt, they could have done worse.

They spent a day and an overnight in Montreal and Quebec City en route to Nova Scotia, doing the recommended sights along the way with a kind of bemused, disinterested patience, idiot grins on their faces (grist for unseen photographers) as if they were on a real honeymoon and indeed genuinely absurdly happy.

Two months after their return, the honeymoon glow barely faded, she discovered herself obsessively attached to someone else. This invasive presence in her life was a handyman hanger-on at the gym she went to dutifully on Wednesday nights, and was not like anyone else she had ever liked before. And if that weren’t enough reason to avoid him, the man was either obnoxious to her or showed no apparent interest, which she took as interchangeable provocations. He had a reputation, which she didn’t wholly credit, for groping women indiscriminately. The nasty stories circulating about him in the gym engendered — she despised the women telling the stories — a kind of perverse sympathy.

One night, later than usual, doing her repetitions on the stairmaster, angry at Jay for reasons yet to define themselves, she noticed that the only other person in the gym was the same narcissistic, muscle-bound creep, his name Luther, she had been fantasizing about. Though behind a desk on the far side of the room, a book open in front of him — she imagined the pages blank or a pornographic comic book secreted inside — she had the sense that he was inhaling her every move.

Where had everybody else gone? The important thing was not to show him she was afraid. Fear, she had read somewhere or heard said or instinctively knew, was catnip to the pitiless. She noticed on the wall clock — she must have dozed at some point — that it was 10 minutes short of midnight and the clock seemed hardly to be moving. She toweled off in a kind of slow-motion, though she had long since stopped sweating, put her coat around her shoulders and promised herself to walk past the dragon without so much as glancing at him.

She was already by him when he spoke. “Goodnight sweetcheeks,” he said in a barely audible voice.

Outraged, she spun around to confront him. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” she said. “I could report you for that. You know that.”

She imagined him laughing at her but instead he said nothing, his thuggish face in the book he had armed himself with, the title registering subliminally as she left the gym as Persuasion by Jane Austen, one of her favorite novels.

Jay was asleep when she came in at whatever impossibly late hour and she had to wait until morning to answer his prying questions with the partially true, almost convincing story she had over-rehearsed the night before on the slow subway ride home.

“OK,” he said when she had finished with the story and it felt to her like a slap.

“I don’t like you questioning me like that,” she said. “You make me feel like a criminal.”

“No one can make you feel like a criminal,” he said, not quite looking at her, “if you don’t already feel like a criminal.”

She walked away, then came back, came up to him from behind and tapped him on the shoulder. “If you are accusing me of something,” she said, ruing each word, “I think you ought to say right out what it is.”

“You’ve been accusing yourself,” he said, stepping away, willing to let her escape.

“I told you what happened,” she said. “I fell asleep. If you can’t trust me, if you’re going to be jealous over every little thing… Sometimes, Jay, you really piss me off, you know?”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, a poor exit line he privately conceded, not at his best when under attack.

They made up in bed that night, or seemed to, each apologizing in turn with exaggerated conviction, their urgent lovemaking like the Hollywood movie of itself.

She went to sleep happy and woke with intimations of despair: her marriage to Jay had nowhere to go but down. And then Jay made it worse, confirmed her in her worst premonitions, by suggesting she give up going to the gym on Wednesday nights.

In fact, she had already decided not to go the following week, but Jay’s bullying demand made it difficult, virtually impossible, to follow through on her decision. Whatever was going to happen, he had, if unwittingly — the evidence filed away for future debate — brought it on himself.

He was awake on her return from the gym the following Wednesday, lazing like a slug on the living room couch, watching a basketball game on television.

“I see that you get your exercise through empathy,” she said, passing him by on the way to the bathroom. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed him glancing at his watch. She had made up her mind, no matter what, that she would make no excuses for the lateness of the hour, would make no attempt to account for herself at all.

There was no making it up this time around. He lay with his back to her in bed, his anger like a force field between them, which might have frightened her if it wasn’t so absurd.

