WHEN THE CURTAIN FELL, Billy sat unmoving though the applause and its gradual fading, through the audience’s getting up and starting to talk, through the beginning of their slow shuffle out. Her heart was thudding heavily in her chest, it had been all through the last moments of the second act. She was nearly breathless at the end. She felt she was seeing Gabriel, exactly who he was, who she’d wanted him to be in that moment. As she watched him, she understood what she’d intended in a way she hadn’t before, even when she was writing it.

The stage direction next to Elizabeth’s name—the last spoken word of the play—had been “Joyously. Sadly.” Rafe had managed to convey both those things tonight, joy and sorrow, and as the scene unfolded in front of Billy, she felt intimately connected to what he was making of it—as though he’d understood not just the character, but also, somehow, her.

She shut her eyes and saw his face again in the moment when he dropped his hands to show Elizabeth what he was feeling—his head tilted back, the tears running down his cheeks, his mouth opening to speak. It was Gabriel up there. She hadn’t seen Rafe at all. She hadn’t thought about what he was doing or not doing.

The spell was broken when the curtain rose for the applause: there was Rafe, his face still wet with tears. She felt almost stunned with gratitude to him. She wanted to see him, to speak to him. To say thank you. To offer him her pleasure in what he’d done. Maybe even to say she was sorry.

Sorry for what?

She wasn’t sure.

The way he’d looked as he’d left her the other night came to her—the untransformed Rafe. She had sensed that he was already heading into guilt and sorrow, feelings that probably always lay in wait for him in his sad life with his wife. Instantly she’d thought that it was a mistake to have slept with him—that they shouldn’t have done it.

They: no way. She was the one who had made it happen. It was she, she, who shouldn’t have done it.

But now she was glad she had. She had been glad doing it, too, but that had been private, purely sexual. She’d been lonely, sexually lonely. It had felt like water to her thirst. But she was glad now because it had brought her—and him—this moment on the stage, she was sure of it. Something had opened in him, had changed. Something that made Gabriel say his wife’s name as though it were a blessing and a penance at the same time—to be welcomed, to be suffered.

She stood up. She threaded her way through the last stragglers, heading toward the front of the theater. She mounted the steps and pushed the curtain aside. As she moved backstage, she heard voices and, turning, saw Edmund and Nasim, one of the lighting guys, onstage, talking. For a moment she was almost startled to see anyone else there, in Gabriel’s living room. She spoke Edmund’s name.

He looked over to her, and instantly his wide face opened in a grin. His head had already started moving up and down: yes.

“Did you see it?” she asked him. He nodded more. “Wasn’t it fantastic?”

“Yep,” he said. “It sure was.” His hand rose and caressed his beard in pleasure.

“Where is he? Where’s Rafe? I wanted to speak to him.”

“Gone. Absent. He must’ve left about the second the curtain came down. He was so out of here.”

“Hey,” Nasim said. “I’m gonna check out this lightboard problem, see what’s going on.”

Edmund turned to him. “That’s the ticket,” he said.

Billy had come onstage, too, and now she sat on the arm of the overstuffed chair. “Why?” she said to Edmund. “Why did he leave?”

“I think he was … upset by it in a way.” Edmund lifted his shoulders. “I suppose he sorta stunned himself, too.”

“You told him how amazing it was, I hope. Before he took off.”

“I did. We all did.” They sat for a moment, smiling foolishly at each other.

“God, I was just so … moved,” she said finally.

“It was fantastic.”

She let a little silence gather. Then she said, “I should have slept with him much, much sooner.”

His face changed. “Billy, you didn’t!”

“Nah.” She was shamed, suddenly. “Nah,” she said. “Just kidding.”

“Good! ’Cause, you know, his life is … really complicated.”

“I know. I know. He told me about it.”

Edmund watched her. She knew he couldn’t tell whether she was lying or not. He shook his head. “It could really do some … bad, bad stuff to him,” he said.

“I know. I was kidding.” But his face was stern. The scary Edmund, the one they all dreaded. “It was funny, Edmund,” she insisted, trying to make him happy again.

“Only mildly funny,” he said.

“I apologize then.” She put her hand on her heart for a moment. “I only said it ’cause I was just so … thrilled. It’s actually almost embarrassing, I’m so happy. For him, and for me.”

“For us.”

“Right. For all of us.”

Now Edmund set his bulk down on the couch, grunting a bit. Here they were, the two of them, relaxed and happy in Gabriel’s sad world. Incongruous.

He was frowning suddenly. “The big question is, will he be able to do it again?”

“Oh, now that he has it, I bet yes.”

“Yah? But without that sense of surprise, maybe.” He took his glasses off and began to polish them with the hem of his immense and shapeless T-shirt. It said SONOMA JAZZ FESTIVAL.

“But we were the only ones surprised,” she said. “I mean, who else knew he’d never done it before?”

“Well, he was surprised, too, that’s the thing. He surprised himself. That’ll be hard to replicate.”

“Oh, try not to be such a pessimist, Ed.”

“Hard for me,” he said. He put the glasses back on, and his pale, washed-out eyes got big again.

They sat in silence for a moment, both staring off at nothing. Billy sighed. She needed to get going. She stood up and began to pull on her coat, her bat coat, as she thought of it. It was black, it had big, loose arms, like wings.

“Want to get a drink?” Edmund asked. “Celebrate?”

“Can’t. I’m meeting friends.”

“Oh.” And without missing a beat, “Well, maybe I could join you.”

Billy imagined it quickly, the impossibility of the group. “They’re kind of special, old friends,” she said. “We’d be pretty boring to you, I think.”

“… ‘she said, brushing him off.’”

“I adore you, Eddie, you know that.” She reached out and touched his cheek. The fur of his beard was surprisingly soft. “I hope you’re as happy with yourself as I am with me.”

“Oh, I doubt it.”

She laughed. “I know. But do it, Ed—get happy.” She picked up her bag. “I’ll see you tomorrow, anyway.”

He bowed his head ceremonially. “Good night, then, Wilhelmina.”

Billy walked back out through the empty theater, empty but for the cleanup crew moving around in the rows of seats, picking things up. She turned at the opened doorway to the lobby and stood looking back at the slope of the seats, at the closed curtain, remembering it again—her Gabriel, his visible sorrow and joy and the way she had felt connected to that, to both feelings. Had felt, somehow, comforted by them, she realized now.

As she stepped outside into the chilly rain, as she put up her umbrella, she was aware of a dragging reluctance about this next part of her evening. She just didn’t want to do it, to go and be with Leslie and Pierce and whoever their pal was. It was partly her usual hesitation about Leslie, fond as she was of her. But it was also because she was so stirred by the play tonight. She wanted to hold on to that, to think it through.

Instead she would go and sit and make the smallest of small talk with the person she most would have liked to talk to honestly about everything—but never had. And never would, she was certain of that.

The day Leslie called, Billy was at home alone, working. When she heard Leslie’s voice at the other end of the line, she experienced immediately what she’d come to recognize as the usual mix of feelings about her. The pull of the old affection, and then the wish to be free of that pull. But when Leslie said that she and Pierce were coming down to see the show, Billy had said only how glad she would be to see them. She offered the name of a place to meet afterward. Then, just as it seemed that the conversation was over, that the next step would be to say goodbye and hang up, Leslie said, “I think we’ll bring a friend along, too.”

“Great,” Billy had said.

As soon as she hung up, she started to worry about the play, about how Leslie would receive it. It wasn’t about Gus and it wasn’t about herself, but the feelings behind it were ones she understood because of Gus and herself. Leslie would probably wonder about that. She might even be wounded by it. Billy had wounded a number of people with her work, but she didn’t want Leslie to join the club. There was something so open, so recklessly generous about her that it made you want to shield her from anything painful.

It was only a while later, fixing herself a snack before she headed to the theater for another rehearsal, that it occurred to her that the friend Leslie had spoken of might be a man, a man she was planning to introduce to Billy, in some old-fashioned sense of the word.

Surely not. Surely it wasn’t a man. And even if it was, surely there was no sense in which an “introduction” would be made.

But standing in the kitchen, eating her crackers and cheese, Billy had thought, How strange would that be?

She walked slowly through the misty rain down Tremont Street, trying to make the short trip last as long as possible. But of course the lighted windows of the restaurant had been visible from the moment she started out, and she was there in only a minute or two. As she waited on the corner for the cars to pass so she could cross the street, she could see Leslie and Pierce at their table, leaned in, talking to the third person, who was, indeed, a man.

Okay. Okay, maybe that would make things easier. A stranger, to let some air into this evening, to keep them all turned away from the topic at hand. The topic always at hand between her and Leslie.

She had barely stepped through the door—she was just shaking out her collapsed umbrella—when Leslie was embracing her, engulfing her in the citrusy scent she always wore. She was saying something, something about flowers. Billy didn’t understand right away. She felt as confused as if she’d been waked from a deep sleep to a conversation already under way. But apparently, yes, Leslie had bought some for her, some flowers, and then forgotten them. She was apologizing for this.

Billy smiled. “Leslie, I wouldn’t have known anything about it if you hadn’t told me. Don’t tell me, for God’s sake.”

“But I could kick myself.”

“Well, don’t. It was such a sweet thought, I’m glad you had it.”

And then they were at the table, being introduced. Sam, the stranger’s name was. He stood up—unfolded himself slowly and for what seemed to Billy like a long, long time. She felt like laughing. Leslie couldn’t possibly be fixing them up. It would be ridiculous, the way they’d look next to each other. It would be a kind of visual joke.

Leslie sat down. Billy had to clamber up onto her chair—it was high, bar-stool height. She slung the big bag she was carrying over the post at its back. Leslie was still talking about the flowers, telling the friend, Sam, about forgetting them. Pierce, meanwhile, had started to speak to Billy, congratulating her on the play. After a minute or two, they were all turned to her. The Sam guy began to add his questions to Pierce’s. How had she thought it went tonight? When was the official opening? Had there been reviews yet? Billy answered politely, fully, but nervously. As she slid her coat off, she felt the man—Sam—helping her, easing her sleeve away so she could extract her arm. It felt good, this small kindness. Maybe it would turn out that he’d be a refuge of sorts.

The waitress came over, tall and blond and cool, unsmiling, a tiny diamond blooming in the outer flesh of one nostril. Billy asked for water and red wine. Pierce ordered a plate of cheeses for the table.

After she left, they turned to Billy again. More questions. It made her feel jittery, more jittery than when she’d been walking over. When the wine came, she lifted it immediately and had a swallow. What she wanted was not to be at the center of things here.

She asked Sam where he lived.

Brookline, he said.

“Oh, I lived there when I first came to Boston!” she said. She talked about the apartment she had then, the horrible cats she was sitting for. They figured out where his house was in relation to hers. They talked about restaurants they liked, and the bookstore. They were both fans of the Coolidge Corner, the independent movie theater.

Movies. Always good. And it worked tonight, too. Pierce had seen No Country for Old Men recently and wanted to talk about it. He said he didn’t know what to make of it.

This was so un-Pierce-like that Billy was curious: why not?

She was turned to Pierce, listening to his explanation of what was unreasonable in the film, when she saw Rafe’s pale face float by outside. He was hatless—no umbrella, his collar turned up, his eyes squinted against the rain. He didn’t look in, he didn’t see her. She had the impulse to get up, to go to the door and call to him, but of course she didn’t. She sat, nodding, being polite, listening to Pierce.

Leslie, who hadn’t liked the movie at all, said the best thing about going was the moment buying the tickets when she got to say, “Two seniors for No Country for Old Men.” Billy had turned to her when she started to talk. As she laughed now, she glanced over at Sam, at the end of the table. He was watching her with level, appraising eyes, as though he’d noticed her quick mental trip away, perhaps had seen where she’d gone in those few seconds.

But then Pierce was suddenly pointing to the back of the room. “Good Lord, what kind of place have you brought us to, Billy? It looks like a … an, abattoir, for God’s sake.”

The others turned and looked toward the far end of the room to what they apparently hadn’t noticed when they came in: past the tables and the big square chopping block, the three wide refrigerators sitting side by side, lighted brightly from within. Their clear glass doors revealed chunks of bloody, raw meat stippled with fat, hanging sausage links, indecent-looking birds—naked, plucked.

“Yes,” Billy said. She curtsied her head to Pierce. “A charnel house, for the edible dead.”

“The Oedipal dead?” asked Leslie, incredulously.

Billy laughed. “E-di-ble,” she said. “Though who knows? Who knows how the capon feels about the hen?”

“Isn’t there a joke that begins that way?” Sam asked.

“There should be,” she said.

“I’ll be working on it.”

His face had a worn quality to it. She liked that. A used man, she thought. She turned to Pierce, said, “It is called the Butcher Shop. In its defense.”

“Very original,” Pierce said. “I don’t think it would quite fly in Hanover. All those naked carcasses. Too much unbridled mortality for a polite college town.”

“I like being reminded of mortality,” Billy said.

“You’re younger than we are,” Pierce said. “We don’t.”

Billy smiled. Leslie smiled back at her, and for a moment she felt a spark of the warm connection that had once lived between them. It unnerved her. She had a little more wine to drink.

As if she were feeling the connection, too, Leslie leaned forward. “I like your hair,” Leslie said. “Cut that way.”

Billy’s hand went up as if of its own volition and touched her hair. “I’m dyeing it now,” she said. Completely irrelevant, Billy.

Leslie sighed. “I probably should be, too. Mine’s gotten so white.”

“But it’s a beautiful white,” Billy said. “Pure as the driven snow.” She could hear the nervous, jazzed quality in her own voice. She hoped no one else could.

It seemed not. Pierce and Sam had started to talk across the table—they were at opposite ends—about the approaching primary elections, the odd assortment of candidates in both parties. Leslie said she and Pierce had gone to see Hillary Clinton in Hanover and were impressed.

“I can’t vote for Hillary,” Billy said. “Not after the Iraq vote.”

“For Christ’s sake, Billy,” Pierce said. “Everyone voted for the war.”

“Well, clearly a majority did. But not everyone.”

“Who didn’t?” Leslie asked.

“How soon they forget,” Billy said. “Your buddy Patrick Leahy. My buddy Ted Kennedy. Paul Wellstone. Barbara Boxer. A bunch of the good guys.”

“Mikulski did, too, I think,” Sam said. “And Chafee.”

“Right.” She looked at him appreciatively. “And a couple of others. It wasn’t a done deal at all. It really mattered, how Hillary voted.”

“But didn’t she sort of have to, really?” Leslie asked.

“Hillary?”

“Yes. Because of being a woman. Not to be a wimp.”

“Not to be a woman, anyway,” Sam said.

“But I hate that! It’s so strategic.” Her voice was too loud. Pull it in, pull it in. She lowered it, spoke calmly. “No, I’m for Obama. Ever since that convention speech. Plus he’s my homey—from Hyde Park, just like me.”

Sam offered the preposterousness of Mitt Romney as a candidate, and Pierce joined in trashing him. They moved on to Fred Thompson, and he got it, too. Billy started to relax a bit. She had the sense of an opening up of the evening, a kind of freely moving conversation spurred by politics—she loved politics, for this and other reasons—so she was surprised when Leslie was suddenly standing by her chair, lifting her coat from it, making excuses for herself and Pierce. She was tired, it was past their bedtime. No, no, Billy and Sam must stay, she said. Pierce was standing now too, pulling out his wallet, joking about how expensive the hotel was, saying that they had to get to bed as soon as possible to get their money’s worth.

Sam and Pierce argued briefly about the money that Pierce tried to set down, but Pierce won—he simply wouldn’t take the handful of bills back. Billy slid off her chair while Pierce helped Leslie on with her coat. Then she was lifting her face to Leslie’s cheek, to Pierce’s—and they were on their way, one last wave before they were out the door, into the dark night.

Leaving Billy and what she supposed was her date. She got up onto her high seat again. They were silent for a few seconds. Too long. “If we’re going to stay,” she said, “I’d like another drink.” She knew this was a bad idea. She’d had almost no supper, hours earlier—half a tuna-fish sandwich consumed standing in the kitchen, Reuben watching the slightest shift of the hand holding the bread.

