FIVE

Dore began thinking that maybe her redemption lay in getting pregnant. She’d do everything right this time. She’d quit her job and never go back; she’d stay at home reading beside the baby’s crib, breathing when the baby breathed; and she’d strap her child against her own heartbeat so it would always be reminded of life, so it would never forget. When she climbed into bed, she curled about Nick. He moved, surprised. He was used to sleeping on the edge of the bed, used to being careful how he touched her for fear she’d get up and go sleep on the couch. She touched his face, she whispered against his skin, and she pulled him closer to her.

Nick wasn’t sure how he felt about having a baby. The whole idea was disturbing and startling; he didn’t want to think how he might react to another child, what memories it might force him to relive. But the thing of it was, he loved having Dore back again. He’d forget everything when he was holding her, stroking her buttery hair. He told himself over and over that she really did want him, that it wasn’t just what she thought he could give her—and then sometimes, too, he thought that even if it was, a baby might bind them together again.

Sometimes, when they were making love, he’d sense Dore straining against him, and he thought suddenly of that woman in Pittsburgh, the one who kids used to think was a witch, and he imagined charms she might have for making babies bud and bloom, for rekindling love. And then Dore would be rolling away from him, panting, slick with sweat, and he’d slip out of her and feel so lost, so crazy with need, that he’d try to enter her again even though he was soft now. They didn’t sleep entwined after lovemaking, they didn’t whisper secrets anymore or trace the moonlight on the sheets. They were silent. Nick, one hand on Dore’s thigh, swore he could hear her heart beating, but it was a kind of language he didn’t understand anymore, and it made him grieve for her.

She wasn’t conceiving. She bought books, she took her temperature ninety times a day and made charts, and finally, the two of them went to a doctor. Nick sat in the waiting room holding Dore’s hand, telling her dirty jokes to get her to laugh, but in the end the doctor told them there was nothing wrong that a little relaxation wouldn’t cure, that there was no reason they shouldn’t be popping babies out. It made Dore tense up all the more. How could she possibly relax?

She waited until Nick was away on business and then she went to a psychologist who did hypnosis. But he made her talk about her childhood, he pulled stubborn answers from her about everything but Susan, and he finally suggested that hypnosis wasn’t a good tool as far as she was concerned; the whole problem was that she was reacting to a mother she didn’t much care for by refusing to be anything like her.

She visited a chiropractor, who assured her the problem was in her spine, who sat her on a green leather table and kneaded and worked her flesh, who manipulated her spine until she winced, sure it was cracking. Alarmed, she struggled upright, and when she stood, she could hardly walk; her whole back felt inflamed and dangerous. “You shouldn’t have gotten up so quickly,” the doctor accused. She wanted Dore to scoot right back up on the table so she could undo the damage she said Dore had brought on herself, but Dore wouldn’t hear of it. She cabbed home, lying prone in the back seat, shaking her head at the driver, who kept shouting at her in broken English that he could take her to the hospital if she just said the word. When Nick walked in the door that evening, he found Dore on the couch with the heating pad. “I sprained my back,” she told him.

And then, she missed one period, and then two, and her breasts began hurting. They enlarged so much that she had to go out and buy herself new bras, nearly two cup sizes larger. She couldn’t zip herjeans, and her skirts bulged in front so she had to wear long, loose tops. Delirious, she blurted out to Nick that she was pregnant. “You saw a doctor?” he asked. She shook her head. She said she had just made the appointment—she had wanted to wait until she was sure. “I know I’m pregnant, I feel it,” she said, pulling him down on the floor, rolling and bruising against the walls.

A baby, Nick thought. It might have made him more uneasy than he was, except for the way Dore had suddenly come back to life, to herself, and to him. She was ravenous in her lovemaking; she’d call him at work and tell him to come home and meet her in the bathtub. He couldn’t get through the day without wanting her, needing her taste. He’d have to leave work because his whole body was pulsing. He’d drive home like a madman and then surprise her, kissing her belly, moving her against him. Now she wanted to talk afterward. She had all these wonderful, dreamy plans about taking the baby to France, about organizing a play group with some of the other women she had seen around the neighborhood. She went to work happy. She began discussing her students’ papers with them, allowing them to cluster about her.