She turned on the reading light next to her side of the bed, asking his permission without expecting a reply, and leafed through an old New Yorker lying on her end table. On page seeventy-seven, he got up noisily and disappeared for awhile. She dozed, though kept the light on at the same time, feeling betrayed by his prolonged absence. She thought of calling out to him that she had done nothing that needed apology, but it wasn’t a stance she felt comfortable with at this hour of the night.

For his part, Jay spent the remainder of the night on the couch, wide awake, wondering if the problem, suitably ignored, would go away of its own accord.

The following Wednesday, without making much of it, she decided to forego her weekly gym appointment. She thought she’d surprise Jay, picking up a couple of overpriced steaks from Balducci’s on her way home, and she felt thwarted not to find him where she left him.

She looked around for a note, some explanation as to where he had gone, not expecting to find anything — why hide a note if he wanted her to see it — but carrying out her intention with meticulous concern for detail nevertheless.

She fell asleep before he came home and woke during the night to find him in bed sleeping restively next to her. A mix of anxiety and outrage occupied her for the next couple of hours and she ended up cuddling against his unforgiving back.

In the morning, she made a point of not asking him where he had been — she would not be the one to pry — storing her grievance under a display of uncharacteristic early morning cheerfulness.

He seemed thrown off his game by hers and she could tell he was just dying to market the version he had worked up of where he had been and what he had done. And then she actually kissed him goodbye like some prototypical housewife (except it was she who was going off to work) before leaving him for the day. He clamped her to him and she felt the tweak of his neediness, which brought her more confusion than comfort.

“I love you,” he said rather desperately as they came apart, which was not a usual part of his routine.

When she was away from him, safely out of the house, it amused her to imagine what he made of her performance, though she had only the thinnest notion herself of what (if anything) was going on between them. It was a game of denial, the game itself denied, in which the one who showed the least concern won the as yet undetermined prize.

She never told him she had come home early that Wednesday — while he never volunteered why he had been out late that night — and the following week as a matter of course she resumed her routine at the gym. Jay was always part of the landscape, sometimes waiting up for her, sometimes dozing on the couch, when she found her way home.

It was six months later, after Luther had broken with her, which brought her a mix of relief and self-doubt, that she turned her attention once again to Jay. One night after lovemaking, perhaps even during the act itself, she found herself longing to confess her brief insignificant affair with Luther, clean the slate as it were, but some wary inner voice wouldn’t allow it.

In the third year of their marriage, it may even have been the fourth, over dinner at the most expensive restaurant they’d been to that wasn’t on someone else’s expense account, Jay confided awkwardly during the appetizer course that he had fallen in love with another.

The news itself was less surprising than the confession and she weighed its implications on the balance beam mediating despair and hope before offering a response.

“Is it anyone I know?” she asked.

“Well,” he said and she out-waited the unnatural silence for him to continue.

“I feel terrible,” he said, which evoked a laugh with claws.

“That’s too bad,” she said. “So who is this person?”

“I’m not planning to leave right away,” he said. “You know that these things happen whether we mean them to or not. This doesn’t have anything to do with you. My feelings toward you haven’t changed.”

“I think I’d be happier if you moved out as soon as possible,” she said.

“I understand your position,” he said, attending to the mostly uneaten food on his plate.

And then, with that out of the way, if not actually settled, she asked again who it was, her next breath contingent on his unwelcome news.

And still he refused to tell her, which was less forgivable, she decided, than the betrayal itself, whatever it might be.

Clearly, it was someone she knew and she made a list at work of possible suspects, the list in order of uncertain priority extending itself to fourteen.

A week passed with no change in the situation — Jay still living in what increasingly she thought of as her place, the issue that occupied their lives barely mentioned since his confession at the restaurant. In fact, they had hardly talked at all since then, each making a point of avoiding the other while having their dinners together at the same kitchen table.

That night when she came to bed, he was already there — his reading light conspicuously on — doing the crossword puzzle. “If I made a guess,” she said, “would you at least tell me if I was right or not?”