“Are we going to stay?” He was looking at her, truly asking.

“I suppose we should. We’ve been instructed to, anyway.”

He laughed and raised his hand to signal the waitress.

When she’d come over again and taken their order, he turned to her. “Now that I’ve got you alone,” he said, “let me ask you about the play.”

“Okay.”

“Would you say it had a happy ending? We were arguing about it.”

She couldn’t tell if he actually cared or was just being polite, so she didn’t know whether to try to explain it to him, what she had wanted, and then the surprise of how it had gone tonight. What she said was “Maybe. I guess I don’t really think of it as an ending, anyway. More a beginning, maybe.”

“A lot of maybes there.” His eyes were unreadable through his old-fashioned spectacles. “But then I suppose it’s not really fair, is it, to ask the playwright what the play means.”

Billy thought this was generous of him. She’d been evasive and he was being generous. She should be generous. She said, “It’s fair enough. And it’s probably time the playwright worked up a quick, deft explanation for wider consumption. Hey, what is my play about?”

“And?”

The waitress came then, with their wine.

Billy leaned back as she set their glasses down. And then she proceeded to do a little housecleaning, picking up around them a little, taking away Pierce and Leslie’s glasses and silverware, their napkins, giving the table a quick swipe with a towel.

“A clean slate,” he said when she’d left.

They didn’t speak for a moment or two. Billy had a sip of wine and glanced around the room. It was getting late for a Tuesday night. There was only one other table still occupied, and two couples at the bar, plus a lone drinker chatting to the bartender. He was someone Billy saw a lot by himself in the bars in this part of the neighborhood. When you’re by yourself in these same bars, she reminded herself.

She looked at Sam, apparently pondering his wine. Everything felt awkward, suddenly. She needed to do something, something to make it easier. “What’s Leslie up to, do you think?” she asked. “Has she donated us to each other?”

He looked surprised for just a few seconds. He said, “It felt something like that, didn’t it?”

“So are you in any sense hers to donate?”

He raised his shoulders, his eyebrows. Who knows? “Are you?” he asked.

She considered it. “Well, maybe she thinks so. I was her brother’s … girlfriend, I suppose you have to say. Though that’s such a ridiculous word. Fiancée, by her lights. So she feels, I guess, a combination of things about me. Affection, I believe, as I do for her. But also worry. Responsibility.” She had some more wine and set the glass down. “I don’t mean I think she owes me any of those things. But that’s who she is. What she’s like. As you no doubt know, if you know her.” He nodded, a slight smile on his lips. “The deal is, Gus was supposed to love me forever, according to her. To take care of me. He died. Now who will do that? I think that’s some of it.” She pointed at him. “Now you,” she said.

“Me what?”

“Now you explain why she thinks she can give you to me.”

“That’s easy,” he said. “I’m an age-appropriate single man. An old friend. It’s not so surprising she’d try to fix us up.”

“But you didn’t know about it.”

“I didn’t. She said a friend had a play being performed, would I join them, and perhaps we’d all have a drink together afterward.”

She felt more comfortable suddenly, knowing he hadn’t been in on it, hadn’t agreed to it. She looked at him appraisingly. “So, are you more an old friend of Pierce’s, or of Leslie’s?”

“Both.” He looked a little sheepish for a second, she thought. What was that about? “More Leslie. I met her first. I know her better.” He was frowning, considering something. “She was kind to me when my marriage was falling apart. She and Pierce both were. But more Leslie, yes.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, it was years ago. My wife and I built a house together near them in Vermont—I’m an architect—and before it was even finished, the marriage was collapsing. Leslie had sold us the land—she was working in real estate at the time—and as it turned out, she was more interested in the house than Claire, than my wife, was. Interested in the process, in the design, in the building of it, and so forth. We saw a lot of each other over that year and a half or so. I was up there every few weeks.” His face had changed. She had the quick thought that it was like Gabriel’s—Rafe’s—when he was remembering Elizabeth. “I suppose you could say I had a kind of … crush on her. Though that makes me sound like a ten-year-old.” He dipped his head, smiled ruefully. “Which I might have just about been for a couple of months after my marriage ended.” He looked at her. “But nothing ever happened between us.”

“You don’t need to tell me that.”

“Well, it didn’t.”

“I mean, I think I know that. Or at any rate, it seems—it would seem—unlikely to me that Leslie would be unfaithful to Pierce.” She gave a little snort. “Talk about codependency.”

“Aka love.”

“I take your point.” She was enjoying this. Him. “It is a hideous word, isn’t it? ‘Codependency.’” She took some bread from the plate Pierce had ordered and spread it with some soft, blue-veined cheese. “Wordlet,” she said. She pushed the plate toward him. “Phrase. How long were you married?”

“That time? About four years, total.” He started to help himself to some bread and cheese, too.

“‘That time.’ There were other times?”

“One, other time.” He looked up at her quickly. “My first wife died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Again. “That will shut me up.”

“No. It was a long time ago. And you?” He sat back, bread in hand. He seemed relaxed, physically. He’d turned his body to the side, his legs stretched out. And out and out, she thought.

“Marriage?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“One. Young. Disastrous. A bully.” Her husband’s face went by, sneering. “I thought it was romantic, fool that I was, to be married to a complete jerk.”

“You would have to explain the romantic part of that to me.”

“Oh.” Billy remembered herself then quickly, the way she had thought about it, getting married to Steve. It was hard to believe she’d been so dumb. “The difficult man. You know. Women have been sold a bill of goods about difficult men. Heathcliff. Rochester. Marlon Brando in Streetcar. Well, Marlon Brando in anything. On the Waterfront. God.” She took a bite of the bread and cheese. “One-Eyed Jacks,” she said with her mouth full.

“Your character tonight was difficult.”

“Gabriel?” she said. She shook her head and lifted her hand to tell him to wait. When she’d chewed and swallowed, she said, “I think his wife may be more difficult, actually. That he’s become difficult partly in response to her. Or so I saw it.”

“Well, you’re the writer. Isn’t the way you see it necessarily the truth of the matter?”

“Yes. But also no. I mean, I write it a certain way. I think of it a certain way. But then it can change depending on who the actors are, how they say things. How they feel them. Depending on who’s directing it, even. Maybe especially that.” She thought of Edmund, his face, frowning at her about sleeping with Rafe. She thought of Rafe. Suddenly she wanted to explain this to Sam, what had happened on the stage, how miraculous it had seemed to her.

“Like tonight.” She leaned forward a little, elbows on the table. He shifted slightly, as if in response to her. “Like the way Rafe—the actor, the guy playing Gabriel—said that last thing: Elizabeth. It was, to me, fantastic. I mean, I wrote it, of course. I even wrote how I wanted him to say it. But in the end, it’s just a word.” He was watching her attentively. “Not even a word, actually. A name. And he said it … perfectly. Wonderfully. It was …” She gave a little half laugh, an expulsion of breath, and his face lifted. “I felt, ‘So that’s what I meant.’ It was so clear to me all of a sudden. A revelation.” Suddenly, absurdly, she felt almost tearful. This embarrassed her, and because of that, she made her voice tough and said, “Maybe I should sleep with him before every performance.”

Sam’s face changed. He sat up straighter. “Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Yes. I guess you should.”

“Oh, Christ,” she said. She reached over and almost touched his sleeve. “I shouldn’t have said that.” Her lips tightened. I will grow old and die, she thought, still doing this foot-in-mouth thing. She thought of Edmund again. “I said it earlier tonight, too, to someone else. Apparently it’s a line I’m trying out.”

He looked at her for a moment, and then he smiled. A tentative smile, at best.

And she realized that he thought she’d been joking. Joking about the whole thing. She couldn’t let him think that. “I mean, it is true. I did sleep with him.” She watched as his face changed again. “Not that it meant anything.” She sighed, and shook her head. “I mean, it did mean something, but it didn’t … change anything, for him or for me.” She met his eyes, neutral behind the glasses. Waiting, it seemed. She lifted her hands, slightly. “We were lonely. We slept together. Once. But I made my little unfunny joke because I really, truly am so grateful for the way he said that line, the last line, tonight. It seems to me it’s what I meant, but without knowing that I meant it. That he was able to make it contain … so much. Love, yes. But capitulation, giving up, giving in. Loss.” She was remembering the moment again, she saw Rafe’s face. “Sorrow for himself and for her. And relief. Love. Did I say that? A kind of joy.” She shrugged. “I don’t know.” She stopped. After a moment, she asked him, “Didn’t you think all of that was there?”

“I did, yes. I think so. But I would have thought … you intended it. All that.”

“Well, now it seems so clear, I must have. Or I would have wanted to. But it was Rafe who saw it. Who read it that way. Who made it contain that.” She brought her hand down on the table. “God, I love the theater.”

After a moment, he said, “Well. We certainly seem to have covered a lot of territory here.”

“Mea culpa. You’ve been a model of restraint.”

“I’ve been an open book. Not that I wanted to be.”

“Not so! You’ve told me the bare minimum. The number of marriages and the way they ended.”

“And Leslie.”

She waved her hand. “Leslie.”

“No, actually I think I was too dismissive of it to you. Since you’ve been so honest …”

“So excruciatingly honest,” she said.

He nodded. “I guess I should say about Leslie that what I felt, for a while—for a long while, actually—was that I loved her.”

She looked at him. “Oh,” she said. Surprise, surprise.

“While knowing I wouldn’t do anything about it.”

She kept her voice light. “Well, who wouldn’t love Leslie? I love her. There’s nobody gooder.” Was she jealous? She couldn’t be jealous. She didn’t even know him, this too-tall man.

“That’s what I felt at the time. How good she was.”

“Look, if that’s the worst thing you’ve done …”

“That’s not what I meant, of course.”

“Of course it’s not.” A silence fell. Behind Billy someone was talking on a cell phone, too loudly, about an argument she had with someone, reporting each side. Now she was saying, “So I’m like, ‘I don’t think so.’ And he was like, ‘Do I care? Do I even care?’”

Billy said, “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

He laughed.

“No, what?”

“Really?”

“Sure. Why not? While we’re covering territory. While we’re embarrassing ourselves. You should do your share.”

“I suppose it would have to do with my kids.”

“Aaah! Kids.” But why was this news? It was always like this. People and their complicated stories. Anyone over thirty or so. Hers, after all, could rival his.

“Yeah. Three boys. Men, I should say. Who … they had, in various ways, a hard time with their mother’s death. My first wife’s death. Not surprisingly. And then with the marriage to Claire. And then with the end of that.” He dipped his head on the word in emphasis. “I think it’s why I’ve … I’ve tried to keep my life simpler since then. Though of course it doesn’t matter at this point. Now that they’re grown. But I would say that I just … I didn’t know how to help them when they were younger. And what’s worse, I’m not sure I’d be any better now.”

“Mmm. But they survived.”

“Of course. They’re fine, in that sense. But scarred, I think. Damaged.”

“Oh, who in this wide world worth their salt isn’t? Why would you wish otherwise for them?”

“I don’t, really. But I think what I wish is that I had made it easier for them, that’s all. That I’d been more, attuned to them, or useful to them somehow.”

His face was so thoughtful that she felt bad, she felt she’d been cavalier. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was glib. Again. I’m a little nuts tonight, I think. Wired. For many complicated reasons.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, I know—or I assume—that it must be hard, to feel that way about them.”

“Well, I almost never do. Only occasionally.” He turned forward in his chair. He smiled, suddenly. It made him younger. “But enough about my sins. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

Many possibilities arose, and she was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Oh, my life is a bottomless pit of worst things. I slept with the actor. And he’s married.”

“Well, he’s in charge of that.”

“Mm,” she said. She thought of the way Rafe had looked, slouched next to her on the couch. The way he’d moved on her in the half dark of the bedroom. “I kind of seduced him.”

“I say it again: he’s in charge of himself.”

Billy looked at her wineglass. She had some wine. She looked at him. He met her glance, steadily. After a few seconds, he said abruptly, “Why are we talking like this? I don’t know you. I don’t even know you.”

“Well, I have a theory about that. Naturally.”

“Do you.” He smiled, expectantly.

“I think it’s because of at least two things. One, that you saw the play, so in fact you think you do know me. People always think that.”

“Do they?” he said.

“They do. They extrapolate. And I’m sure you have, too.”

“I’ll never tell. And the second thing?”

“The second thing is that I told you that I fucked Rafe. That broke the ice, all right.”

“Don’t say that.” He made an odd face, displeased, as though he’d smelled something off.

“What? That I fucked him?” She was surprised.

“Yes.”

“Why? It’s how I think of it. And would say it. I do say it. So please, don’t be fastidious because”—she drew herself up—“you think I’m a lady, or something. It’s my business, after all, not to be a lady. To know how people speak. All the very unladylike things people say. How they think.”

“I suppose it is,” he said. And after a moment, “You’re a little … difficult, yourself, for me.”

“Why?”

“Oh, your life is so different from mine. Mine is … has been, I guess you’d say, regulated. The kids, the marriages, the house, the office. Those things.”

“Well, that is different from mine, yes. Lots. But, why does that make me difficult? Maybe you’re the difficult one.”

“I might well be.” They were quiet for a minute. “I think all I meant was that you’re used to a more … to a wilder life, I think. Less regular.”

“Ah.” She laughed. “La vie bohème.”

“Well, yes. Compared to mine.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong. I wouldn’t be up to it. It’s more la vie boring, I’m afraid. Most nights I’m in bed by eleven with my dog and a cup of tea.” She had a sudden fond image of her bedroom, Reuben lying on the quilt, the pretty old gas lamps out in back. “Up at seven. Alone, all day long.” She shook her head. “It’s pathetic, really.”

“But then there’s being in the theater, being with other people.”

“Yeah, once every couple of years.” Then she nodded. “But you mean sex, don’t you? That kind of being with other people.”

“Probably. Probably I do.”

“Everyone has sex. You don’t need to be a bohemian for that.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do.” They sat silent for a moment. He was moving his hand over the tabletop. Now he leaned forward, one elbow on the table. “You and Gus seem an unlikely pair,” he said.

“Did you know Gus?” This possibility hadn’t occurred to her.

“Not really. I met him once. At Leslie’s. But … wasn’t he much younger than you?”

She laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t say much.” Then she remembered what a child he had often seemed to her. “I don’t know. Maybe I would. But after all, I’m six years older now than I was then. And he would be, too.”

“But he also seemed … I don’t know. Well, you seem like you’re very different … types.”

“We were very different. It was … it sometimes made things not so great between us. There were times …” She looked out the window at the dark, at the lighted marquee down the street.

“Times?” he prompted.

She looked back at him and met his steady gaze. “Oh, nothing.”

“Right. I suppose we should save some information for next time.”

“Oh. There’s going to be a next time?”

“Well, I’d like it.” When she didn’t answer right away, his eyes behind the glasses changed. “And we more or less owe it to Leslie to have, say, coffee together, or dinner or something.”

She sat still for a moment. What had she been doing here? Was she incapable of conversation without inviting someone to put the moves on her, even someone she had no intention, no possibility, of getting involved with? She pushed her glass away. There was a half inch or so of wine in the bottom of it. “I have to go, actually,” she said. She slid off the seat.

“Oh, look,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be pushy, or make assumptions …”

“No,” she said. “No, let’s. Let’s have coffee or something. It’s just, you know, I have to get home. I have a dog.”

He stood up, too, to get his wallet out of his back pocket. He was signaling for the check.

The waitress came over right away—she had probably been waiting for them to leave so she could finish up her shift—and he gave her Pierce’s money, and his own. Billy was beginning to rearrange her possessions. “Do you need change?” the waitress asked.

“No, that’s fine,” he said. “Keep it.”

He stepped behind Billy to help her on with her coat. There were a few awkward moments when she couldn’t find the sleeves—she could feel him moving the shapeless thing around, trying to help. Then there he was. She slid her arms in.

Outside the rain had stopped. It was colder.