But when Dore went to the doctor, he told her that she wasn’t pregnant—that the tests showed nothing. She was furious. She wanted to know what the swelling in her breasts was then, why she got so nauseated mornings that she had to keep saltines by her pillow. Why did her stomach swell out? Why was she dreaming about babies every time she shut her eyes? He shook his head, he told her he didn’t know, and in the middle of his speech, Dore got up and strode out of his office. She told herself he was a quack, that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

She made another appointment, with a woman doctor, who was more expensive, who had a plush, all-white office on Newberry Street. The doctor examined Dore and then had her come into the office for a talk. “You’re not pregnant,” she said. She told Dore it was what was called a “hysterical pregnancy,” that it was a common phenomenon, mostly in African tribes, and that oddly enough it was the men who swelled up, carrying it to such extremes that they even seemed to go through labor and got as much attention as their wives.

“I’m not doing this for attention,” Dore snapped.

The doctor shook her head. “Of course you’re not,” she said. “But you do want a baby, and your body did its best to oblige.” She told Dore to go home and relax, to take hot baths and wait and the swelling and nausea would disappear. “Then we can start to work on really getting you pregnant,” the doctor said, smiling. “Don’t you worry.”

Dore, silent, got up and left the doctor’s office. All the way home, she kept her eyes unfocused. She didn’t want to see any pregnant women in the streets, she didn’t want to see any babies, and she didn’t want anyone seeing her, knowing how shamed she felt, how betrayed.

Nick came home that night with roses for her, wrapped in green tissue, but she was in the kitchen, crying over onions. When he bent to kiss her, she shrugged him roughly from her. “I’m not pregnant,” she said.

“You’re not?” he said, and she told him it wasn’t a real pregnancy, that her mind had done it to her body, and she didn’t want to talk about any of it.

He was silent for a moment. “We could adopt,” he said, but she shook her head; she said they’d have to get married for that.

“But I would marry you,” he said. “I want to.”

“I told you, I can’t get married because of a baby.”

“You don’t make sense,” he said, and she turned and looked at the floor.

“Sure, I do,” she said.

Just like that, Dore gave up trying to become pregnant. She dieted like a crazy person, refusing to eat breakfast although her stomach twisted and growled, nibbling on toast for lunch, picking at her dinner until Nick told her she was being silly, that she looked wonderful, that a few extra pounds was probably healthy. “Why should I look pregnant when I’m not?” she said. She exercised every late afternoon, as soon as she got home from teaching, dancing around to old rock-and-roll albums in her living room until the people downstairs banged on their ceiling for her to stop. It made her feel lonely, hearing the banging; it somehow reminded her of the baby she wasn’t to have, a baby made of air and imagination, who wasn’t to be her healing after all.

She called Flora, but the number was out of service, and she took it as omen. She began walking about the neighborhood to keep herself from thinking. When Nick was out on the road, she missed him, but really what she missed was her past with him, those days in the trailer when just seeing him made her breath stitch up inside of her. When he came back from being on the road now, she always felt a faint flutter of pain. Although he said he loved her, although he said he didn’t care that she wasn’t pregnant, she didn’t believe him. She didn’t think he needed her anymore.

She wasn’t sure why, but she began talking to her students. She sipped her morning coffee right at her desk and struck up a conversation with whatever kid was hanging around. She homed in on the details—the red-rimmed eyes of a girl, a brand-new inky tattoo on a shy boy’s arm—and she asked question after question, surprising kids into answers, pulling out their confidences. She was good with them. She never gave advice, she never revealed her own opinion, but she listened so intently, the effect was mesmerizing. She couldn’t help feeling nourished by all the need. It hooked her. She began getting to school a whole half-hour earlier just to expose herself to that much more student interest. Gradually, she began to reveal bits and pieces about herself. The kids were fascinated by her. They whispered among themselves. They tried to imagine their teacher living in a trailer, carrying some secret pain like a romantic Brontë heroine. They adored her; they began to spread the word that she was a good ear, that you could tell her anything and she wouldn’t flinch or accuse you, or rush to call your parents or the principal. She treated you like a human being.