He seemed to be considering her question, though what he said next gave no indication of it. “I want you to know that I’ve stopped seeing her,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. I can’t promise that I’ll stop thinking about her, but I won’t see her again. I also want to say that I appreciate how patient you’ve been. You’ve been wonderful about everything.”

Was that meant as an apology? she wondered. His presuming on her forgiveness made her want to smash him over the head with the first object that came to hand. “It’s too late for apologies,” she said in a quiet voice. “Your breaking it off or her breaking it off, whatever, doesn’t change the fact that you’re not welcome here.”

He gave her a pained, little boy look. “I want to stay,” he said.

It was hardly the appeal she had hoped for, not the one in the best case infinitely variable scenario she had been carrying around all week in her imagination. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “But I absolutely want you out of my bed.”

If he was a gentleman, which he clearly wasn’t, he would have taken his sorry ass into the guest room down the hall without a moment’s hesitation. That he hesitated, that he seemed to be considering her non-negotiable demand was more than any reasonable wronged person could bear. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “if you tell me who it is, I’ll let you stay for the night — I know the guest room is an unholy mess — but tomorrow I want you out of here. All things considered, I think that’s a generous offer.”

“C’mon, you know who it is,” he said without actually moving his lips.

“If it’s who I think it is,” she said, “I’ll never forgive you. That’s a promise.”

He turned on his side away from her, said something she couldn’t decode, which might have been “Of course not” though probably wasn’t.

She aimed a kick at his back, though by the time it landed it barely moved him from his vagrant spot. A second kick was considered, held sway briefly in the platonic realm, but it never quite translated itself from conception to deed. The hand of sleep intervened.

When she woke up, the dusty light of the unborn morning flooded the curtains. It took a moment for her to notice, that moment following the moment she recalled the disturbing interchange that preceded sleep, that the huddled figure on the other side of the bed was missing. She wondered if he was really gone, anxiety rubbing elbows with her brief elation, her feelings on his absence not yet quite in place.

“I continue to love you,” he said rather desperately as they came apart, though this time it was in the interstice between sleep and waking, a wistful echo from a momentarily forgotten dream.

TEN

Now that Jay had agreed to the joint session with her therapist, she couldn’t remember why she had favored the idea in the first place. It was one of those things you did, which is what she told Lorrie over the phone, so that afterward you could say you had done everything (or something) to save your dying marriage. She wondered if she had ever loved Jay — that is, she could no longer remember having loved him — but there was something between them, some intricate bond, that seemed resistant to violations no matter how unforgivable.

All she wanted, after all, was to get free of him and then afterward they could salvage or not whatever dregs of their relationship remained.

Jay, on the other hand, said he was willing to change if necessary to save their marriage.

“No one changes after forty-five,” she said.

“Who said?” he said.

“I can’t remember anyone who has,” she said, dipping her toe briefly into the well of memory. “Can you?”

“Maybe what we’re talking about is not the incapacity to change,” he said, “but a failure of memory.”

She hated it, totally despised it, when he pretended to be smart. At the same time or perhaps a moment afterward she had a quiver of recollection — a subliminal flash — of having felt something other than indifference for him.

For their first session, they sat in parallel chairs about twenty feet apart facing the therapist who was in an impressive high-backed armchair in a slightly elevated part of the room.

“Is there some agreement as to who goes first?” Leo asked, looking at neither of them in such a way as to give each the impression of being the one he was urging.

Jay was the first to speak. “I don’t mind if she starts,” he said.

“I’d prefer going second,” she said. “He’s the one who believes in talk.”

“In that case,” Leo said, “that’s the way we’ll do it. So Jay, what’s your view of why your marriage isn’t working?”

“Why does she get to go second?” Jay said. “Is it because she’s a woman?”

“I thought you were both in agreement as to the order here” Leo said. “When you offered her the opportunity to go first, I assumed you took it to be the favored position. If it wasn’t, why did you make it sound as if you were doing her a favor?”

“Because that’s the way he is,” she said.