He asked if he could walk her home, but she said she was fine, that she was just steps away, really. He talked about the time when it wouldn’t have been fine in this neighborhood. He was trying to hold her there, she could tell. He said he’d call. She nodded and extended her hand. They shook. She smiled up at him. “Well, then,” she said, and turned and walked away.

She felt certain he was watching her go, but she didn’t look back.

She had a headache the next morning. She lay in bed for a while feeling sorry for herself, remembering the things they’d talked about the night before. The line about sleeping with Rafe. God. Twice she’d said it. Why? Why, Billy? In particular, why the second time, with Sam? Had she been trying to attract him? To repel him?

Both, she supposed, she was in such an agitated state.

And maybe because she’d drunk the second glass of wine. The wine she’d had to calm herself down. The wine she’d felt she needed because she’d been a little crazy, a little vulnerable, after the play. Because it always upset her to see Leslie anyway, and here she was being presented by Leslie with a new man. Clearly, yes, being introduced. Because she’d liked him, the new man, and wanted to resist that.

But why had she wanted to resist liking him?

Because she didn’t want to sleep with Rafe and then a few nights later with someone else. Because he seemed ready to like her, and she didn’t want a “nice, age-appropriate man,” as she remembered him calling himself, in her life. She liked being alone. When she wanted company, she could usually find it in people she met at work.

Because it was so complicated, with Leslie’s having set it up, with all that would mean in terms of Leslie in her life. Gus.

Because she needed to be alone. It was better for her to stay alone.

Because of Gus. Because of Gus.

——

Billy still had a picture of Gus somewhere in her desk. Correction: of Gus and Leslie. It had been taken long before she’d met him, actually. He was probably only about twenty-five in it, so Leslie would have been about forty. Her hair had been dark then, and it fell thick and straight to her shoulders. She wore a sundress with wide straps. Gus’s arm was around her waist. He was barefoot, in khakis. He was grinning at the camera unselfconsciously. Leslie was looking at him, at his profile, looking at him in the way Billy had seen her look at him dozens of times in life—lovingly, admiringly. Behind them the flowers of Leslie’s garden made a deckled blur in the sun. Billy knew the exact spot where they were standing.

She liked to think of Gus as he was in the photograph—admired, adored. She liked to think of Leslie as she looked in the photograph too: young, pretty, happy.

This was the picture she’d chosen to keep when she put everything else into a big plastic bag—all the other photos and the letters and the odd things he’d given her—and set it out on the curb along with the other stuff she left behind when she moved out of Gus’s apartment.

Billy had never started an affair with anyone in quite the way she did with Gus. Effortlessly, she would have said. Maybe thoughtlessly. Certainly quickly. She was surprised, even delighted, by the ease of it. This, perhaps, should have been a danger signal, but she ignored it. Maybe it’s my turn for something unanguished was what she thought.

Her specialty before had always been sunless men. Dark, punishing, punished men. Men full of ambition and bitterness. She had fled Chicago, in fact, from such a man. Oh, certainly, there were professional reasons for the move, too. The job she’d gotten at BU, her feeling that she needed to leave the city she’d always lived in in order for anything big to happen to her, the sense that she was mired in familiar patterns in her work. She was not without ambition herself. But she was also very happy to escape from Tom, from his stalker-like unwillingness to let her go. He had wept; he had cursed her. He had telephoned her as many as fifteen or twenty times a day. He had appeared on her doorstep at two in the morning, angry, bitter, pleading.

And suddenly, almost as soon as she moved to Boston—light and air: along came Gus.

She met him in May, on the slow ferry to Provincetown, about a month after she’d moved from Chicago—this charming, perhaps slightly younger man who started talking to her about the book she was halfheartedly reading. Partly because he was so pretty, partly because of their destination, she assumed he was gay. She was always making mistakes like this, misunderstanding other people, particularly other people in relation to herself. She had done the other thing, too, assuming some gay man was straight and, what’s more, interested in her. But the result of her mistaken assumption about Gus was that when he started to kiss her, she was so surprised that she uttered a little involuntary shriek.

She made a sexual joke of it later—she shrieked when he entered her for the first time. And then occasionally after that, just to make them both laugh, she shrieked when he did anything for the first time.

They started to see each other, at first every two or three weeks. After a little while, more like once a week. It was he who was pursuing her, trying to make something happen—she could feel it. And she decided to let it happen. She was having a good time.

There were other reasons, too. She didn’t know very many people in Boston yet—she was lonely, a bit—so she was pleased just for the company. And she loved being in bed with him. It was as though sex were a sport he was very, very good at, and easy and joyful in doing. She told him so.

“But that’s the way it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?” he asked.

She laughed.

She couldn’t believe it when he wanted to take her to meet his sister. He kept pressing her about it, almost from the start. It seemed ridiculous, this wish of his. His sister, for God’s sake.

But he brought it up so often that she said yes, finally.

They drove up to Vermont on a Saturday in late July in Gus’s old yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the windows open because you couldn’t turn the heater off. As they slowed down to drive into the little town where Leslie lived, Billy looked around and thought how preposterously perfect it was—the sunlight filtering through the tall maple and oak trees on the town green, the white houses arrayed around it. Billy saw children playing on the green as they pulled into Leslie’s dirt driveway.

The house itself was old and quirky and sweet, its windows wide open to the soft air moving through it. Inside, the floors tilted, the ceilings were low. They stood for a long moment in the front hall. Billy watched the curtains at the living room windows lift and fall. When no one appeared, Gus leaned into the stairwell to the second floor and called Leslie’s name.

“Oh!” someone said. They heard rushing footsteps above them, and then Leslie came down the narrow staircase, emerging into their view feetfirst on the steep ladderlike stairs. Billy was startled as she descended by how different Leslie was from Gus—soft, almost plump, where he was buff, dark where he was blond. And there was something grave, something serious, about her, which you couldn’t have said of Gus, though when she turned from embracing him to hold out her hand to Billy, her face opened in a smile of dazzling warmth. “Billy,” she said. “I think I would have known you anywhere.” Her hand itself was warm, her grip firm. Billy liked her immediately, just as Gus had promised she would.

They sat in the side yard, and Leslie brought out a tray with a pitcher and served them lemonade. Just as she finished pouring their glasses, one of the children across the road called loudly to another, “That’s not the rules.” And another answered, “Yeah, well, the rules stink.”

“So true,” Billy said, and Leslie laughed.

The shade around them was dappled, shifting when the breeze moved the trees. From where she sat, Billy had a view in one direction of the green and the playing children, in the other of the garden—wide swaths of tall, arching plants in pale colors. Leslie peppered her with questions about herself, about where she’d grown up and how, about how she started writing plays. But she talked about herself, too, about her family and Gus’s. Late in the afternoon, she got up “to do something about supper,” she said, though it would turn out she’d already done a great deal about supper. She came back after a minute or two, the screen door smacking shut behind her, and handed Billy and Gus two small tin buckets. She asked them to pick a few cups of raspberries from a patch she had in the backyard, behind the flower garden.

When Pierce came home from the hospital, he served them gin and tonics under the trees, and Leslie came and sat with them again. Billy didn’t quite get Leslie and Pierce together, they seemed such an odd pair. Leslie fell almost silent around him, and he seemed entirely comfortable about that, about occupying center stage. Gus kept him going, too, asking him questions, almost teasing him sometimes. They told jokes for a while, in turn, and Pierce laughed loudly after each one, even his own. Billy liked that, someone who laughed at his own jokes.

They moved indoors for dinner, just in time to escape the bugs that had started to descend. There was cold soup to start, a minty puree of peas, and then sliced lamb and potatoes. The dark slowly gathered around the house. About halfway through the meal, Leslie lighted the candles on the table. There was something lovely, something ceremonial, in the concentrated, graceful way she did it. When Billy looked away from her, the windows were suddenly black. The reflection of the candles swayed and leaped in the warped, uneven old panes of glass.

Leslie cleared off the dinner plates—Gus got up and helped her—and then brought out pound cake, with ice cream and a seedless raspberry sauce.

After dinner, Pierce went up to his study to do some work. Gus and Leslie and Billy carried the dishes to the kitchen. Leslie wouldn’t let them help her wash them, so Gus took Billy for a walk, to spy on the neighbors, he said. They made a slow circuit of the green. Amazingly to Billy, no curtains were drawn. She and Gus could look freely through the windows at what seemed the mild and pleasant activities of the townspeople: television, reading. Some families were still sitting around tables in their kitchens or dining rooms. As Gus and Billy walked, a group of boys on bikes swooped past them several times in the dark, doing wheelies, yelling at one another, their white T-shirts all you could see of them at a distance. The air smelled green and fresh.

They lay down on the grass of the town green. It was cool and dampish against Billy’s back. Above them, more stars than she would have thought possible glimmered and shone. A distant cluster was so thickly strewn that it looked like spilled powder. Someone called for a child to come in, a faint call that sounded full of grief to Billy: “Louey. Lou-ey.”

A car drove past, its headlights raking over the white houses, the trees—and then it was gone and everything was dark again. Billy said, “I know why you wanted me to meet your sister.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because you wanted to append this whole scene, and Leslie, too, to yourself. To add this … dimension, whatever it is—sweet Americana—to my sense of who you are.”

“I’m not so devious as you think I am. I just thought you’d like her.”

“I do. What’s not to like?”

When they got back, the house was silent. There was just one lamp on in the living room. Leslie and Pierce had gone to bed.

Gus and Billy turned the light off and felt their way up the creaking, narrow stairs to the bedroom that had been Gus’s when he was in college. It had a ceiling that sloped radically. Over the bed was a skylight. Looking up, Billy could see the moon just appearing. The stars were made faint by its bright light, and the night sky looked blacker behind it.

She took the first turn in the bathroom and then slid between the cool sheets. She could hear Gus brushing his teeth, peeing. He came back and stretched out next to her. He smelled of peppermint and a flesh smell unique to him, faintly grassy. He started to touch her breasts, but Billy said, “No. Gus.”

After a moment, he asked, “Why?”

“They’ll hear us.”

“We’ll be quiet. We’ll make stealth love.”

“I can’t, Gus. It’s too close. They’re too close.” Was that it? Billy wasn’t sure.

They lay there, whispering in the silvery light. After a while, from across the hallway, through the walls, they faintly heard a light, repeated crooning—Leslie’s voice. Pierce joined her after a few moments, first a soft rhythmic call under her song, then getting louder, rising above it, as they each—both—swam toward a climax. A definitive climax, though all of this had been muted, perhaps out of the polite hope that they wouldn’t be heard. Slowly they subsided into silence. After a minute or two Billy heard their voices in sleepy conversation, a few low alternating murmurs.

“Hmm!” said Gus, when all had been quiet for a while. She could see that he was grinning. His teeth looked dangerous in this light.

“Interesting,” she answered.

“Kind of a precedent, wouldn’t you say?” He turned on his side to her again.

“Gus, no. I mean even more now I’d feel self-conscious. It would seem so … competitive.”

“Oh, and that’s something you never indulge in.”

“I just can’t, Gus.”

She lay awake a long time after Gus had dropped off. The moonlight moving across the bed kept her from sleep, but she was also conscious of a slight discomfort she was feeling about him; she wasn’t sure why.

No, here’s what it was. Gradually, over the course of the afternoon and evening, he had come to seem young to her. Too young. Not grown up. It had to do with Leslie, with the way he was around Leslie. He seemed so easily to take from her. He had described her to Billy as being like a mother to him, but this was something you’d grow out of in the back-and-forth struggle with a mother, she thought.

In the car the next day, driving home, she said, “I would pay money to have someone adore me the way your sister adores you.” She had her bare feet propped on the dash to escape the warm air pumping steadily in from below it.

“You don’t need to. Ta-da! Here I am.”

“Not the same. You are aware of certain, shall we say, flaws.”

“I can’t think of a one,” he said.

“You see? You have to joke about it.”

Over the next year, they went up to Vermont frequently, usually once a month or so. Often Billy and Leslie sat up late together after Pierce and Gus were asleep. In the warm weather they sat on the screened porch off the dining room; and then—in August and September, as the nights grew rapidly cooler, and then cold—they were inside, in the low-ceilinged living room. They moved easily from one thing to another in these conversations—plays and movies, books they liked, cities they’d traveled to. Leslie asked about her awful first marriage, about her childhood as the daughter of a distinguished man.

“A great man,” Billy said. “Or so we were instructed. By our mother, poor invisible woman. And, of course, by him, himself.” She felt at ease talking about this with Leslie, though she’d never discussed it with Gus. “A bigger narcissist I never met. The Great Pooh-Bah, I called him. Behind his back, of course.”

Leslie in her turn talked about Pierce and the way they met, about her and Gus’s ugly growing up. About their mother’s irrational anger—once she’d seen scratches on Gus’s face, she said, and he’d told her it was nothing, that their mother had slapped him because he’d left his bedding on the sofa after he’d gotten up, and her ring had caught in his flesh and torn it.

“Nothing, he called it.” Her voice was full of pain. Her mouth tightened as she shook her head.

She spoke of how amazed she always was by Gus’s lightheartedness. “I feel as though we divided up the way to respond or react to our family along very tidy lines. I took in all the hard, mean stuff. I noticed it. And I know that’s made me the kind of person I am,” she said. “I also know what kind of person that is. I know how I like things—orderly and calm—and I understand what’s not very brave about that, what frightens me when that feels threatened.”

They were having this conversation outdoors, on the porch. It was dark, and their voices seemed almost disembodied in the night air. Perhaps they wouldn’t have said so much otherwise.

“Honestly, though,” Leslie said, “I don’t know where Gussie’s temperament comes from. He’s so … carefree, really. My father might have been a bit that way when he was younger, but by the time Gus would have been aware of him, he wasn’t much of anything but a drunk.”

When work started for Billy and Gus in the fall—Gus at the suburban prep school where he taught, Billy at BU—they were so busy that they agreed they wouldn’t see each other at all during the week. Billy was teaching two courses that were new for her, and Gus, of course, had classes every day, and lessons and papers to go over most weeknights. They usually spent a day of every weekend together, though, sometimes in the big apartment Billy was subletting in Brookline, occasionally at Gus’s smaller place in Somerville. They explored the city or slept late; they cooked together and saw plays and movies, they listened to music. They made love. They drove up to see Leslie and Pierce. All of it seemed easy, unfraught.

Almost all of it.

Occasionally Billy would feel Gus’s attentiveness to her as stifling, his willingness to change his mind about anything she had a strong opinion on as weak. Where were his own feelings? His own passionate convictions? She’d withdraw from him then, and sometimes be silent, sullen, disliking herself for this but unable to control it. Or she’d stay away from him for a couple of weeks—once, for almost a month—making up some excuse having to do with her need to work. Which was always true, there was so much she was trying to get done.

Every now and then, too, she would have the uncomfortable awareness she’d experienced the first time she’d seen Gus with Leslie—the sense of him as undeveloped, little-boyish. And seeing that, feeling that, would make her conscious of her distance from him, conscious of the way in which she was almost using him. Passing the time, as if with a pleasant, momentarily engaging diversion—the equivalent of the popcorn and ice-cream dinners she sometimes indulged in when she was alone.

But then he’d do something winning, say something funny. Or she’d remember his terrible childhood and excuse him for everything. Or she’d suddenly be turned on by his physical beauty and they’d spend an afternoon or an evening in bed, making each other come over and over.

She didn’t love him. She knew she wasn’t going to love him. She knew, too, that it was different for him. Once he had said to her, “I think I’m falling in love with you, Billy Gertz.”

She had felt almost sorry for him then, it had seemed so adolescent to her—the claim of someone who wants reassurance that his feeling is returned before he’ll truly announce it. She had made her voice light, though, when she answered. She said, “Oh, don’t do that. It’s more fun the way it is.”

When there were problems, it was mostly a matter of this kind of thing, Billy aware of her distance from Gus and reacting to that by being irritated with him for pushing in closer or with herself for not taking her own life more seriously, for wasting her time and, therefore, as she reminded herself occasionally, his time, too.