The kids began showing up in her neighborhood, walking back and forth in front of her apartment until she chanced to notice them, bumping right into her in the supermarket. It made her remember Ronnie Dazen again, how he tried to court her interest, only this time she didn’t need to be courted, she almost always invited the students right into her apartment. She ended up disinfecting irritated tattoos, making strong tea for broken hearts and family miseries. She watched each kid gradually heal and then fade away, replaced by another wounded soul. She began giving out her phone number to a kid or two, telling them they could call her only if it was a dire emergency, and when her phone rang, she leaped to get it.

Nick would come home with his hands full of blooms for her. Orange tiger lilies like small flames; white roses. He’d saunter into the living room and there would be four kids sprawled on the floor, leaning toward Dore. Dore would stop talking as soon as Nick came in, and the kids frankly stared. He felt like an intruder in his own home. He nodded curtly, and then he went into the kitchen, trying to jam the flowers into a jelly glass, all the time waiting for Dore to at least dip into the kitchen for a hurried kiss before she went back out to her students. But instead, the talk continued, low and secretive. “They need me,” she told him when he asked about it. “They have parents,” he said, but she gave him an odd, crimped smile; she turned from him.

There were phone calls. Late at night. Pleas that pulled her into her car, that had her driving to the bus station to pick up some kid who was too terrified to really run away, too scared or drunk to go home. Nick would sometimes wake up to find a stray ragamuffin sleeping on the sofa. He was polite at first, even concerned, but the kids were shy about him. When Dore ran out to get coffee, he’d sometimes approach one of them and try to be comforting, but they always gave him a blank, angry stare, and he sometimes felt they were angry with him for disturbing their privacy with Dore.

“Look, this has got to stop,” he told Dore. Their apartment wasn’t a halfway house; she wasn’t a therapist. He told himself that the next time a kid came to their door, hungry for talk, for something cool and clean in a glass, he would tell the kid himself to go see Dore during school time, to make an appointment with a good psychologist. He told himself that—but then, of course, when the doorbell rang and he opened the door on some kid stammering out Dore’s name, stumbling on some story, Nick always ushered them right in. Orphans of the storm, he kept thinking.

He saw Dore, talking, talking, talking. One night, passing by the living room, he heard Susan’s name, and instantly he felt his heart freezing, his blood tamping its flow. He leaned along the wall where it was cool, and then he heard Dore say, “She died…” and then he strode forward, not seeing her, not bothering to get his jacket, and he got in the car and drove out to the Dairy Queen and just sat in the parking lot, a dime-size headache breeding behind his eyes.

He didn’t know what to do. He wanted Dore back, he wanted her the way she used to be; but he didn’t want the baby being part of it—he didn’t want to have to remember, to have to see that face flickering across his mind, burning, a flame. This was Boston. Everything was supposed to be changed now, the pain was supposed to be past, as unvisited as the New Jersey trailer court.

When he came back home, his headache in full bloom, the kids had all gone. Dore was sleeping on the couch, a glass of tea beside her.

“Hey,” he said, nuzzling her.

“Oh, don’t wake me,” she murmured, her face turning toward the pillow. “Just let me sleep.” She started settling back into the couch, but he didn’t want to go to bed alone, not tonight. He didn’t want to have to bunch up her pillow beside him. He lifted her up and carried her into bed, and then he got in beside her and hooked her limp arm about him, as if she had done it herself.

The next time he was back in Pittsburgh, he found himself thinking about Leslie. What he wanted was a little laughter, someone to talk to while he ate dinner. He looked through the phone book at the hotel for her number, telling himself it was no big deal if he couldn’t find her; he could go down to the hotel bar and float himself away on a few beers; he could swim upstairs to sleep. He found two numbers he thought might be hers, and he got Leslie on the very first try. She said of course she remembered him, and she didn’t seem surprised that he had called. She didn’t mention that it had been three months since they’d met. She said only that she had a fitting that night but could meet him later at the movies. Children of Paradise was playing and she had seen it only once.

Leslie, outside the theater, was in ripped jeans and a black sweater, her hair braided down her back like a spine. One of her sleeves had a safety pin in it, but her nails were buffed and clean, and when he got close to her, he caught some piny, mysterious scent.

She beamed when she saw him. “Well, hi!” she said. She chattered and bounded at him.