Leo gestured for her to stop whatever else she was planning to add. “Let’s hear what Jay has to say, shall we?”

Jay stood up, collected his coat but then seemed to change his mind from whatever to whatever. “You’re both right,” he said. “I’m a terrible person and I’m choked with regret.”

“That’s a bit easy,” Leo said. “Don’t you think?”

“I’m sorry about that too,” he said. “I tend to let myself off too easily and I’m sorry. OK?”

“He isn’t really sorry,” Lois said.

“You’re probably right about that,” he said, “but look I’m really sorry that I’m not really sorry. What about you, LL? Is there anything you’re sorry about?”

“That’s not a real question,” she said, “and you know it. Do you want me to say that I’m sorry I married you? All right, I’ll say that I’m sorry I married you.”

Leo looked around as if there were another person in the room with them, possibly dangerous, he hadn’t seen before. “Let’s stop here,” Leo said, “and we’ll continue next Wednesday at the same time.”

Jay, who had been standing, his coat folded over his arm, sat down. “We haven’t even decided who goes first,” he said.

While Jay wrote the therapist a check for the truncated session, Lois mumbled “Thank you, Leo,” and made her way out the door.

There was an antique shop a few doors down and she occupied herself studying the unusual face of an oversized wall clock in the window, figuring Jay would be out in a few minutes and they would travel back on the subway together. She didn’t see him come out, though sensed his approaching presence, feeling a sugar rush of affection for him. arming herself with a slightly ironic remark.

For his part, Jay noticed his disaffected wife waiting for him and decided to cross the street to avoid her, pretending to the unseen observer that he was in a huge hurry to get somewhere.

When on turning her head, she noticed him rushing from her, she wanted to call out that she was not as frightful as he imagined.

SECOND SESSION

“If anything’s going to get accomplished, we’re going to need to give these meetings some structure,” Leo said. “Lois, I’m going to ask you to speak for no more than five minutes. At which point, Jay can either respond to what you’ve said or use the allotted five minutes to present his own grievances. On the second go around, I’d like you each to address what the other has said. Are there any questions before we begin? … If not, let’s get to it. Lois.”

“It’s easier if I get up,” she said, though she remained seated. “I don’t think I’ll need five minutes to say what I have to say. Actually, I don’t know why I am here. For a while now, I kind of thought, that despite our persistent problems, that it was worth making whatever effort was necessary to continue, to get along. I no longer feel that way. That’s all. Well, one other thing, whatever feelings I once had for Jay are gone. It’s like one morning, they put on their coat and scarf and went out the door. I feel my own growth as a person has been inhibited by this marriage. That’s all. I don’t want it any more. I don’t want to be in this marriage. That’s all I have.”

Leo seemed to be waiting for Jay to continue, but after a few minutes he pointed his finger at her, who seemed to be looking the other way. “Jay?”

Jay stood up. He had something written on a card that he held up in front of him. “I was going to say that I would do whatever I could to keep us together, but that seems foolish now, doesn’t it?” He sat down, resisted putting his head in his hands.

Leo looked over at Lois, who made a point of avoiding eye contact, and waited for someone, perhaps even himself, to break the silence. “It might be useful,” he said to her, “if you were more specific about what you want and feel you’re not getting from your marriage.”

“What I want, OK, is that Jay accept the fact that the marriage is over,” she said.

“Why should Jay’s acceptance or not make a difference?” Leo asked her.

“It just does,” she said.

“She wants to hurt me,” Jay said, “but in a way that protects her from feeling bad about herself. She hates the sight …”

Leo was quick to intervene. “Let her speak for herself please,” he said. “The two of you seem to know more about the other’s feelings than your own … I understand that your feelings about Jay are intuitive, Lois, but it would be useful here if you gave some examples of what seems to be the problem.”

“He doesn’t want to hear them,” she said.

“Then tell them to me,” Leo said. “I want to hear them.”