Occasionally though, very occasionally, Gus would find something about Billy or her life that bothered him. Sometimes he complained of the way she disappeared into her work, the way she was distracted and only half there when she was in the midst of some project. He didn’t like it when she went out with other men, which she did every few weeks, sometimes in a group, sometimes with just one person. These were colleagues, she pointed out to him. Other writers, people she was getting to know as she moved more into the Boston theater community.

Once it was because she used a private joke of theirs in a play she was working on—the little shriek she’d given when he kissed her for the first time. She was sitting next to him during a reading of this play, an evening of staged readings of faculty work. She thought to turn and watch him when the moment arrived. He laughed, but his face fell quickly. She could tell he was hurt.

They talked about it the next night. He got to Billy’s about six. She had been alone all day, working, except for a trip to the grocery store to pick up things for dinner. Gus had gone out to his school for an important soccer game—he coached the team. All the teachers at the school coached something or led some extracurricular activity. Billy couldn’t believe this at first, this mens sana in corpore sano crap, but she supposed it made sense if you were trying to keep a bunch of adolescents in line.

She had thought from time to time through the day of the way Gus’s face had looked at the theater. She thought of that, and of the slight sense of strain, of politeness, between them afterward. They’d gone home separately, though that had been the plan all along on account of his need to get up early. They were sitting now, having finished dinner. Billy was drinking wine, Gus beer. She was still wearing the apron she’d put on to cook in, a dowdy but completely protective affair she’d been given by her grandmother years before. Gus was wearing a blue-and-white-striped shirt, open at the neck, and he looked fresh and youthful. She felt at a disadvantage, she realized. She felt plain.

They’d been talking about the reviews of a movie they thought they might see the next afternoon, but they’d fallen silent.

She said, “You were startled at the play last night, I think.”

“Hmm?” He frowned at her.

“Yeah. When Jay moves in to kiss Elena and she makes her little noise.”

He was looking down at his glass, avoiding her eyes.

“My little noise,” she corrected herself.

He looked up quickly. “Our noise, I would have said.”

“Meaning you felt it was … private. Between us.”

“Yeah, I sure did.” He nodded many times, rapidly. He was unsmiling.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“But it was private, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, it still is.”

He expelled his breath sharply, a mock laugh. “Explicate.”

“Well, you are not Jay, you are not a guy who makes his living gambling, a guy who’s betraying his wife. And I’m not Elena. I’m not … dependent upon the kindness of strangers.”

“But you gave them something that happened between us. Something private.”

“But for them to do it makes it something else.” She had leaned forward on the table, but he still wouldn’t look directly at her. “It’s different with them. It means something different. It’s not our noise when they make it. When she makes it. It’s transformed.”

“Not transformed enough.”

“What. You think people are going to say, ‘You know, I bet that happened between the playwright and that cute boy she was sitting next to’?”

“I don’t care what they say. I care about me, about us. About you not using us.” Gus, angry. A surprise.

But she was angry right back. “I use me, Gus,” she said. “I use me up. I need all of me, and if you’re with me, that means I use you, too. I use everything. How could I not? And what I don’t use, I don’t use because it doesn’t work. Not because it’s sacred.” Her voice had risen. “Nothing is sacred. That’s just the way it is.”

They sat in silence for a minute. Billy could hear that her own breathing was a little rapid. She consciously slowed it down. She changed her voice, made it playful. “If you can’t stand the heat, as they say …”

He looked at her. He smiled suddenly. “Ah, Billy,” he said. “Spoken of course by a woman wearing an apron. You came with props. Not fair.”

Was it fair? The use she made of everything? Billy thought about this often. In her first play she’d used her miserable youthful marriage, in particular the mocking way her ex-husband used to speak of their domestic life. “Mr. and Mrs. Married, and their little married apartment and all the little married things they’re accumulating.” Within a few weeks of their wedding, he seemed bitter with regret, he was incapable of kindness to her. There was virtually no loving gesture she could make that didn’t beckon his irony. Having suffered through that for three years, she felt she’d earned the right to make use of it however she wished.

In particular she’d used a fistfight they’d had.

She’d started it, actually. She’d punched him first, a downward chop with her fist on his moving mouth, intended simply to stop the ugly, ugly words emerging from it. Purely by reflex, he punched her back, with all his strength. He had sixty pounds on her. She actually rose up into the air before falling, crumpling against a wall. It was like living through a cartoon scene. All that was missing, she told a friend later, were stars and planets circling around her head.

The fight choreographer had a good time with it, and it was convincing onstage. The actress wore a black eye for the rest of the play and told a series of cheerful and increasingly loony lies about its origin, lies she was meant to be believing, at least in part. It was a kind of absurdist work, one act, about self-deception, and it ended with the couple singing “Tea for Two” in pretty, closely entwined harmony.

She had written it in a rage once she got started, and she couldn’t have argued to Gus that she transformed things very much in that particular case. Maybe the tone, maybe the humor, which had been entirely absent as she lived through it.

But it wouldn’t have made any difference to her ex-husband. He had moved away by then, to work in Phoenix. It was a certainty that he hadn’t seen it, since its only performances were in a small experimental theater on the North Side of Chicago. The sad fact was that almost no one saw it.

The second play was nearly as directly drawn from life, and it did make a difference to other people in Billy’s life. It was about a family gathering, a Thanksgiving holiday, five grown children returning from their lives to stay in their childhood home for a few days. The father was a professor, retired, reduced almost to invisibility by his wife, a woman with a need to be at the center of every situation, it didn’t matter how. Whatever method was at hand—knowing more than anyone else, being more sexually provocative than anyone else, talking more than anyone else. If necessary, being more wounded than anyone else—in one scene the turn from dripping contempt to anguished tears was accomplished within seconds by the actress playing her.

In the course of the play, each of the adult children in turn was sucked into the orbit of this monstrous character and changed. The oldest brother, a doctor, got into a futile and increasingly childish argument with her about tuberculosis, in which she would not concede that he might know anything more about it than she did. One of the daughters was called upon to comfort her about his cruelty in arguing with her at all. She got drunk and was seductive with the youngest son. Together the two of them made fun of the second daughter, who pretended not to be hurt, who actually laughed at herself with them. And through it all, the father’s polite blindness to the cruelty and manipulation involved provided a kind of cover for the mother’s behavior, asserted the lie that this was a normal, perfectly pleasant family gathering.

And of course this had been Billy’s family, with the gender of the parents reversed—in her case it was her father who was the narcissist, and her mother who receded so much as to be invisible. But the change didn’t fool anybody in Billy’s family—all of whom were then alive except her mother, three of whom lived in Chicago and came to the play. The result was that she was estranged from them for a long time afterward and still not reconciled with her father when he died some years later.

He had called her after he saw the play to offer a critique of it. She had defended it, defended herself. At one point he said, “You know what your problem is, Billy?”

Well, Billy knew what some of her problems were—she’d been in therapy enough through the years—but she doubted her father had any of these in mind. “No,” she said.

“Your problem is, you think you’re better than everyone else.”

Billy laughed. “Doesn’t everyone?” she said.

He hung up.

She hadn’t worked so closely to her own life since then, not through a fear of wounding people or losing them, but because she was just less angry. As a result of this, her plays were less angry, too—less accusatory, she supposed. She worried about this a little. She had felt that what made her work interesting, what made her interesting, was her rage. She was concerned that without it she would become ordinary. That’s what she saw as having happened to her siblings. The strain of pretending things were all right in their family had made all of them less than they might have been. She’d escaped that by being angry, and it made her wonder what would happen to her and to her writing as that anger dwindled.

Basically, she discovered, what happened was that her plays became less eccentric. More conventional, anyway. “Deeper,” “wiser,” the critics said. She began to have a wider audience. More success. Sometimes, though, she missed those early, angry plays and especially the heat with which she’d written them. She had to work harder now—at the writing itself, and at figuring out why she was writing. She would never have acknowledged that to Gus, but she knew, even as she was making her passionate argument to him about her need to use everything, that her anxiety about all this was connected to the ferocity of her defense of herself to him.

Starting in March, ten months after she met Gus and three months before the owners of her sublet apartment were due to return and claim it, Billy began to look for another place to rent. The sublet had been cheap because she’d had cat-sitting responsibilities for two unfriendly, sneaky white cats who were completely uninterested in her until they heard the whine of the electric can opener. Now as she went through the listings at BU, as she read the ads in the Sunday papers, she was appalled by how expensive housing with no strings attached was in Boston—far more so than Chicago had been. By June she hadn’t found anything she liked that she could afford.

In the end, she let Gus persuade her that she should move in with him for the summer. Her idea was that she’d keep looking, that she’d find something for September, which was the next big turnover date in this academic town. Gus’s idea was that he could convince her to stay on, which she knew but pretended not to know. In any case, on a sunny Wednesday in early June, he and a friend of his drove over to Brookline in an Econoline van, loaded it with Billy’s worldly possessions—mostly books and papers and clothes—then drove to Somer ville and carried everything up to Gus’s apartment, to the room he’d cleared out for her to work in.

She spent the first few days, while Gus was still teaching—gone from early in the morning to dinnertime—fixing this space up, setting up her computer, laying out her notebooks and the plays she liked to have around to look at while she worked. Then she had a couple of days where she did work, and worked well. This could be okay, she was thinking. She actually liked the room, which looked directly into a lush tree. And she liked the noise of the kids playing in the street in the afternoons. The street in Brookline had been expensive and empty and silent. If there were kids, they were somewhere else, taking lessons.

At the end of the week, Gus persuaded her to come with him to his prep school’s graduation ceremony. “It’s pretty,” he said. “You’ll like it.”

It was pretty. It was held outside, on a stage erected on the vast green at the center of the campus. The audience sat in rows on folding chairs set up on the grass. The women—mothers and grandmothers and sisters—wore big hats in straw or white, in bright colors, to protect them from the sun. “It’s like finally getting to go to the Kentucky Derby,” Billy said to Gus. “It makes me miss the horses, though.” The graduating girls, dressed in white, each carried a red rose, and the boys with their white jackets had roses in their lapels. Billy actually got teary as they were given their diplomas and loped across the stage so triumphantly, so hopeful and unaware of what was coming at them.

Afterward, while Gus went to congratulate his students, she moved around anonymously, eavesdropping, as she loved to do in any crowd, making mental notes for herself. She kept catching glimpses of Gus through the milling people. He was talking to different groups of the graduates, joking around—teasing the girls, jockeying with the boys, punching the odd kid’s arm, laughing and completely at ease.

And then, at one point, looking across the lawn through the thinning crowd, she saw him and didn’t recognize him. It took her more than a second to realize the kid she was looking at was not a student. Was Gus. She stood there, staring at him. He was moving his head around in a strange way, clearly imitating someone, and then he laughed. The boys around him laughed, too; their little group broke up for a moment, and then reassembled.

Why, he’s a boy! she thought. He’s their age.

She had a moment of shock, followed quickly by revulsion. But the revulsion was at herself, for not having known this before. Or for not having let herself know it. She’d seen it, she’d been aware of it—she acknowledged this to herself now—but she had gone along, even so. Because it was easy, because the sex was good, because she was busy in the rest of her life and Gus was someone she didn’t have to think about.

What a terrible thing to do, to use someone in this way. To use someone’s love.

And Gus loved her, she knew that. Whatever love meant to him, that’s what he felt for her. It was there in his admiration, his attentive noticing of whatever she did. It was there in the way he watched her responses to things, echoed her opinions. All the things that irritated her, if she were honest. Which she hadn’t exactly been, had she?

She felt stunned by it all, and overcome with anger at herself. In the car on the way home, she barely spoke. Gus was high on the event, though, so it didn’t matter. And then when he fell quiet—in response to her, she supposed—she turned the radio on and the Red Sox were playing, and he was happy enough listening to that.

After this, all the things that had sometimes charmed her about Gus—that he was good and kind and considerate and sweet, that she liked making love to him, that she liked looking at him, that he was funny and smart—didn’t matter much anymore. Or didn’t matter enough. What she saw now were the things that bothered her, that had always bothered her. But new things, too. She saw that he had no deeper dimension, no darker side. Or none that was available to her, anyway. For instance, it was as though he’d simply pushed away from himself any awareness of what was troubling about the way he’d grown up. Billy had gotten a more honest picture of this from Leslie in the long late evenings they sat up talking than she did from Gus. And the fact was that Leslie had cared to look at it, painstakingly. Had tried to try to understand it. She recognized that her own need to be kind, to be calm, was an almost-conscious response to what had been difficult and ugly in her growing up. And she understood that her response was a limitation as much as it was a strength.

Gus didn’t see his growing up as sad. Or he wouldn’t see it that way. He once called it “irregular” to Billy.

“Irregular, as in ouch,” Billy said.

It got worse after the graduation. Gus was on vacation. Billy wasn’t. She needed to work, but Gus wanted her company, he didn’t see why she had to be at her desk every single day. It was summer. Why wouldn’t she come with him to the Vineyard? To Vermont? To western Massachusetts? To a play, for God’s sake? To Williamstown, to see a play, the very thing she cared about most.

She came to feel that in some way he didn’t think of what she was doing as work. Oh, he admired the plays—or said he did. But he didn’t seem to make the connection between them and her need to be alone at her desk for four or five hours a day.

She started to go to her office at BU to write. It was kind of a dump. It looked out over an air shaft; it had unpleasantly bright fluorescent lighting. The paint was old, and there were water stains on the ceiling. But it was private. It was quiet. Very quiet now in the summer, when most of the faculty disappeared from the warren of offices around hers that housed them in the academic year.

Most of all, there was not Gus.

It was on the way there on her bike one morning that she realized she had to end it. It wasn’t just that she needed to find her own place, to move out. She needed to tell him it wasn’t going to work at all, ever. That it wasn’t working now. It was early, around six-thirty. Traffic hadn’t yet thickened, and there was hardly anyone out besides the joggers. She was pedaling along the river, watching someone in a scull moving smoothly upstream, watching the steady quiet lap of the water into the tall grasses on the riverbank. She stopped her bike. She looked up at the Boston skyline and the graceful cable ribs of the Zakim Bridge. This is what she loved, this, being alone, being sentient only for herself. She didn’t want Gus noticing her noticing things, admiring her, ignoring all that was unpleasant about her, insisting on his version of who she was.

She would tell him. She would.

Not now, though. It would be better to wait until she had her own place—it would be too awkward living with him once he knew, too hard for both of them. But she would tell him.

The relief she felt at acknowledging this, at making a plan, was sharp and clear, as though some months-long fog she’d been living in had lifted. The gulls above the treetops wheeled and cawed, white against the blue sky, and Billy had a sense of almost-giddy happiness for a moment. When she got to her ugly office, she sat down eagerly and started to read through what she’d written the day before. She would have her life back.

As though he sensed this—and surely it must have made some difference in the way Billy behaved, she felt so much lighter—Gus seemed to want to draw closer. Only a few weeks after this, she arrived home one afternoon and opened the door to find him sitting on the living room floor playing with a puppy, a medium-sized black puppy, but one with enormous paws. It was for her, he said. A present.

He’d clearly been planning it for a while—he had a crate set up in a corner of the living room, and he said he’d hired a dog walker who would come each day mid-to-late morning. He would walk the puppy early, he said, before he left for school, and again when he got back—long walks. Billy would only have to come home around two or three, as she did every day anyway, and walk him then. Just a short walk.

As she sat down, silenced by surprise, he went on, nervously. He introduced the dog. He was a mutt, Gus said. His mother was a Newfoundland, owned by another teacher at school. She had no idea what the father was.

Billy looked at the puppy. He was chewing on a large rawhide toy Gus had bought for him. He was, of course, completely, heartbreakingly winning. Gus was smiling at him. She felt a pang of deep anger at Gus, and then pity, too. She wondered whether he was at all aware of what she had instantly felt were the complicated motivations behind this gift.

She knew she should tell him no, and she knew that saying no to the puppy was part of the larger no she needed to say to him. She looked at him. She could tell by his face that he was at least a little ashamed he’d given the dog to her. Ashamed, because it was such a terrible way to try to keep her attached to him, to try to make her stay.