He was surprised that she really wanted to see the movie, that she didn’t want to just go get coffee and talk. She said they could talk later, that the film would give them something to talk about. She made him sit in the first row—she said things looked more real that way—and for one sharp moment he thought of Dore. Dore always sat in the front row because of her poor sight. They never had to rush to make a film, because the front rows were always the last to fill.

But Leslie didn’t watch films the way Dore did. She didn’t touch him or lean over to make comments; she didn’t want him to put his feet on top of hers because the circulation was jammed up and she needed the weight to start things up. Instead, Leslie hunched toward the screen, perfectly silent, ignoring him, and gradually Nick was suckered into the story, too, and he forgot her there beside him, and forgot Dore.

When the movie ended, he felt something tear in his heart. He felt as if he were the one in the final reel, racing helplessly after the departing carriage, crying the name of the one he loved, crying, “Dore, Dore,” and there was Dore riding in the carriage, her head held up, an enigmatic smile on her face, oblivious to him. Abruptly, he turned to Leslie, but she was already standing, looking past him into the audience, and when he touched her, she turned to him, smiling, embarrassed at the tears she was wiping away.

They walked outside. “Oh, my,” she sighed, but she didn’t want to talk about the film. “It’s all in here,” she said, tapping her chest. She walked with her hands in her pockets, her strides long. She didn’t ask him very much. She didn’t even want to know how he had liked the film. She seemed perfectly happy to see him, but he had the feeling she would have been just as happy not to. She didn’t ask him how long he planned to stay, and when he told her anyway, she simply nodded.

She was funny to walk with. She kept stalling in front of store windows, mesmerized by a row of silky blouses, a fan of skirts. When Nick faltered, when he tried to make some remark about the window, she glanced at him, amused, and continued walking. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but if I stare at anything long enough, I can copy it. Unfortunately, not all of my clients want originals from me.” She said she had always had that talent. Her dolls had worn the same spanking-white tennis outfits her parents wore.

Leslie saw Nick looking at her own outfit and she bristled. “It doesn’t matter for me,” she said. “Clothing is for other people. I see it on them. I can’t tell the difference between silk or cotton on me, but on someone else I feel it, I just know how it should be styled. I knew how to change all my friends’ outfits so they’d look smashing, but I was always being sent home from school because my skirt was torn.” She laughed, looking over at him.

He walked her to her house, a small brick home on Howe Street in Shadyside. It had a small porch, a small yard, and a white front gate that she told him she used to swing on when she was a little girl. “I grew up in this house,” she said proudly.

“You did? And you still live here?” He couldn’t imagine it, staying in one place that long, having a history that seamless.

“Well, I moved out when I was at design school. Parsons in New York. No one I knew wanted to leave the city, but every chance I got, I came home. I loved coming home. The house just felt good.” She pushed back a stray hair.

“Then my parents moved to Arizona when my mother got arthritis, and they couldn’t bear to sell the house. It was all paid for, and filled with their memories. My father thought selling it would be like having a piece of him die. I was through school by then, sharing an apartment with a girl I almost never saw, because she worked nights. I was working myself, for a small company designing women’s golf clothing, trying to sketch my own designs at night. I was designing, but it wasn’t enough. I just never felt very comfortable in New York, it never felt like home. When my father called and offered to give me the house, I got the next plane out. The house always felt like it was mine.” She leaned on the gate.

“I have lots of clients here,” she said. “It took a while. Word of mouth. Going to people’s homes and showing them my book. I designed originals at reasonable prices—and sometimes, if I was short of cash, I did alterations.

“You know tennis?” she said abruptly. Nick shrugged. “Both my parents were champions.” She said she had photos of the two of them holding up their loving cups, smiling into the crowds. They’d taken her to all the matches when she was little; she grew up teething on tennis balls and rackets, she grew up playing. “I wasn’t very good, though,” she said. “My skill was sewing.”

She said her mother was the better player of the two, and when she was diagnosed as having crippling arthritis, she started smashing things. Her trophies, her dishes, her rackets. “She had to give up playing,” Leslie said. “She’d take me to matches and we’d both sit in the bleachers and watch my father win, and sometimes she’d grab me and walk out because it was just too upsetting for her to watch.