She had a hundred grievances against Jay, she had a litany of grievances — they often came to mind unbidden like the hypnogenic lyric of some ancient detergent commercial — but at the moment she couldn’t come up with one that didn’t seem hopelessly trivial. “He’s only interested in me as an extension of himself,” she said.

“That’s not specific enough,” Leo said.

“He doesn’t clean up after himself,” she said. “He leaves crumbs all over the apartment, which I end up having to deal with.”

“What do you say to that?” Leo asked, turning his attention to Jay.

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” Jay said. The role she was performing laughed. “You see what I mean,” she said.

Leo reiterated in paraphrase Lois’s complaint about his messiness.

“She’s probably right about that in general,” Jay said, “but I’ve been better about it recently. I think even Lois would acknowledge that I’ve been trying.”

“Too little, too late,” she said.

“Let’s put this into perspective,” Leo said. “If, say, overnight, Jay no longer left messes that he didn’t clear up, became a sudden exemplar of neatness and consideration, would that alter your feelings toward him?”

Lois wanted to say that it might, but since she didn’t believe it, felt the dishonesty of any such assertion, she said nothing or rather mumbled something that was susceptible to a near infinite variety of interpretations.

“What Leo’s saying,” Jay said, “is that the example you gave represents a petty annoyance and is hardly a significant factor in your disaffection toward me.”

“I don’t think that’s what he’s saying,” she said. “Is that what your’re saying, Leo?”

“Is there anything Jay can do or not do that would make you reconsider your decision to separate?” Leo asked.

“What about her?” Jay interrupted, suddenly outraged. “Why is this whole discussion about my changing?”

“There’s nothing he can do,” she said, “nothing that would make the slightest bit of difference.”

“I hear you,” Leo said. “Jay, what changes would you like to see Lois make?”

Jay started then stopped himself. “Well, for openers,” he said, “she can stop fucking Roger or whoever it is she’s been seeing on the sly.”

Leo seemed unfazed by the revelation. “And if she stopped,” he said, “would that make a difference?”

“I’m sorry I said that,” Jay said.

“What are you sorry about?” Leo asked. “It was something you felt, wasn’t it? You meant it, didn’t you?”

He looked over at Lois, who seemed to have shut down. “I didn’t want to embarrass you,” he said.

“I thought you thought I was shameless,” she said and seemed, until she took a deep breath, on the verge of giving into feelings she was hours away from acknowledging.

THIRD SESSION

They arrived at the therapist’s office together and Jay suggested that she go in by herself and that he would loiter in the lobby of the building, kill a few minutes, before making his appearance.

“You’re joking, right?”

“Well, I don’t see any reason to throw Leo off his game.”

“As Leo would tell you, and as I’m sure you know, that’s exactly what you do want. Denial is a form of admission. What’s Leo’s game in your opinion?”

“I’m here to find out,” he said.

She laughed. “Shouldn’t we tell him things are better?”

“What do you think?”

They entered Leo’s office at the same time, though not quite together, made their appearance in single file, Lois the first to enter.

As they sat down in their respective seats, Leo looked over his glasses from one to the other, then jotted something down in the small notebook he always seemed to have on the table in front of him. “People, I’d like to try something a little different today,” he said. “I’d like to have you switch roles — Lois you take on the role of Jay and Jay you present yourself as Lois — for the next twenty minutes.”

Lois looked skeptical while Jay seemed vaguely amused.

“So Jay, putting yourself in Lois’s shoes, I’d like you to present your grievances toward your husband …”

“She wears a seven-B,” Jay said. “There’s no way I could get my feet in them without cutting off my toes.”

Leo ignored him. “And Lois,” he said, “I’d like you to begin to imagine yourself as Jay. I’ll give you both a few minutes to focus and then Lois — that is, Jay as Lois — will start. Otherwise it will be the same format as last week. Once we start, I’d like you both to stay in character. Any questions?”

“I don’t know, Leo,” Lois said. “I’m not comfortable with this.”

“Let’s give it a try, OK, and see how it goes,” Leo said.