The puppy stood, wobbling a bit, and frolicked unevenly over to her. She held out her hand, and he lowered his hind quarters and started licking it.

“What shall we call him?” Gus said, and she sighed and gave in.

That was in August. Billy was still looking at apartments when Gus was getting ready to start back to school. She had a lead on one in Cambridgeport, another sublet, but it wouldn’t be available until January, when the family, academics, was taking a leave, so she was still scanning the housing lists at BU almost daily, checking the Sunday notices in the paper.

On September 11, Billy woke early. She’d waked once before, actually, when Gus got up to leave for the airport, but she’d pretended to be asleep that time. This time she couldn’t do that. The puppy was crying. Reuben. She’d named him Reuben. She peed and brushed her teeth, she got quickly dressed and went into the living room. As soon as she saw Reuben, she gave over to him again, just as she had the day of his arrival. He was charming, even beyond the charm most puppies have. His winning awkwardness on account of his size, his sad brown eyes, his immense paws, the rounded shape of his head, his long pink tongue, the clean way he smelled—everything about him gave her pleasure. He was in his crate now, the crate he was already almost outgrowing. He was making a noise that sounded like an old woman keening.

Now he saw her and he yipped. He began scratching frantically at the floor of his crate. She picked up some plastic bags and the keys and the leash from the hall stand. She came and unlatched his door. He sprang out and ran to the front door of the apartment. When she opened it, he thundered downstairs and stood impatiently by the outer door. She heard a little anxious cry in his throat. “Good dog,” she said, opening the last door.

He almost fell down the porch stairs in his haste. As soon as his feet touched the sidewalk, he squatted and peed.

She lavished the praise on him that was part of his training, patting him, scratching his long, floppy ears. Then she hooked the leash to his collar and they started out, around the three-block circuit that constituted the walk she took with him twice a day.

It was a perfect day—cloudless, mild. There were many fine things about having a dog, all of which she was reluctant to admit, but one of them was simply how much more frequently she got outside. She knew, of course, that this wouldn’t be the pleasure it was today come January or February, but for now Billy liked it.

Especially today, when Gus was gone. Today, tomorrow, Thursday. He wouldn’t be home until late Thursday night. He was flying out to Los Angeles this morning. His father had died—Leslie had called on Sunday with the news.

It was strange for both of them. Neither wanted to go. They hadn’t seen him in years. There was the second wife to deal with, and she was also what Leslie called “a high-functioning drunk.” But Gus had been named executor of his father’s will and there was a service of some sort Wednesday, so they agreed they ought to be there. After the call, Billy and Gus had sat and talked about it with more affection and friendliness than they’d been able to muster in months. Than she’d been able to muster, anyway.

It couldn’t have been worse timing for him—his school started this week. But he’d called the headmaster and the chair of the department right away. He’d spent all day yesterday—Monday, the first day of classes—at the school. He’d met with his kids and outlined the special projects he wanted them to work on over the three days he’d be gone.

And this morning he’d left the house at five-thirty to get to the airport on time while she pretended to sleep.

She felt his absence as an enormous relief. Three days of not acting as if she didn’t know it was over. Three days of not having to sit through dinner with him. Three days of not feeling angry at him and then at herself for allowing the whole thing to happen, for ignoring all the ways it should have been clear from the start that it wasn’t going to work. Three wonderful long mornings of work without having to bicycle over to BU.

And in the afternoons she would get herself organized to find an apartment. She had to. It might be too expensive, it might be in a crummy neighborhood, but she needed to do it. After she and Gus had gone to bed Sunday night, she’d lain there next to him as he slept, planning it—the lists she’d check, the neighborhoods she was interested in.

When she got back home from the walk with Reuben, she fed him, and then she made coffee for herself, coffee and toast, and went out onto the back porch to sit. Reuben padded behind her and lay down by her feet. She would take him with her when she left, she had decided this already. After all, he was hers. He’d been given to her. He’d been given to her to make it harder for her to leave, and harder it would be. But in an odd way, it had strengthened her conviction that she needed to do it.

She sat with her coffee, her feet propped up on the porch rail, and looked out through the trees at the other rooftops in the neighborhood. Gus lived on the middle floor of a triple-decker just over the line into Somerville from North Cambridge, near the commuter line he caught every day to go out to teach. The houses here were only a few feet apart, sometimes just the width of a narrow driveway. Most had aluminum siding. In front they all had little yards, scraps of lawn or gravel or dirt, many of them protected by chain-link fences. But the backyards were deep and lush with trees. You could almost forget you were in a city. Looking out now, she thought how she would miss this. As though he understood what she was feeling, the puppy heaved a great sigh.

She finished her coffee and went inside. Reuben followed. She put him in his crate and looked at the clock in the kitchen. Seven-thirty. He should go out again in a couple of hours. She went into her study and turned on the computer.

At about quarter to eight, her cell phone rang. She opened it and looked at the number. It was Gus. She felt a quick tug of the irritation she had been trying to stay in control of, and closed it without answering.

She worked well. She was trying to shape up the play about Ray and Elena and his big con, fussing with the beginning of the second act, which had seemed expository to her. By the time she stopped to walk the puppy again, she’d made what she thought was good progress—she’d put into dialogue about a third of what had existed as stage directions or notes to herself.

Reuben was asleep. He woke as soon as she touched the door of the crate. She took him quickly outside. Again, he peed as soon as he reached the sidewalk, and she gave him a treat.

The streets were quiet. The kids must all be back in school, she thought. As she rounded the corner by the Ell-Stan Spa, the little convenience store that marked the beginning of the tiny local commercial strip—a Laundromat, a pizza place—she noted that there were six or seven people clustered inside, all standing, all watching the wall-mounted TV. On it she could see a talking face, and then the screen filled with roiling, tumbling smoke. She thought immediately of Waco, those terrible images of the fire. It must be something like that, something awful that had happened somewhere out in the wide world.

She turned Reuben around and walked quickly back to Gus’s. Inside, she went immediately to the second bedroom, Gus’s office, where the tiny TV was. She turned it on just in time to see a replay of the collapse of the South Tower, the billowing dust and debris, the strange tribe of ghostlike people coated with white emerging from the thick rolling cloud—running, looking behind them, terrified.

She watched for a long time in stunned horror as the events unfolded and unfolded, and then were played over and over again. At some point maybe several hours later, she paid attention for the first time to where the planes were coming from, where they were going. It occurred to her then that Gus might have been on one or the other of them.

It couldn’t be, she thought. It was too unlikely.

She found her cell phone and played his message. “Hi, sweetie. We’re getting on the plane, so I just wanted to hear your voice for a second. You must be walking Rube. I’m thinking of you. I’ll talk to you tonight.”

She played it again. Then she hit RETURN CALL. There was no sound on the other end of the line. Nothing.

Frantic now, she went through the papers on his desk, looking for a note, something he might have jotted down about the airline, about the flight number. She couldn’t find anything.

She was going too fast, that was it. She made herself stop, she went through everything more slowly. Here were his papers, his innocent papers. Plans for the semester. Notes, quickly scribbled about what the students could do while he was away. Bills. A postcard from a friend traveling in Europe over the summer, with a detail from a fresco by Fra Angelico reproduced on the front.

There was nothing about the trip, the reservation, the airline.

She tried to call Leslie at home. The phone rang and rang, and then a message came on in Leslie’s calm, modulated voice. After the beep, she couldn’t think what to say, so she hung up. And then remembered abruptly that Leslie would be on her way west, too. She had been planning to fly out from the little airport in New Hampshire. Manchester, that was it. Manchester on a connecting flight to some hub probably, and then the final leg from there to Los Angeles.

She tried calling a few airlines—American, United, Delta—but she couldn’t get through. Everything was busy. What would she have asked anyway? She wasn’t certain what time he was leaving, she didn’t know whether it was a direct flight, or even what the airline was. There must be thousands of people in exactly her situation, trying to learn something.

She tried Gus’s school. Maybe someone there knew something.

That line was busy, too.

She played his message again.

On her way to the bathroom, she saw that Reuben had left a puddle in the hall. How long since she’d walked him? She couldn’t remember. Where was he, anyway? What time was it?

She went in the kitchen and looked at the clock on the stove. One-thirty.

When she was done in the bathroom, she went into the living room. Reuben was back in his crate—he’d gone there on his own. He was asleep, his head sticking out through the open doorway, resting on his paws. She didn’t wake him until she’d cleaned up the piss. Then, bending over his crate, she spoke his name. He sprang to instant eager life, and she took him out for another walk. The streets were still silent—everyone, she assumed, indoors by the television, by the telephone. Except in New York, where everyone was panicked, on the move.

At two-thirty, Leslie called. Her flight had been canceled and Pierce had driven her back home. She was calling to ask whether Gus had actually left, to say that one of the planes was Gus’s. She’d heard the number and recognized it—they’d conferred about flight times and she’d written it down.

When Billy said yes, there was a little moan on the line, and then silence.

“Leslie?” Billy said.

Leslie’s voice was uneven when she spoke. She said, “He must be dead. I think there’s no way he can’t be dead.” She breathed audibly, unsteadily. “Oh, Billy, I think it’s true. I think it is,” she said. She started to cry, and then tried to check herself.

Billy wasn’t sure what she said back. She was sorry, she said that. “I can’t believe it.” She said that.

Leslie said she had kept hoping that he wasn’t on it, that he somehow didn’t make it, but she’d tried his cell and there was no response. And he would have called, surely, if he could. If he were alive.

“No, he called,” Billy said.

“He called?”

The hope in her voice was painful for Billy to hear. “He called when he was getting on,” she said quickly. “Just when he was getting on.”

Leslie started to cry again. “Oh, what did he say?” It was hard to understand her.

“He said just that. That he was getting on. He said he’d talk to me tonight.”

“Oh. Well.” She was pulling herself together. She blew her nose. “I’m so glad you got to speak to him.”

“Yes,” Billy said, feeling already how false a position she was in.

“I know … I know,” Leslie said. “This is … a terrible time. To talk. But we will … I will call you, if I hear anything. I’ll call. Anything.”

Billy said yes. Yes, she’d call, too.

About half an hour later, the phone rang again. Billy almost jumped. It was Leslie. Her voice was stronger. She thought Billy should come up to Vermont. That she shouldn’t be alone. “Alone with this,” is what she said. If she didn’t want to drive, Leslie would arrange for a car to bring her.

“We could help each other, don’t you think?” she asked.

Billy couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to do less, but she kept her voice calm as she said that she wanted to stay in the apartment—that’s the way she put it. She had the puppy, she said. She just wanted to stay here with him.

When she got off the phone, she turned the television off. She went into the bedroom and lay down. The images from the towers played over and over in her mind, inescapably. She couldn’t remember which was the South Tower, which was the North. Which was Gus’s plane. She thought of Leslie’s voice, breaking. She thought of him, the way it must have been—the disorder, the panic and the chaos in the airplane. The understanding you would have—how long before?—of what was going to happen. And then surely the instantaneous death. Surely.

Or perhaps not.

Her stomach gurgled. She hadn’t eaten, she realized, since early in the morning. She got up. Standing in the kitchen, she ate a few bites of an apple. She set what was left carefully down on the counter, walked into the bathroom, and threw up. She stayed there, kneeling over the toilet, until her knees began to ache.

A while later, she walked the dog again. She fed him. Then she took him downstairs and walked him once more—she’d done things in the wrong order, she realized. She should have fed him before the first walk.

There were people out now, at the end of the day, moving around, standing in clusters on porches, on the sidewalk, talking to one another about it. An old woman walked toward her on the sidewalk. When their eyes met, she said, “Isn’t it terrible.” Her face was anguished.

“Yes,” Billy said.

Back in the apartment, she went to Gus’s desk. She sat down. She went through his things again. She picked up the smiling photograph of herself he’d set in a clear plastic stand and looked at it for a long time, then dropped it in the wastebasket. She turned over the Fra Angelico postcard. On the back, in scratchy black ink, it said, “The things we are seeing! I hope you will too one day. We are drinking it in, along with what we are actually drinking in. Theo and Nina.”

She had no idea who Theo and Nina were.

There was so much of Gus’s life she didn’t know. Who would take care of all this? Who would it belong to? Who would dispose of it? Who was in charge of Gus now?

Leslie, surely.

Not me, Billy thought. And she started to cry for the first time.

She walked the puppy once more after dark, and then she brought him into bed with her. It was about ten. He hadn’t been allowed to sleep with her—with her and Gus—ever before, and he was confused. He stood up several times and came and planted himself by her head, panting his hot breath on her, his tail wagging.

She spoke sharply to him each time, and finally he lay down, his bulk curled against her rump. She could hear his breathing change when he went to sleep. She lay awake a long time. Twice she got up to pee. Once she cried, silently but long enough that, when she stopped, her face felt swollen and thick, she couldn’t breathe through her nose. The last time she looked at the red digits of the clock, they said 1:10.

Reuben woke her a little after three, mewling, scratching the pillow close to her face.

Gus had done the nighttime walks until now. Nighttime, early morning, the one before dinner, the last one before bed, all to show Billy how easy a puppy would be, how easy it would be if she just stayed with him.

She pulled on her jeans and a sweater, slid into some sandals, and they went out into the hallway and down the stairs. The moment she heard the outer door click behind her, she knew she’d screwed up. She’d locked herself out. In her mind she could see the key on the table. On the table where it should have been but wasn’t, next to the leash and plastic pickup bags. Where it wasn’t, because she’d been careless today. She hadn’t followed Gus’s orderly patterns, she hadn’t put things back where they belonged. Here, here was the price.

Reuben peed. She sat on the porch steps for a while. The dog watched her attentively for clues as to what was happening. Finally she got up and started to walk with him. A big walk. Might as well. One or the other of her neighbors in the house would let her in, but it would be hours before she could decently ring either bell.

She walked through the dark, dead streets. Everything was quiet, except for here and there the bluish flickering light in a bedroom or a living room—someone awake, someone unable to stop watching the events again and again, someone finding consolation, perhaps, in the theorizing, the expert opinions.

She walked south and west, over into the streets of Cambridge, toward Harvard Square, thinking she would go to the river, she’d sit in the grass there until the sky was light. As she walked, she thought reasonlessly, uselessly, swinging between a deep disbelief—the sense she had that nothing like what had happened could possibly have happened—and the horrified imagining, over and over, of how it would have been for Gus, slicing into the building, crushing it and being crushed.

In flight from any of that, she made herself think of the most practical issues. She wondered if the rent was paid up, where Gus had left the car, what she would do with all his belongings. She would move out, she knew that. She couldn’t possibly stay. It was Gus’s place. She didn’t belong there.

It occurred to her with something like relief that she hadn’t talked to anyone about splitting up with Gus—anyone except the one old friend in Chicago whom she e-mailed and called regularly. It would make it easier for her to get through it, to go through the motions of grief, which is what she’d have to do.

No! It would be more than that, more than motions. Of course it would. She did mourn Gus. Her throat ached with sorrow for him. It was awful, truly awful. That he’d died. That he wasn’t, anymore. The way he’d died. The cruelty of it, the enormity of it, the randomness of it. The wrongness of it—for how could it be Gus’s end? Gus, who was so sunny, so blameless.

She’d gone about a mile and a half—she was approaching Harvard Square on Ware Street—when she realized that the puppy was flagging, that, unconscious of him as she was, she’d more or less been pulling him for the last couple of blocks. She hadn’t ever exhausted the dog before, she specialized in such short walks. It was Gus who did the walks that really exercised him, that wore him out.

As soon as she stopped, he sat down. He sat down in a way that suggested he would never get up, a kind of grateful and rubbery collapse. After a moment, when she didn’t pull him up, he lay down on the sidewalk and put his head on his enormous paws.

She squatted by him and patted his head, stroked the softly curling fur of his body. His tail slapped the sidewalk. He turned on his side and grabbed at her hand with his mouth, licking, chewing.