“It affected his game, too, seeing her leave, seeing how her face changed there in the bleachers.” Leslie sighed. “God, he loved her so much. He couldn’t play as well as he used to. It was as if winning were suddenly a betrayal, so he started to lose. He wouldn’t practice, because he saw how she’d tighten when he left her. In the end, they decided to go to Arizona because he thought the sun might heal her.”

“Did it?” Nick said.

Leslie shook her head. “She bathed in sulfur springs, she saw faith healers and acupuncturists, she practiced positive thinking until she gave herself migraines, but she kept crippling up. She had to cut the front of her shoes out because her toes were so deformed. She couldn’t move her hands because the fingers kept overlapping, locking on her.

“Finally, my father talked her into doing some coaching. She did it grudgingly at first, sure she’d have no students—because really, she couldn’t demonstrate much, all she could do was speak and yell and prod. But she got students because of her name, and she built up a reputation, a kind of mystique. Everyone said that because she couldn’t get up and play, it forced her students to stretch their minds, to imagine what the moves should look like, to dig the knowledge out of themselves. She raised holy hell when they did things wrong. But she praised, she gave good directions, and she started producing stars.”

Leslie stretched in the moonlight. “They both coach now, they both love Arizona, and they both never get back here. I go to see them.”

“Could I come in?” Nick said.

“No, I don’t think so,” Leslie said. She pulled keys from her pocket.

“We could sit on the porch,” he said, thinking how cool and lovely it was tonight, how easy it would be to talk away the hours with her.

“No,” she said again. She was silent for a few moments, fiddling with the keys in her palm. “Call me in a few days, why don’t you,” she said abruptly.

“What, from Boston?” he said. “I’ll be gone by then.”

She looked up, studying him, and then abruptly told him to come for breakfast tomorrow, that she liked to get up really early so she could have the whole day to work. “Come whatever time you want,” she said. “I’m up and famished at six.”

“I’m more nine o’clock,” he said, and then she bent forward and touched his face, pulling away before he could see her expression.

He watched her go into the house, and then he went grudgingly back to the hotel, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He lifted the phone to call Dore. It rang and rang. He hung up. The room was terrible—nothing-colored chenille bedspreads, green carpet. He knew exactly what would flicker on the TV right now, exactly how the water in the bathroom would taste in the glass after he had un-papered it. He didn’t like it—the phone in his room not ringing, not going to ring; the night settling heavily about him.

He got his jacket and went outside and walked by the pool. It was still filled, even this late in the season, silent, coolly blue. He walked all around the complex, waiting for the night watchman or someone to come out and ask him who he was, just so he could tell him. They could swap stories, maybe even have a beer by the pool. It made him hopeful, and then he got irritated. Jesus.

He decided to go for a drive. He drove along the highway, blasting the radio, and he thought about Dore, about what she might be doing, where she might be. Maybe she had been right there when he called, listening to the ringing, knowing it was him and not picking up. And then, before he knew what he was doing, he found himself driving past Leslie’s house.

It wasn’t a bad place. Her lights, he noticed, were still blazing. Curious, he parked two houses away, rolling down his window a little. He liked being so close to her, and her not even knowing it. He could sleep right here and not feel so alone. He’d just have to wake himself up early enough to drive away and then come back, shaved and clean, to have breakfast with her. It was no problem. He could wake whenever he wanted. It was a talent he had cultivated back at the home, giving himself cues before he fell asleep, concentrating on a clock with the hands set at the hour he needed. It always worked. He’d wake at three in the morning just to sneak a cigarette, just to read undisturbed in the bathroom.

Lately he had been doing it with Dore, waking in the middle of the night, half hoping she might talk in her sleep, might say something, anything, that would convince him that she still loved him. And, oh, yes, he had done it with Susan, so he could bring her bottle before she even thought to cry for it. He remembered her soft, sleepy face when he woke her, the surprised pleasure when her mouth found the bottle, and his own delight in pleasing her.

He shut his eyes. Just for a moment, he thought.

Leslie, in the house she had inherited from her parents, the house she loved, had stopped playing the piano. It was just after three, but she wasn’t sleepy at all. She was pulling down the blinds when she spotted the car, and, curious, she leaned against the window to study him.