“I’d prefer standing,” Jay said slyly, getting up then sitting down. “One of the things about Jay that makes my hair curl is that he is incapable of empathy. That’s all I have to say at the moment.”

“Jay,” Leo said, pointing to Lois.

“Lois tends to be a perfectionist,” she said, “and so tends to be what I call hypercritical. The way I see it, there’s nothing I can do to please her no matter how many times I apologize for being oblivious. She has an idea how people should be and if you don’t live up to that idea, you’re in trouble. You never know exactly where you stand with her.”

“Could you give us an example of what you mean?”

“An example? Well, one night after a hard closing, she comes home from work and finds me sprawled out on the couch., watching TV, a basketball game most likely, and she says something like, ‘You’re supposed to be working on your book not watching TV, aren’t you?’ And then it comes out that I’d neglected to do the little bit of shopping she had asked me to do and I get some more grief from her. I don’t answer and then I offer an unfelt apology, but when she keeps at it I put my coat on and go out for a walk. Some hours later when I come back I find her talking on the phone to someone I think I have reason to assume is her lover.”

“How does that make you feel?” Leo asks.

“How does that make me feel? I let her know how angry I am by knocking over a few chairs and then I order her to get off the phone. It’s not the best way to handle it but I have to do something and I haven’t the faintest idea what else to do. I’m bigger than she is and I don’t see why I shouldn’t get my way.”

Jay waited a few minutes before speaking. “Look, I’m not going to let myself be bullied by him in my own house. I have a right to talk to whoever I please. His behaving like a jerk only makes me more determined. His bad behavior, which I may have provoked — you get to know the right buttons — is embarrassing to me. He knows I hate scenes. And so I get off the phone, which makes me hate him even more but not before telling my friend that I’ll call him back.”

“Do you ever after the dust has cleared talk about what went on?” Leo asked Lois.

“Not usually. Mostly we avoid each other. One of us goes in the bedroom and the other stays in the living room.”

“What happens the next morning?” Leo asked Jay.

“I don’t as a rule talk much in the morning and when we do talk we tend to be excruciatingly polite as if one wrong word might cause irreparable damage.”

“Do you have breakfast together?” Leo asked Lois.

“I … excuse me … Lois doesn’t eat breakfast. She has coffee and sometimes a toasted bialy but it’s not a sit down breakfast. On the other hand, I have designer cold cereal in the morning and tend to read the sports page while making music chewing my granola.”

“If you don’t discuss your fights, how do you ever reconcile your differences?” Leo asked Jay.

“Time heals,” Jay said, “and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Lois cut in just as Jay was completing his sentence. “My policy is to ignore problems and hope they go away,” she said.

“When I feel wronged, I can be absolutely unforgiving,” Jay said, “and it’s possible that Jay has been burned too much to be willing to risk making a gesture he knows will be scorned.”

Lois pursed her lips. “I guess when the going’s tough, I don’t have much backbone, do I?”

Jay picked up a flyer that had been lying on the table and folded it into a paper airplane.

Leo’s bearded face showed a minor crack of concern and he suggested after Jay had launched the paper airplane in Lois’s direction and Lois had stared daggers at Jay in return that it might be a good idea to stop the role playing at this point and return to their former selves. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get back into your own heads.”

“This was useful,” Lois said. “When he was going on about me being hypercritical and unforgiving, I got the impression he was really talking about himself. I learned something from that.”

“Hey, weren’t we both talking about ourselves?” Jay said.

“You’re so clever,” she said. “Why hadn’t I ever noticed that before?”

“You’re the princess of snide,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry I threw the plane in your direction. It wasn’t really meant to hit you, it was to make you aware there was someone else in the room.”

“You never say anything that means anything,” she said. “Why is that? You are the prince of self-justifying incoherence.”

Jay got out of his chair with apparent difficulty as if fighting some kind of invisible resistance, and retrieved his coat.

“Why don’t you just leave?” Lois said.

Leo turned his head just enough to glance at the clock on the wall. “We still have some time left, people,” he said.

FOURTH SESSION

There is no record of a fourth session.