“Not allowed, buddy,” she said. She clamped his muzzle shut with one hand and, with the other, scratched his belly, stroked him for a long time, talking to him, sometimes crying for a minute or two. She had to use the edge of her sweater—why not?—to wipe her eyes, her runny nose. She crouched there until her legs started to feel numb. When she stopped and stood up, he sat up too, watching her face, his tail swinging in wild swoops, wanting more.

She started back north, toward home, and he pranced beside her for a few blocks, then slowed, then wanted to stop again.

She let him. She stood by him while he rested for a few minutes, and then she squatted and patted him again. In this way, Billy crying and petting him, Reuben resting, they retraced their steps slowly back to the house, Gus’s house.

The sky was lightening when they sat on the top step of the porch. Reuben lay down and instantly slept. Billy was exhausted, too, she realized. She leaned against the post at the top of the stairs. It was cool against her skin. The flesh of her arms under her hands felt chilly. She thought of Gus in the plane again. She stopped herself. Somewhere a rooster crowed. Across the street, she could make out the big pink plastic flowers stuck into the earth of the front yard by the old woman who lived on the ground floor. So much for the bother of gardening.

She thought of her downstairs neighbor, how he might come out and find her. What would she say? She would tell him about Gus. She would have to. They’d known each other a long time. He owned the building and two others on the block. He knew all his tenants, but he especially liked Gus. He would be shocked and horrified. She would be, too, all over again. She would be, because she was, shocked and horrified.

But a part of it—a part of her, a part of everything from now on—would be false. Would be a lie.

Leslie drove down, by herself, on Saturday. Billy had held her off until then, but couldn’t any longer—she was insistent. She wouldn’t stay overnight, she said. She didn’t want to impose, but she wanted to see Billy, she wanted to be in Gus’s place, to look at his things.

Billy was shocked at the way she looked. The open, warm quality she had always conveyed was gone, as if erased, though she said the same words, the same Leslie kind of things. But she seemed, Billy would have said, smaller. Exhausted.

The worst moments, of course, were the very first, when she embraced Billy as though Billy needed comforting more than she did. “My dear,” she said. “Oh, my dear.” She held on, almost rocking Billy for a long moment. Billy could hear, she could feel, Leslie’s ragged intake of breath. When they stepped away from each other, she saw that Leslie was fighting tears.

But Billy was tearful, too, because it was awful that Gus was dead. That so many were dead. That Leslie was so visibly in pain. Leslie’s gaze, resting on her, was soft, full of sympathy and affection.

That shamed Billy, and she turned away. She went to make some tea, and they sat in the kitchen and talked. Mostly just going over, as everyone did in those days—even those who weren’t directly involved—how it had happened for them. How it was for Leslie at the airport, hearing about it and checking what she’d written down about Gus’s plane. The terrible ride back home, listening to the radio. Pierce finally turned it off, she said, and that somehow made it worse, made it final.

Billy was aware of herself, of her responses, as she listened to Leslie’s account, as she told Leslie about her day, about how slowly she came to realize that one of the planes might have been Gus’s. She was conscious of trying to calibrate her grief, trying to hold on to a shred of honesty by not letting Leslie think she was overcome, or had been overcome. As soon as she could, she excused herself to walk the dog.

Over the next days and weeks, Leslie misunderstood almost every gesture, every word, Billy said. The more Billy tried to back away from being the grief-stricken lover—the more she deferred to Leslie—the more Leslie insisted she had prior rights. She should have the final say on whether the Boston service should be at the school. She would know better than Leslie the list of friends to be invited. She should go through Gus’s things and choose what she wanted to keep. She should read at the service.

Her no to most of these things seemed only to confirm Leslie’s sense of Billy’s lostness in grief. Again and again Billy told herself that she would be as honest as she decently could. She would try not to lie, not to pretend what she didn’t feel. But in the end it seemed to her that there wasn’t a truthful gesture she could make. She felt cottoned in falsity. Her dry eyes were understood by Leslie as shock. Her finding the too-expensive apartment in the South End was a sign of her need to flee the place where she and Gus had been happy together.

Could she have told her the truth? Someone braver than Billy might have. But Billy knew Leslie took some comfort in believing that she had loved Gus, that she mourned him, so she said nothing. This was the least she could offer her, could do for her. It was, she slowly realized, the only thing she could do for her.

The service was to be held at Gus’s school the first Saturday in October, in the chapel. Billy hadn’t done any of the planning for it, and she felt bad about that—that Leslie, so burdened by her unequivocal grief, should have had to do it by herself. Of course, Pierce had helped her; there was that. And Leslie said that Gus’s old friend Peter had helped, too, that he was “a godsend.”

Billy did buy a new suit for the service, a dark gray suit. She assumed that this would be the only formal occasion in her life for remembering Gus, and she wanted her appearance itself to be a kind of honoring of him. The day of the service, she took her time getting ready. She applied her makeup carefully, she blew her normally messy hair smooth. About half an hour before Leslie and Pierce were to pick her up, she walked Reuben and crated him. Then she pulled a chair over to one of the curved front windows of her parlor apartment and sat looking out it for Leslie and Pierce’s old Volvo—they’d never be able to find a parking place. When she saw them pull up and double-park, she grabbed her purse and went quickly to the door. As she closed it quietly behind her, Reuben let out an anguished cry, long and mournful. She couldn’t stop to console him; she just had to hope for her neighbors’ sakes that it didn’t go on too long.

Leslie had just stepped out of the car on the way to get her when Billy emerged. She looked elegant, Billy thought—all in black, with a royal blue shawl thrown over the shoulder of her suit. Her face was drawn but beautiful, her hair pulled back simply into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, as if she hadn’t wanted to bother arranging it. There was something immense, almost monumental, about her. Billy felt like a girl, a child, by contrast.

They embraced—quickly, because a car had pulled up and was waiting behind the Volvo, the driver watching them with what passed for patience in this environment. Billy got in the backseat, where the child belonged, after all. Pierce turned around to say hello before he put the car in gear and began to drive. His voice was without the exuberance that usually marked it. It was tender, the way he must speak to the kids in his practice.

Their conversation was polite, neutral. How was the drive down? How’s the dog? The new apartment? This is such a lovely neighborhood. Pierce said his favorite restaurant was close by and Billy said she’d have to try it. Leslie asked about how the teaching at BU was going this year. It was a relief for all of them, Billy felt sure, to get on the highway, where the noise made conversation unnecessary.

At one point, though, Billy leaned forward to ask, “Is there anything in particular I should know about the service, or the reception?”

Leslie turned sideways, almost in profile. “I think it will all just move along smoothly,” she said. “No surprises. Peter has arranged for some friends to talk, and the students wanted to do a choral thing. I think one of them will speak, too.”

Billy was instantly swamped again by guilt about this, that she hadn’t offered to speak, or do anything else, in fact.

“The headmaster’s in charge, for which I’m grateful. Mr. Willis. He put it in the paper and had someone contact every single person I listed. He’s been wonderful.”

Leslie turned away, but not before Billy saw the tears well in her eyes. Sitting back again, she felt small and ashamed, ugly.

They drove in silence, not even Pierce feeling compelled to talk. The trees had thinned out a bit—their leaves would begin to fall in earnest soon. For now they were at their most intensely beautiful, the colors on the hillsides astonishing. They turned off the highway onto the winding, almost-country roads. They drove by the old houses set far apart from one another, their lawns sprinkled with the fallen leaves, the new, low light dancing through the trees. They passed eight or ten bicyclists moving in a group at the side of the road, sexless and insectlike in their busyness, their gleaming helmets. Billy saw a yard sale in front of an open barn, an odd collection of possessions. There were dishes and chairs, two iron bedsteads leaned up against some old trunks. A small crowd of people was milling around, examining the boxes of things. Billy thought of the things she’d set out on the curb in Somerville, things that had been part of her life with Gus.

They drove down the main street of the little town. It was lined with shops and restaurants, thick with people out doing Saturday morning errands. At the end of this strip, they turned onto the side street where the school buildings began. The dorms looked like simply more of the white Georgian houses of the village, but then the campus suddenly opened up and you saw the larger new administrative buildings arranged around the central lawn with its crisscrossing pathways. The sky was a grand painted blue behind the vivid trees and white buildings, behind the green of the glistening grass. Billy felt a sharp pain in her stomach, something like nausea, something like stage fright. She dug her fists into her midriff. It would begin now, her performance.

Pierce parked in the visitors’ lot, and they walked together on one of the paths to the chapel building. Its narrow white steeple pierced the blue sky. Mr. Willis, the headmaster, a man only a little older than Gus, stood in its entryway, perhaps waiting for them. He was in his shirtsleeves, but he had a tie on. He greeted them and led them back to a private room. Gus’s friend Peter was already there, Peter and his pregnant wife and another couple Billy had met once. She waited her turn beside Leslie and Pierce to be greeted. She and Gus had had dinner with Peter and Erin two or three times. Now she murmured something: Thank you, she would call, yes, if she thought of anything they could do. Leslie was working so much harder, talking about Gus, remembering that Peter and Gus had once tried to hitchhike back to Boston when they’d missed the bus. That quite by chance she’d seen them when she was out doing errands, that she’d ended up driving all the way down with them, calling Pierce from a restaurant near an exit to tell him she’d be home late that night. “Do you remember?” she asked Peter. He nodded.

“Imagine,” Leslie said to Billy, to the group, “me doing anything on a lark! But that’s what it was like with Gus.”

As soon as Billy could, she told Leslie she was going to go and sit in the chapel.

“Oh, Billy—oh, of course,” Leslie said. “I understand completely.”

Don’t, Billy wanted to say. Don’t understand. But she said nothing of the kind. She said nothing at all.

The chapel had no religious symbols or decoration. As Gus had told her, it wasn’t really a chapel at all. It was called that because all these old prep schools had at one time been sectarian, had started each day with a religious service and then made the daily announcements; so that the gathering for these announcements was still called chapel, and the place where you gathered was also called chapel. All anachronism, he had said. Like so much else about the school.

It was large, with enough pews for the entire school population. Tall, clear windows opened out onto the trees and lawns of the campus. A bank of flowers, mostly white, sat across the apron of the stage. A lectern was set in the midst of them. Toward the back of the stage, there was a grand piano, its dark, harp-shaped lid propped open.

Billy moved into a pew three rows back. There were programs set out along the seat cushions at regular intervals, each with a photo of Gus’s face. Over and over, Gus, smiling, bright sunlight making him squint, his yellow hair windblown. She picked one up and sat down, holding it. The pew creaked under her.

She wasn’t alone for long. In a few minutes, people began to straggle in, taking seats nearer the back, whispering, talking quietly. After ten minutes or so, a young man came down the side aisle to the stage and mounted the steps. He sat down at the piano, arranged some music, and started to play. Billy wasn’t sure of the composer—Schubert, maybe. Then more quickly, the pews filled. Students, mostly, but also people Leslie’s age, Gus’s age. Billy knew none of them.

Leslie and Pierce came in with the headmaster and Gus’s friends and took the first few rows. Peter’s wife, Erin, was sitting directly in front of Billy. She bent forward, as if praying, but perhaps she was only reading through the program.

When the piano stopped, the headmaster stood and mounted the short flight of stairs to the stage. He greeted the room. The students—and, raggedly, a few others joining in—said, “Good afternoon,” back to him. There was a moment of silence, and then he said, “We gather to celebrate the life of our dear friend Gus Forester. Lost, among so many others, in the cruel events of September eleventh. But Gus was ours, and so we especially miss him, and we know all too well what an emptiness his death will leave in our lives.”

Somewhere in the room, someone began to cry softly, and here and there people were blowing their noses. Billy shut her eyes for a moment. The pews’ creaking was a constant, the rustle of the programs, the shifting of people’s clothing as they moved.

The headmaster spoke for a few more minutes, and then Peter came up and took his place. He introduced himself and talked, it seemed mostly to the students, about friendship, about his friendship with Gus in college and its irreplaceable importance to him. Gus’s loyalty, his joie de vivre. He mentioned Leslie, and Billy saw her lift her hand to her mouth.

After Peter, a gaggle of students came up the steps and assembled themselves into two rows, the girls in front. The pianist did a quick introduction and they sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” As soon as they finished, one of the girls broke down. She was instantly surrounded by the three other girls, and they huddled down the stairs from the stage, their arms around one another, and then down the aisle, past Billy, who sat dry-eyed, not looking at them.

One of the boys from the choral group had remained onstage. He stepped to the lectern now and talked about Gus as a teacher and friend, someone who pushed for excellence in their work and made them care about it, too. He called him “one of the great teachers.”

The headmaster came up again. He announced the Twenty-third Psalm, and they stood and read it together, the beautiful words of calm faith. Was Gus a believer? Billy didn’t even know that.

The whole room sat down, and then Leslie got up and went to the steps, mounted them. Billy looked down at her own hands, folded on the program on her lap, resting on Gus’s face in the photograph. She didn’t want to meet Leslie’s eyes, she couldn’t watch her face.

Leslie carried a little sheaf of paper that she set down in front of her. She put her glasses on. The remarks were read, then, and as she started, Billy heard that quality in them—a bit formal, certainly composed. Leslie’s voice wobbled, though, and several times she had to stop.

She talked about the age difference between her and Gus, about the joy he brought to her life, as a sister—almost as a mother. Near the end of the talk, she said, “How glad I am to think of him in the last year, so especially happy in his work with many of you here, and in his life, with the woman he loved so much, Billy Gertz.”

Billy breathed in deeply and unclenched her hands. She saw the print of her fingernails in her flesh, dark crescents arcing across her palms.

There was a musical interlude, and then the headmaster invited anyone who wished to speak to add his remarks. For a long minute or so, it seemed no one would, but then a woman arose and introduced herself. There was the rustle of everyone turning to her. Billy turned, too. She was a tall, thin woman about halfway back, with a mass of long, wild graying hair. Her name was Augusta Sinclair, she said, “so of course, we were the two Guses. And somehow this was enough, in Gus’s world, for us to be friends. Sometimes he would ask me, ‘How is it in the alternate Gus universe?’ and he always took time to listen to my answer.” The other thing, she said, was how important his teaching was to him, how much he loved it and the kids. “And whenever I needed a shot of what I think of as emotional caffeine about my work, I’d find him, and that is exactly what he would give me. Actually, he gave me that in other contexts, too. I’ll miss him very much.” She sat down.

After her a few students spoke, and then an alumnus, a young man who “had to come,” he said. Mr. Forester had changed his life, had made him understand that language shaped thought, clarified it. That if you couldn’t say it or write it, you hadn’t fully mastered it. “He was exacting, and I slowly learned to really, really love that. And it’s brought me to where I am today.” And then he said, “‘Explicate!’” and the room laughed.

The headmaster stood up again and announced a student’s name. A young woman came up and read the 103rd Psalm, one Billy didn’t know as well—about God’s power, his generosity, and man’s smallness by comparison, God’s pity on man. The girl’s voice was strong, reading the lines. Near the end of the reading, she intoned, “As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.”

Billy thought of Gus, of course, but she thought, too—as almost everyone else must have—of the Towers, gone, the blank spot on the skyline where they’d been. That, that was how absolute his death was. All of their deaths. “The place thereof shall know it no more.”

The noise of weeping spread around the room—that choked sound—and people blowing their noses. Then a hymn was announced, the words printed in the program. The piano played an introduction as they all stood. It was an evening hymn, “Now the Day Is Over,” in a minor key. Billy knew it from the churchgoing days of her youth. The verses had been chosen carefully—no mention of Christ. The verse asking for comfort for “every sufferer, watching late in pain,” was still there, though, and it made Billy think of Leslie. She felt her own tears starting, but stopped herself. They were sentimental tears, and she wouldn’t allow herself them. The last verse they sang was about dawn:

When the morning wakens
Then may I arise,
Pure and fresh and sinless
In Thy holy eyes.

Gus. It seemed made for him. Leslie must have chosen it. The last note of the “Amen” floated in the air and then disappeared. Everyone sat down again.

The headmaster got up and asked everyone to come to a reception in the meeting room off the dining hall. The piano started once more, and the first few rows stood and began to file out. And then everyone was standing, the same noise as the rustling hubbub of a theater audience. There was a gradual increase in volume as they all began making their way out of the pews and down the side or the middle aisles, talking, greeting others, some of them simply wiping their eyes.