She didn’t have many men in her life. Her mother used to try to fix her up, getting strange men to call her on the phone with dinner invitations. Her clients sent their handsome sons to pick up dresses, to have suits designed when they didn’t really need them. The mothers would later call on the pretense of asking about a hem, and then gradually they’d bring the conversation around to their sons. It always flustered Leslie. She never felt comfortable with any of them. She’d go to the films, to the restaurants, and once or twice she’d bring a man home with her, but in the morning she’d be restless. She’d sense too much male in the house, and she’d hurry the man up and out of her home before she got too used to him, before she expected anything.

She had been in love only once. She was eighteen. His name was Danny and he played football and was on the honor roll at school and her mother was teaching him tennis. Leslie played tennis a few times with Danny, but mostly the two of them went up to the grassy areas behind the courts and made love. He was terrified of getting her pregnant. He pulled condoms out of his pockets, and he had a brown paper bag with a can of foam in it. She laughed at him. She squirted the foam across the tops of the dandelions even though he told her to cut it out, that it wasn’t funny. She didn’t care. She wasn’t going to have anything between herself and the feel of him, no layer of plastic, no chemicals. She insisted that she could will herself not to get pregnant, that he could help out by willing it, too.

They were both stubborn, but then she would be all over him, covering his face with kisses, opening his buttons, his pants, and then he didn’t care either. Sometimes, afterward, she’d squirt some foam in because he was so solemn, and then they’d walk back down to her house, the foam leaking out of her, staining her pants so she’d have to ball them up and stuff them into the trash. They were exhausted, pleased with each other, and then her father would walk by and ask them if they had had a good game. Leslie always poked Danny in the arm. “It never hurts to practice,” her father said, and they both had to look at the floor to keep from laughing.

She had designed her own prom gown. Black satin with ribbon at the hem. She was going to have her flowers dyed black, too. She didn’t care that her mother said black was for funerals and not for proms, that everyone would look at her and whisper trashy things.

“They whisper now, I bet,” Leslie said.

“You like that? Fine,” Leslie’s mother said.

The week before the prom, Danny went to visit his grandmother in Nebraska, and it was there that a tornado struck. The weathermen on the TV stations kept predicting how bad it would get, breaking into everyone’s favorite programs, telling people what to do. Danny’s grandmother, used to nature’s turmoil, calmly packed bottles of water into the cellar, easy-open cans of tuna and juice.

Danny was riding around on a neighbor’s motorbike, crossing a field in his hurry to get home. The sky was dirty-looking and the air felt clammy. He hadn’t planned on getting back this late except he had wanted to talk to Leslie in private, away from his grandmother. He had gone all the way over to the drugstore in town. She didn’t know about the tornado; she knew only that he whispered to her that he loved her, that he was going to swallow her whole when he saw her again. She had whispered what she was going to do to his body, how she was doing those things to him right now, in her mind, channeling them to him over the phone wires.

He hung up. He got on his bike and he was halfway across the field when the tornado struck. Terrified, he managed to bolt down into a ditch, peering up at the storm. He thought the world was ending, turned inside out. He saw trees cracking like matches, soaring up into the black swirl of air. He saw a dog, frantically barking, hurtling past him before his neck was snapped by the ferocity of the wind and he was still. Danny rolled into a ball of fear. He peed into his jeans, his heart slammed up against his chest, and his breath felt stitched up tight. He was in the ditch for over four hours, and then the black spiral moved away and the rains came. He couldn’t move. He clung to the mud, he let the water fill in until he was soaking, until he was weeping and calling for Leslie, over and over.

He didn’t make it home until the next day. He was muddy and chilled and he had to ring his grandmother’s bell for ten minutes before she came to the door, and then her face went white when she saw him.

He was a celebrity in the town. His picture made the front page, and people said that TV should buy the rights to his story. It made Danny a little irritated when the talk turned, when people started saying it hadn’t been such a terrible tornado anyway, and it wasn’t such a miracle that he’d survived. The damage to the town was minimal—a few phone lines were down. Danny called Leslie, who had heard about the tornado on the news and had been white-knuckled by the phone. He told her he was taking the next flight out, home to her.

He went back to the field to get the motorbike. A neighbor told him to forget it, that a life was worth a lot more than a bike, but Danny went anyway. He found the bike in the field, a little battered, but he got it to run, and then he was racing it back, speeding and alive, until the bike struck one of the fallen power lines and he was instantly electrocuted.