Billy stepped outside onto the steps in the bright sun by herself. Leslie came up to her. “Billy, dear,” she said. “You’re bleeding. You’ve bitten your lip.” She fished in her bag and brought out a packet of tissues, from which she extracted one for Billy. Billy took it, touched her lip, held it out. A bright stain.

“So I have,” Billy said. She was glad for it, and somehow glad, too, to have Leslie see it.

“Oh, Billy,” Leslie said. “I wish there were some way I could help.”

“I do, too,” Billy said. The truth, for once.

Leslie kissed her, and then Pierce joined them as they started across one of the paths toward the dining hall.

The reception was in a smaller, more elegant room off the enormous student dining area. Tables had been pushed back against the walls, and an array of food was set out, mostly square sandwiches, the crusts cut off, and various desserts and fruits. One table had pitchers and several big, institutional urns—coffee and hot water, and probably decaf, too. Billy wanted nothing, but others were loading plates, and some were already holding them as they stood around, talking and eating.

Peter’s wife, Erin, came up and launched herself into a conversation. She liked to talk. Billy had complained about it to Gus after their evenings with her and Peter, but now she was grateful. She felt at ease, briefly. Surrounded by Erin’s gentle chatter, there was no need to speak. But then she moved off and Billy was alone.

“So, how did you know Gus?” someone asked her, politely. He had a plate of cookies he had held up to her by way of saying hello.

“I actually met him on a ferryboat,” she said, ignoring the larger question behind the small one: Who are you in relation to him? “And you?”

He was a parent of someone on the soccer team Gus coached. He’d come to the games regularly and struck up an acquaintance. He spoke of Gus’s drive to win, his pleasure in using his body.

“Yes,” Billy said sadly, remembering the uses he’d made of it with her.

The head of the English department came up to her and said, “So you’re the famous Billy we all heard so much about.”

“I suppose I am,” she said. “At least, I don’t think there were other Billys.”

“Gus spoke of you so often,” he said.

“Thank you. Thank you for telling me,” she said.

Always she felt she should be saying more, that her silence, her failure to have been part of the service, were things that people would have noticed, would be thinking strange. But then she also told herself that this was self-important, that no one was thinking of her, that they were thinking of Gus—only of Gus.

She met two of Pierce’s brothers, with their wives. Leslie introduced her to several old friends of hers, people who were there mostly for her, it seemed, as Billy spoke to them. Who hadn’t known Gus all that well. They asked her about him, and then about how she thought Leslie was doing.

When Pierce touched her back and asked if she remembered what Leslie had done with her shawl—“Did she take it with her out of the car?”—Billy seized on this as an excuse to escape.

“I’ll go look. Maybe she left it in the chapel.”

“That would be nice of you. Thanks, Billy.”

As she stepped out into the cooler air and started walking back across the green to the parking lot, Billy wondered if Pierce had noticed how out of it she was and was rescuing her. More likely Leslie had noticed and had sent Pierce over. Either way, walking alone for the first time today, she felt her body ease. She breathed in. The sky was so blue, as blue as it had been on 9/11, though the air was cooler, a kind of presentiment of fall in it. She started to think about what she might have said about Gus, if she’d spoken.

But no, she was only glad she hadn’t. There were many good things she could have offered, of course there were, but she would have offered them to make things seem okay, and not because of the wish to honor him, to remember him.

But of course she would remember him. She would remember good things about him as well as the trapped feeling she’d slowly come to have living with him. She would remember him perhaps longer and with more pain than someone whose feelings were less ambivalent, less knotted. She would remember him every time she walked the dog, every time she saw an airplane glide through an azure sky, every time she saw Leslie, every September 11 of her life. She swore to herself she would. She would remember him, she was sure, long after she’d forgotten exactly what he looked like, or exactly why she’d felt she couldn’t live with him anymore.

The shawl wasn’t in the car. She retraced their steps to the chapel and went inside. It seemed enormous once more without people filling the pews. The pictures of Gus were scattered everywhere, even on the floor. She went to the pew Leslie had been sitting in. She could see the scarf, the brilliant blue corner of it, sticking out from under the bench. She gathered it in. It carried Leslie’s perfume with it and, somehow, the sense of Leslie. She had loved her better than she loved Gus; she knew this. And she was as sad about Leslie, she realized, as almost anything else—sad that she would always dread seeing her, being with her, even while she missed all of that. She folded the shawl neatly and carried it out into the bright sunlight.

A couple was walking toward her as she crossed back over the pathway. It was Peter and Erin, she saw as they got closer. Erin was carrying her shoes. They stopped when they met. Erin explained she just couldn’t stand up anymore. She pointed to her feet. Billy looked down. They were shapeless, unfootlike. “I need to get home and elevate them, ASAP,” she said.

On an impulse, Billy asked if they could wait. They lived in the Back Bay, just a few blocks north of Billy’s new neighborhood. It would be easy enough, then, for them to drop Billy in Copley Square. She could walk home from there in fifteen minutes. “I need to take Leslie her shawl, and let her know I’m going, but I’ll be right back.”

They said they’d wait by their car.

The crowd at the reception had begun to thin. Leslie was talking to two of the students. Billy held the shawl out to her, and Leslie turned from them.

“Where was it? Thank you so much!”

Billy told her. Then she said, “I’m going to excuse myself now, Leslie. I just need to get home, and Peter and Erin said they could drive me.” She knew how Leslie would take this, her announced need to leave, and she felt a certain sorrowful anger at herself for using the feelings she didn’t have, but might have had—should have had—in order to make a getaway.

“This was hard, I know,” Leslie said, sympathetically.

“Yes,” Billy said. “And for you, too,” she said. It felt lame, pathetic, whatever she said.

Leslie lifted her hand, dismissively. “I’ll call you tomorrow, shall I?” she asked. “I want to be sure you’re all right.”

“I’ll be all right,” Billy said. “I am all right. I’m just, tired, I guess.”

“Of course you are. And of course you’ll be all right. I just … I miss you.”

She was engulfed again in Leslie’s embrace.

Peter and his wife let her sit in the backseat. They didn’t seem to mind her silence. They talked to each other about Gus for a while, about the service, about 9/11, but then moved on to other things. She had a doctor’s appointment coming up. She was going to ask about her feet. Their voices dropped. She said something about bleeding. Billy opened her window a crack and let the breeze and its rushing noise shelter her.

Instead of dropping her off in Copley Square, as she’d suggested, they insisted on driving her home. It wouldn’t be a problem, an extra five minutes, Peter said. When they pulled up in front of her building, he got out and came around. Billy was out of the car, was bent over Erin’s opened window saying good-bye. When she stood straight, Peter held out his hand. She took it, and he folded his other hand over hers and said earnestly, “If there’s anything we can do, Billy, you’ll let us know.”

Billy was sure he meant it, but it was also an easy, perfunctory thing to say, and her answer—to thank him, to say she would—was easy, too. They both knew she wouldn’t call.

The parlor was quiet when she opened the door—no frantic greeting from Reuben. For a moment she was frightened—where was he? what had happened?—but then she heard him shift in his crate, and an anxious small whimper. As she came closer, she saw he was sitting all the way at the back of the crate, pressed against that wall. Then she noticed the smell and saw the turd heaped in the front corner. He hadn’t been able to wait.

She went quickly into the bedroom and took off her suit and heels. Wearing just her slip, in stocking feet, she went into the bathroom for a roll of toilet paper and a towel. From under the kitchen sink, she got paper towels and rags and the bucket. She filled the bucket with soapy water and carried everything with her to the crate.

When she opened the door, Reuben didn’t move to come out. She knelt on the floor. The smell from within the crate was awful. She made two wads of the toilet paper and picked up the turd, set it on the floor on some paper towels. Then she reached in, curled her fingers under Reuben’s collar, and pulled him forward. She saw that he’d gotten shit on his haunch and leg, probably because the crate really was too small for him now. As soon as he was out, he crouched down to the floor in apology, looking carefully away from her, ashamed. His ears were flat. He turned over on his back, a supplicant for forgiveness.

She reached out and stroked him on his face, his enormous head. “It’s not your fault, sweet boy. You’re good. It’s my fault. You’re good. You’re a good boy.” Something in these words made her throat ache, brought tears up. Why? She didn’t know. “It’s my fault,” she said. “You’re a good boy. A good, good Reuben.”

With tears blurring her vision, she dunked a rag in the soapy water and began to clean him up.

Sam called on Friday, three days after they’d met. The message was waiting when she got back from the theater. She stood for a moment listening to his voice in her dark living room, looking out the window at a couple moving past under the streetlight. Their voices were pitched loudly—a little flirty, a little drunk. Reuben was whining at the door. Come on.

“I wondered about our having the coffee we’re supposed to,” Sam said. “Or maybe lunch. Or dinner, for that matter—on Monday. I think that’s the day theaters are famously closed. Let me know.” He left several numbers.

She got Reuben’s leash and took him out. The fountains in the private park at the center of the street were turned off now, so there wasn’t that steady, pleasant sound—nature disciplined, as she thought of it. It made a kind of emptiness. The leaves were gone from the trees, and her view into the parlors and the ground-floor apartments was unimpeded. TV and more TV for the most part. There was one dinner party still in full swing, though, a group of men around a table, their faces alive in the glowing candlelight, their chairs pushed back or turned sideways, their voices a faint murmur from the street.

They met one other dog, coming their way, much smaller than Reuben but unintimidated by him, and friendly. As the dogs circled and sniffed at each other’s private parts—easier for the small dog than for Rube—she and its owner, a young man, passed the leashes back and forth to avoid their getting tangled. There was a kind of absurd intimacy to this teamwork, their anticipation of each other’s next move for the sake of what amounted to terribly rude dog behavior, but it made Billy feel accomplished in some small, pleasant way. “Have a nice night,” the man said as they parted.

Outside the restaurant on the corner, the patio chairs and tables, which had been stacked up and chained together through the fall, had been removed. The end, she thought. The season of ease was over. She stopped walking. This was as far as they went at night. She gave the leash a little tug. “We’re going home, Rube,” she said, and he turned back, trailing her now. He stopped to sniff again at all the places he’d stopped on the way out, occasionally feeling it worth his while to lift his leg again and make a claim.

As they dawdled home, she was thinking about Sam. She was surprised he had called, actually. She had felt his interest in her as they talked in the restaurant—and hers in him, for that matter—but she thought she’d sent a signal at the end of the evening that she wasn’t interested. Or that she wasn’t very interested, anyway. Of course, Billy, maybe the fact that you were interested jammed that signal.

She remembered that awkward moment when he’d suggested they see each other again and she didn’t know what to say. She remembered his face changing, looking surprised, then quickly almost blank, as he registered her withdrawal.

Inside, she got ready for bed without turning the lights on. She liked moving around in the dark. It wasn’t really dark anyway, with the faded glow from the gas lamps. Reuben was already lying on top of the quilt on his side when she slid into bed. “Good night, sweet prince,” she said. He sighed. His tail whacked the bed twice.

She lay looking out the windows at the bare trees, at the shadows they cast inside. She wasn’t sure what to do about Sam’s invitation. He came from Leslie, and Leslie was the last person she wanted closer in her life, it had taken her so long to pull away to the extent that she had, to establish her distance. But she was drawn to Sam, as she hadn’t been to anyone in a long time. As she had chosen not to be in a long time.

Her last serious relationship had been almost three years earlier, with another playwright—probably, as she thought about it later, reason enough for its not working out. But for a while she had thought it was possible it would, she had thought that her string of bad choices—God! her husband; all those gloomy, demanding Chicago guys; and Gus, poor Gus—that all that might be over.

The relationship had been five or six months old, and they were talking about living together, when Leslie called. She wanted Billy to take some of the money, the money the government had given to the families. It was a lot, Leslie said, much too much, and she didn’t need it. She was going to give most of it away to charity, but she thought Billy should have some. Gus would have wanted it, she said. And it would make a difference in Billy’s life, as it wouldn’t in hers. “That seems right to me,” Leslie said. “That it should go—at any rate that some of it should go—to someone where it would make a difference. Someone Gus loved.”

Billy said no, and she and Leslie argued on the phone, awkwardly, politely. Finally, Billy agreed to think about it, just to end the conversation. And she would think about it, she told herself—she would think about how to say no in a way that Leslie wouldn’t argue with. That she couldn’t argue with.

When she told David about Leslie’s call, she treated it as something so out of the question as to be sadly, horribly funny. She thought he would laugh ruefully with her, that he’d help her figure out how to manage getting out of the situation.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “Of course you should take it. It would change your life. It would change our lives, together.”

Billy was so startled that she could barely respond, but over the next few days, they argued about it, over and over, increasingly bitterly. It was he who spoke the line about fucking Henry James in one of these long, drawn-out sessions, the line she used in the play. She’d been silent in response. She didn’t think of the answer, of Gabriel’s answer, until much later, when she was writing it, when David was long gone. Her characters were always quicker than she was—the advantage of living their lives in the slow motion of her imagination.

It was in the course of these arguments that she understood that things weren’t going to work out with her and David, that it was over. Another bad choice, another messy ending.

Since then her specialty had become the occasional one-night stand, and that only when she felt secure that the other person understood the rules, didn’t want anything more complicated either. Rafe, for instance.

With Sam, this would be an impossibility. There would be no rules with him. This was something she just knew.

She groaned aloud and rolled over onto her side.

She lay there and imagined him here, in her house, or her bed, and understood instantly how much she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to go to his house, either, to see the way he lived. She didn’t want to learn about him, to accommodate him. To feel him learning about her, accommodating her. And he brought with him, again, all the complexity of the connection with Leslie, the memory of Gus. At some point, with him, there would have to be the discussion about Gus. She didn’t want to discuss Gus with him. She didn’t want to discuss Gus with anyone. The closest she came to doing it now was the sort of thing she and Rafe had talked about, and that was as much as she wanted to say to anyone ever again about that part of her life. She couldn’t go back there again. That way monsters lay.

“It’s over, Rube,” she said in the dark. He was still.

In the morning, she worked on her own stuff. Then she had some student scenes to critique and a grant application she’d been putting off finishing for days.

Around one, she walked Reuben for the second time that day. When she came back, she went to the kitchen and got some takeout soup from Whole Foods from the refrigerator. While it heated, she played the message from Sam again. She thought about what to do.

Actually, she talked aloud about what to do. Like many people who live alone, she often talked to herself. And almost as often, she pretended to be talking to Reuben—speaking to him about what she was doing in the moment, or about the characters she was writing, or about her life. Her voice now was subdued and meditative. “I’m going to have to manage this, Rube.” She stirred the soup, set the wooden spoon down on the counter. “I’m going to make him be my friend. My pal.” She scratched behind the dog’s ears as he stood next to her, looking up into her eyes. “I can do that, don’t you think? I have lots of friends. Guy friends. Why not Sam?”

There were many reasons why not, but Billy ignored them. She called the number he had left, and he picked up after two rings, his voice neutral but somehow exciting to her. She ignored this, too. She suggested, instead of dinner or a drink, that they go for a walk with Reuben on Monday afternoon, at the Arboretum. “I never get to go there because I don’t have a car.”

“Well then,” he said, “I’m happy to accommodate you.”

She saw the squirrel just before Reuben did, and she knew, even as he took off, that it would be bad. Why hadn’t she just let go of the leash? She didn’t. She gripped the plastic handle even tighter—what a fucking idiot!—and braced herself.

Reuben weighed almost as much as she did. When he hit the end of the extendable line, he was up to full speed. She felt herself yanked forward, she felt herself falling. Here she must have let go of the handle, because as the ground leaped up to meet her, she could see Reuben across the field disappearing into the woods. Her arms were in front of her, her hands scraping the ground, but still she landed hard on her belly, and her chin whacked something. She cried out, she was crying out, even before the impact.

And then lying there, no dignity left at all, she started truly crying, it hurt so much. Sam was by her side almost instantly, crouched next to her. “God, Billy,” he said. He was stroking her back. After a few moments, when she’d calmed down a little, he helped her to a sitting position. She turned her face away from him. She could taste blood, she could feel it in her mouth and leaking down her chin. Her tongue touched the inside of her upper lip. It was already swelling. Her wrist hurt in an ominous and ridiculously painful way. “Damn it!” she said.

Sam was wiping at her face with something—his scarf, his expensive, probably-cashmere-it-felt-so-soft scarf. “Okay. Okay,” he said soothingly, as if to a child, and she realized she was making little grunts of pain.

She made herself stop. She rested her face against the scarf, against his hand holding the scarf. He was sitting down next to her on the ground now, she saw. Her own legs were straight out in front of her, the knees of her jeans smeared with black earth, her hands resting on her thighs, filthy. One of them held the other one, the broken one. Was it broken?

“You’ll get all dirty,” she said to Sam after a moment. It was hard for her fat lip to say the word.

“I’m not worried about that,” he said.

They sat together, not talking. He had his arm around her. “Oh!” she said after a minute. “I’m just so depressed about this.”

He laughed. She looked up at him—even sitting down he was so much taller than she was—and suddenly she was laughing, too. “God,” she said, resting her head against his jacket, his shoulder.

She saw Reuben emerge from the woods, prancing sideways, trying to avoid the handle of the leash as it kept retracting toward him, as if it wanted to wrap itself around his legs, as if it were alive. “There he is, that criminal,” she said. “I’m going to sue him.” She started to stand.

“Here, let me help you up.” Sam reached for her arm.

“Careful, careful, careful, careful!” she cried, turning her body away from him. “I think my wrist might be broken.”

She held it out, supporting her hand. It was swelling, turning red. She couldn’t believe how much it hurt.

He bent over her, taking her other elbow, and helped her as she gracelessly rose to one knee and then heaved herself all the way up. When she was upright, he began to brush off the front of her coat, the knees of her jeans. She stood, letting him, holding the scarf against her mouth.

Reuben had come close by now and was watching them dubiously. “It’s all your fault,” she said to him. She pronounced it fawt. “You asshole.”

“Think he gets that?” Sam asked. “Think he’s experiencing remorse?”

“Oh, it’s all right if he’s not,” she said. “I have enough for both of us.” The plastic handle to the leash was dancing and jumping on the grass. “Could you grab that, Sam?” she asked. “I don’t want him taking off again.”

Sam picked up the handle, and Reuben turned his sober gaze on him.

“Will you be able to walk?” Sam asked.

“Yes. It’s just my face and my hand. My wrist, I mean. My knees hurt, but they’re fine.”

“I think we should head back, then, and find an ER, or your doctor. Someone to look at your hand, at least. Maybe your lip.”

“My lip is that bad?” But she could feel it was. Her tongue went there again. In the middle of the swelling, there was an open slice. The impact of her chin hitting the ground must have shoved her lower teeth into her upper lip, hard. Yes, her jaw felt achy.

“It’s not good,” he said.

They started back down the hill. With every step, every jolt, her wrist hurt. Sam was ahead of her on the path. He was wearing jeans today, as she was. It made him look less formidable. Lankier.

Had she thought he looked formidable in his elegant suit? Apparently so.

She watched his long, loping stride. Reuben moved eagerly alongside him, his new best friend, every enthusiastic step a betrayal of her.

They had to wait in the urgent care wing of her HMO. The intake person, a handsome, fat black woman, smoothly coiffed, bejeweled, thoroughly in charge, thought it might be half an hour. “Take a seat,” she said. “They’ll call your name.”

There were two other people waiting ahead of Billy, one a Hispanic child with his father, looking listless, almost gray, and breathing phlegmily, probably contagiously. Billy settled herself as far away from him as she could, which meant she was very near an old man who sat almost doubled over, rocking rhythmically, as though to soothe some terrible internal pain. Sam sat next to her. They talked in near whispers. She felt compelled to apologize for perhaps the fourth time.

“Don’t be boring, Billy. We’ve been through that. You’d do the same for me.”

“I’m not sure I would. I might try to weasel out, somehow.”

“There is no weaseling in an emergency. You’d do the same.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.” They sat. Glumly, Billy said, “This is making me so sad, being here.”

“Because it hurts?”

“Not that. Just … the humanity.” She rolled her eyes.

“Yeah. There’s no escaping that.” After a minute, as if to change the subject, he said, “I talked to Leslie.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. She was the one who gave me your number. Since you hadn’t.”

Ignoring the pointed quality in his voice, she asked, “And was she pleased you were going to call?”

He was silent for a moment, as if considering this. “I think so,” he said at last.

“Why? What did she say?”

“She said that she hoped we’d be friends, anyway.”

“No more?”

“‘Anyway,’ she said.”

“No, I mean, no more about me.”

“Oh. A bit. Yes. She talked about you and Gus.”

“I think I can assure you that Leslie knew almost nothing about me and Gus.”

“But you were together a long time.”

“Not so long. A year, more or less. But we mostly didn’t live together.”

“What she said was that Gus loved you. Wasn’t that true?”

“Gus thought he did.”

“If he thought he did, then he did, surely.”

She said nothing for a long moment. She was suddenly remembering all her reservations about Sam, about getting to know him. She said, “I don’t want to talk about Gus with you, Sam.”

He looked at her, coolly, she thought. “I was just answering the question.”

Billy felt awash in confusion. Finally she said, “You’re right. I asked. But let’s talk about something else now.”

Perhaps he wanted to change the subject, too. Perhaps he saw how badly she needed to be distracted from her throbbing wrist. At any rate, he launched himself into his history with emergency rooms—the story of taking his kids to various hospitals over and over when they were young. He said she was lucky to be in the care of a pro like him—he’d seen it all. There was the time when they’d opened the back of the station wagon too fast, and Mark, the youngest, had tumbled out headfirst onto the pavement. “Concussion. Plus twelve stitches.” Once Charley had chased Jack through a closed sliding glass door. Forty stitches in all. Mark had been showing off for a little girl in his class, jumping from a swing at the high point of its arc, and broke his leg. There were two broken arms, a dislocated shoulder, one fever so terrifyingly high he’d brought whatever child it was that had it into the hospital. And those were only the emergencies. There was lots of ordinary blood and gore, too.

Billy kept him talking, kept asking questions. She liked his voice, she liked not thinking about her own pain. She liked the sense of him as a parent, taking care of other people, having survived it all, being able to joke about it.

Finally her name was called. She went into an exam room and sat on the padded table, the paper crinkling under her. The technician, a short, plump, cheerful young woman wearing a terrible perm and a flowered hospital top, took her temperature and her blood pressure—125 over 82. Billy always wanted to know, even though she had no idea what the numbers meant in terms of her health. “Is that good?” she asked. The technician said it was okay.

After she’d been alone for a few minutes, a very young man in a white jacket came in and greeted her. Dr. Cramer, his name was. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

“I don’t usually look like this,” she said, pointing to her face.

“That’s a very good thing,” he said. He listened to her sad tale while he washed his hands. Then came over to her and, without asking her, flipped back her upper lip in what she thought was kind of a rude way. He looked at it for a minute and said he thought there was nothing much to do about that. Ice, he suggested, though he added that it was probably already too late.

He asked who Sam was. Then his face turned suddenly grave, which made him seem even younger. “Do you feel safe with him?” he said.

Yes, Billy said. She did. It hadn’t occurred to her how it would look—as if she’d been knocked around. They should go after Reuben, she thought. Reuben, who was probably sound asleep in the car out in the parking garage.

He moved her wrist, and she cried out. He sent her to X-ray. Sam came with her and waited for her to be called, and then waited longer with her for the film. He’d been reading an old Newsweek, and both times they sat together, he reported to her on whatever obsolete article he’d just finished. They talked about what the appropriate punishment for Michael Vick might be. They discussed their recently discovered ability to make new neurons as adults—who knew? Sam talked to her about his middle son, who probably had known—he was doing research on Alzheimer’s disease.

When they got the films from the X-ray guy, they headed back to urgent care with them. By now Billy could feel that her knees were stiffening up. “I’m getting older by the second in here,” she said, shuffling down the corridor.

“We all are,” Sam said. “It’s what hospitals are meant to do to you.”

Nothing was broken, the young man said, showing her the picture of her own intact, shadowy bones lighted from behind. He gave her a splint that closed with Velcro straps and told her to keep her wrist elevated and iced. She asked for and got a prescription for painkillers, and she and Sam sat together in the pharmacy while it was being filled. She asked him why he was free on a Monday, a workday, and he explained the shape of his life to her—that he worked alone now, he made his own hours. That he’d had a partner for years, but they’d split up when the partner got more interested in developing projects on his own. “More speculative stuff. He’s braver than I am. Or more entrepreneurial, I guess you’d say. It was a bit like a divorce, but without the rancor.” He’d taken his jacket off and he was slouched in the waiting room chair. He seemed entirely comfortable.

“‘Rancor,’” she said. She looked at him. “Was there rancor in your divorce?”

He thought for a moment. “Not quite rancor. Something a little more like … disappointment, maybe.”

“Who was disappointed?”

“We were both disappointed, I think.”

“In equal measure, would you say?”

He laughed. “What’s it to you?”

She shrugged. “I’m interested in narrative,” she said. “How it went. How it was. What happened next.”

“Well, I would say yes, in just about equal measure.”

“That’s a good thing,” she said.

He didn’t answer.

“Right?” she asked.

“A better thing is no disappointment.”

“Well, yeah. But do you think that’s possible?”

“Don’t you?” It was in part his glasses, she thought, that made his gaze look so intense when he asked a question.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I’ve managed to disappoint everybody.”

“And been disappointed?”

She smiled at him. “In about equal measure, I would say.”

They sat looking across at the pharmacy counter, where everyone—five or six people in white jackets—seemed very busy, but no one was being called.

“Who’s ‘everybody’?” he asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“But I do. I’m interested in narrative, too,” he said.

“Well. That’s not part of the walk-in-the-Arboretum deal. That information.”

“But neither is urgent care,” he said.

“Point taken.”

“Point scored.”

Finally her name was called, and she went up and got the pills. She took one immediately, bending over the water fountain in the corridor and then tilting her head back to wash it down. Sam admired her technique, called it birdlike.

By the time they pulled over to park, a half block from her apartment, it was getting dark. Billy was slouched against the window on the passenger side, already feeling more comfortable. “Oh drugs,” she said. “I love them so.”

“They are a blessing,” he answered.

She thought suddenly of his wife, of how much serious pain he must have witnessed and had to help with. And failed to help with, finally. And yet here he was, indulging her, trying to make her feel better too. She had a pang of apologetic shame for her whining. “You’ve been swell today,” she said. “Nearly as good as a drug yourself.”

“That’s almost the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” They were getting out of the car. He opened the door to the backseat and attached Reuben to the leash.

“What was the nicest?” she asked. She felt afloat, detached from her body as she leaned against an elaborate little iron fence circling someone’s front garden. The streetlamps were on. They started to walk, their footsteps seeming loud in the twilight.

“I wouldn’t want to be immodest,” he said.

“Oh, be immodest.”

“Nah,” he said.

Inside she hung her coat up and turned on the lamp on her desk and then the one by the couch. She flopped down on the couch. Reuben came and set his immense head in her lap. “Sweet boy,” she said. She leaned over and smelled his fur. “I could kill you. I could kill you, my darling. You are a darling I could gladly kill.” She leaned back, and a wave of sleepiness rolled over her. She felt it as that: a wave.

Sam was in the kitchen, out of sight. She heard things clunking around. This was exactly what she hadn’t wanted, this intimacy, this invasion. “Want tea?” he asked. “Coffee? Wine? What else is here.” He was being nice; she gave him that. She heard a cupboard open. “Cognac?”

“Sam, stop it,” she called. “You’re off duty.”

“I have stopped,” he said. “I’m going to have a cognac.” He appeared in the doorway holding the bottle and a glass. “Want some?”

“I better not,” she said. “I’m already a little tipsy from my drug.”

“What about tea?”

She looked at him. She should tell him no. She should tell him she wanted to sleep. She said, “Tea would be awfully nice.”

He went back into the kitchen. She heard the water running, then the clash of the kettle on the burner. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, he was setting a cup down next to her. The windows were completely dark. Steam wisped off the teacup. “Whoa,” she said. She licked her lips. “I was asleep.”

“I know,” he said. “You were snoring a little.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

He lifted his hands. And his eyebrows. “As you wish,” he said.

“What about the dog?” he asked, sitting down across from her.

“What about the dog?”

“Does the dog need feeding?”

“I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll do it later. He’s flexible, poor thing. He’s had to be, since I’m his owner. And you need to stop being so … solicitous.”

“I’m being mostly solicitous of me. I’m having a glass of terrific cognac.” He stretched his long legs out. They reached half the distance between them. His face was in shadow, his head tilted up, resting on the chair back.

Billy leaned back, too, on the couch. “You’re probably going to get a ticket.”

He waved his hand: Who cares?

“Which I will pay,” she said. “It’s the price of living where I do, where nobody can park. I wouldn’t have friends if I didn’t pay their tickets.”

“We won’t argue about it,” he said.

She tried some of the tea. Almost too hot, but not. She set the cup back in the saucer, her hand circling the warm china. After a minute she said, “I didn’t want you to come here today. It’s why I suggested a walk. Neutral territory.”

“Why not?”

“Oh.” She gestured around her. “It’s all so kind of personal a place.”

“Isn’t every place where someone lives personal?”

“Not yours, I bet. I bet yours is lovely in a tastefully neutral way. Big. Gracious. Guest hand towels in the bathroom. In the lavatory. Monogrammed. Many bedrooms. Et cetera.”

He was silent a moment. She closed her eyes. He said, “You’re kind of a snob, you know it?”

“Am I?” She couldn’t really see his face, how he meant it.

“In a sort of reverse way.”

“But you’re the one who thought I was too bohemian or something. That was snobby of you.”

“We’re both snobs, I guess.”

“Perfectly suited to each other. Let’s call Leslie.”

She could see he was smiling. She closed her eyes again.

Later she would remember that he said something else—a few other things—and that she swam up several times from wherever she was sinking to say something back, but the next time she rose to full consciousness, he was gone. She was covered with the quilt he’d taken off the bed, and Reuben was asleep on the floor by her dangling hand.

She groaned and got up. She went into the bathroom. Bent over the sink, she splashed warm water on her face. She stood straight, grabbing a towel, and looked at herself as she dried off. Her lip was immense, fat, as though she’d been shot with an elephant-sized syringe of collagen. She leaned forward to the mirror and lifted it slightly to look at the cut inside. Standing back again, she saw that she’d lost an earring during this adventure. One of her favorite pair of earrings. This seemed important, somehow.

She felt tired, suddenly. Sad. Emptied out. Reuben was standing in the bathroom doorway, waiting for her. “Come on, old Rube,” she said. “Let’s get you some supper.”

He turned and loped to the kitchen. She followed, more slowly.

Sam’s glass and her cup and saucer were rinsed and set in the sink. Reuben’s leash lay coiled on the counter. Under it there was a note. She picked it up. I walked the dog, but I couldn’t spot his food. Sam.

She made a noise. “What am I gonna do with this guy, Rube?” she asked. She suddenly remembered something that he’d said as she was dropping off. She thought she remembered it. He had been speaking again of how different they were, but this time he said, “I thought, Why not? Why not let someone so different into my life?”

Hadn’t he said that?

She didn’t want to be in Sam’s life. How could she be? She didn’t want to be in anyone’s life but her own.

She picked up Reuben’s dish from the floor. Her wrist hurt. She crossed the little galley. She knelt on the floor on her sore knees to reach under the kitchen sink for the bucket that held his dried food. Her view now was of the disorder, the mess hidden under here—the old rags, the dark, irregular shape of some dried-up liquid she’d spilled months ago, a stiffened rubber glove, palm up, supplicant, its yellow browning around the edges.

She felt suddenly teary. “I can’t,” she said aloud. “I can’t do any of this.”