Leslie refused to remember the details now. What she did recall was taking the black prom dress and burning it in her garage. When her father saw the smoke, he made her put out the fire, but he didn’t yell at her. Instead, he took her and the rest of her ruined dress in the car to the incinerator by the plant in town and waited for her to drop it in, and then he drove her back home, the two of them silent.

It had done something to Leslie. She stopped expecting anything in relationships, stopped letting herself believe that a future could spin out of her like magical sugar. It was funny how it worked, but it made the boys around her, and later the men, fall hopessly, easily in love with her. In college, a man named Eddie fell in love with her, making a magnet of her disdain. He would stare dreamily at her in class, he would follow her to lunch and dinner. He kept asking her out, and when she refused, he made up excuses to come to see her: He had to get study notes; he had to get an assignment. She told him right from the start she wasn’t interested in any man, but he told her he would kill himself if she didn’t give him a chance.

She thought he was crazy—and in truth, he was a little. He wound up in the infirmary with a pumped stomach from an overdose of antihistamine pills. When she came to see him, he was quiet, removed. The attempt had burned the fire out of him—and inexplicably, her own interest suddenly kindled.

She was like that a lot. She had liked Nick when she first met him because he seemed so transient in her life. The months she hadn’t heard from him, she had thought about him, and when her mother had phoned with the name of some new young man that a friend of a friend knew, Leslie had said she was seeing someone.

She stared outside at Nick. She wasn’t angry, the way she might have been. He would be gone again in a day, and then he’d either be back or he wouldn’t. She stood up straight, she stretched, and then she went to get her jacket.

Nick was dreaming when he felt the knock at his window. He blinked. He jerked up. It was still dark outside. The music was sapped from the air, and when he turned, he saw Leslie studying him through the window. Her hair was impossibly long, impossibly black. “You’re watching me,” she said. He rolled down the window a little more, and then he pulled her to him and kissed her hard.

He didn’t want to stop. He didn’t care about the neighborhood. He pulled her into the car with him and slid his hand under her soft flannel shirt. Her body was damp; she smelled of powder. Who took a shower in the middle of the night? He was so used to Dore’s silences, and here was Leslie, rough, moving, kicking out one leg so the horn honked, making low easy moans like she was dancing. He touched her, he tasted her, he kept his eyes forced open, afraid if he shut them he would see Dore’s face shimmering back to him. When he entered her, she gave a small cry. She threw her head back and pushed herself against him, and then he stroked her eyelids until she opened them, until she saw him.

Afterward, stunned, he sat up. “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant—”

She put her hand over his mouth. She said that she was sleepy. She wanted to go inside. Her bed was freshly made; she had changed the sheets just that morning. It was a bed big enough for two. He shook his head no, and she didn’t ask him why. She burrowed up against him, and in minutes she was sleeping. He watched her, absolutely amazed, and then he tentatively touched her shoulder. She didn’t move. He settled back against the door, looking out at the vague light of the stars, and after a long while he slept, too, as best he could.

When he woke—his back stiff, his left leg cramping so he had to stamp the pins and needles from it—she was gone. His mouth tasted funny. When he peered at himself in the rearview mirror, his eyes looked old, his skin sallow. He didn’t know what to do—whether to ring her bell and take her to breakfast, or leave her a note, or just drive and drive and drive back to Dore.

He got out of the car. Across the street, a little boy was pushing dirt with a stick. He made a face at Nick and then sat down on the curb, rat-a-tatting his stick like a drumbeat. Nick started up Leslie’s walk, wondering what she’d do when she saw him, how he’d feel when he saw her face. And then the door suddenly opened and there she was, in blue jeans and a rose-colored sweater, her hair wound up on top of her head.

“I’ve got to get to a fitting,” she said, rushing, stooping to buckle a shoe. She looked at him. “No breakfast,” she said cheerfully.

“I’m going to call you,” he said, and she smiled, she dipped one shoulder.

“No, really, I am,” he said, and then she leaned toward him and gently kissed him before she brushed past him to get to her car.

“I’ll be here,” she called out, and then she raced the motor and pulled out of the driveway, leaving him standing there, watching her, unsure.