7

I’D BEEN BACK in Manhattan only a week when Sean called. He was going to be in New York for interviews and asked if he could see me Wednesday night. I probably would have said no if the apartment hadn’t smelled like Mark and felt like Mark when I returned. There were tennis racquets, dishes we’d bought together, and other reminders. My sense of rage and injustice came back. Mark was living only a few blocks away with Lila, and I still wanted to hurt them as they’d hurt me. I tried to stay busy. I spent time with my upstairs neighbor, Sally, who worked for Women’s Wear, and with other friends, but still I couldn’t forget. So when Sean asked me to go out with him, I said yes.

I had just stepped out of the shower when the doorbell rang. Glancing at the clock as I wrapped myself in a robe, I saw he was an hour early. I hate people who are early, so I buzzed him in and prepared myself to tell him I wouldn’t go out with him. When I looked through the peephole, I saw Bobby Jones standing in the hallway.

I opened the door hesitantly. “Hi.” He beamed. “Remember me?”

More than I cared to. “How’d you find me?”

“You gave me your address and some crazy phone number, remember? What’d you think? I’d forget you?”

He waltzed into the living room, moving with an athlete’s gait, that strange swagger in which the torso doesn’t budge. “Is this your grandfather?” He was pointing to a photograph my father had taken of Albert Einstein.

“No,” I said flatly. “That’s Albert Einstein.”

“Far out.” He looked at my head, wrapped in a towel, my bathrobe, as if noticing them for the first time. “Did I catch you at a bad moment?”

“I’m expecting company at six.”

“Oh, you’ve got time.”

Time for what, I thought. At the rate he made love, there was plenty of time. But Bobby was intent on scrutinizing the apartment. “You live here with your folks?”

I tried to recall what stories Jennie and I had told him that night, but I couldn’t remember. Liars need good memories. “I used to live here with this guy but he split. So now a friend lives here with me but she’s not around much.”

Bobby wasn’t a complete fool. He glanced at the bleached-wood Scandinavian furniture, at the African wall hanging, the director’s chairs, the potted plants. This was no college girl’s place. Where were the beer cans, the papers piled high, the Indian-print bedspreads flung across everything you sat on? “You got any stash?” he asked, after a pause. Mark had walked out with the small funeral urn we’d picked up in Greece and I hadn’t bothered to replace it.

“How about some Johnny Walker?”

“Sure,” he said, flopping down on the sofa. He was disappointed but consenting. I wondered if he was old enough to drink, as I poured two shots of Scotch and handed it to him. “I’m just going to comb out my hair.” Bobby found the stereo and was content. He put on an old Stones album and lay back again into the sofa. I pulled on a skirt and blouse and ran a comb through my long auburn hair, which I then twisted into a knot.

Bobby sat up and opened his eyes when I walked into the living room. “Hey, babe, you look great. Come here.”

“Look, I have to tell you something. My friend just made up that whole story. I’m not in college. I’m not in graduate school. When you were learning how to tie your shoelaces, I was graduating from college. I think I’m old enough to date your father.”

“You mean you’re over thirty?” He seemed despondent.

I nodded.

“I don’t care. We can have a good time, can’t we? I like the idea of an older woman.” I’d never been the older woman before.

“I have to get ready to go out,” I said.

He nodded. Then asked me somewhat sheepishly, “Who’s Albert Einstein?”

I was in the middle of explaining the theory of relativity and Einstein’s perception of space and time when the doorbell rang, and Bobby looked at me, a little stunned.

“Is that your date already?” I nodded solemnly. “Is there another way out of here?”

I felt saddened, as if I had tampered with someone’s innocence the way someone had tampered with mine. “The front door will be all right,” I replied.

Sean passed Bobby Jones on the stairs, glanced at him with a somewhat suspicious look, and walked into my apartment. Bobby Jones winked at me as he left. “Who’s the kid?” Sean asked as he walked in. He smiled and there seemed to be something different about him, which I attributed to his clothes. He wore a blue and white striped shirt, a blue blazer, and white corduroys, and seemed more grown up to me than he had when I saw him at Jennie’s.

“Oh, just someone. I’d better change.”

“You look all right.”

“But you’re dressed up.” I pointed to the liquor cabinet and he poured himself a drink.

“Contributing to the delinquency of a minor?” he called as I walked into the bedroom.

“I think it’s the other way around. Where’re we going?”

“To a sneak preview.”

I don’t remember much about the sneak preview except that Clint Eastwood starred and Sean took a fall off a roof. “That”—he pointed to the screen as a body tumbled down—“was me.” It was shortly after he fell that Sean took my hand. I’m not sure I remember him taking it but I do remember looking down and seeing his hand wrapped around mine. Sean looked to see what I was looking at. He whispered to me, “I’m just holding your hand. Is that all right?”

“I guess it’s all right. Are you going to fall again?”

“A little later.”

“Do you get paid much for doing this?”

“More than you can imagine.”

Someone shushed us. I sat staring blankly at the screen for the remainder of the film, uncomfortably conscious of my hand resting in his, waiting for Sean to fall off the roof again.

 

Friday was the kind of night when you can see the air oscillating in front of you, when everything seems to be moving at the wrong speed. Sean picked me up at seven sharp, which is what he said he’d do when he phoned me that afternoon at my office to say he’d be in the city a few more days. I had decided, since I was back in New York, that I’d go in to work a couple of days a week and Bill Wicker said it was fine with him.

Sally was visiting when Sean picked me up. I was in the bathroom, so she got the door. She called to me, “There’s some gorgeous guy here to see you.” It was Sally’s humor but she made Sean uncomfortable immediately. When I looked at him, standing in the doorway, I saw, however, that Sally had perhaps made an accurate observation. Over dinner, he seemed restless. “Your friend, is she always so blunt?” I apologized for Sally, saying she was a journalist and generally said what was on her mind.

After dinner Sean wanted to walk to Times Square and maybe catch a show. He had no idea what show, what kind of show, he wanted to see. We bought a paper that felt wet to the touch and wilted in our hands. “You want to walk to Times Square in this heat?” But he insisted. Most of the films I’d seen he hadn’t, and vice versa. “Here we are,” he complained, “in the middle of Fun City and we can’t find anything to do.” We decided to stroll. He rolled up his shirt sleeves before we’d gone two blocks, and I put up my hair. “Why don’t we decide what we want to do and take a cab?” I suggested.

“Why don’t we just walk and find something?”

“I think we should go somewhere air-conditioned.”

It was the kind of night when every smell is stronger than anything you’ve ever smelled before, the kind of weather people have in mind when they warn travelers, “Don’t visit New York in July.” So I was with a madman who wanted to walk throught the grimiest parts of the city in a July heat wave. Mark would have known where we were going and we’d have taken a cab. It would have been planned before we walked out the door. We were both great planners. Most people who visited our apartment noticed that all our books were in alphabetical order.

“Look”—Sean took me by the elbow—“when was the last time you walked to Times Square?”

“They have a subway that takes you right there. It’s very efficient. Isn’t that easier?”

But Sean won. He didn’t want to be indoors. It was the war that had made him hate being inside. As we walked, he told me about his “bit part” in Vietnam. He had dropped out of Yale at the height of the war and the army made him a deal. He didn’t have to take off to Canada and he didn’t have to bribe some poor doctor. He just had to run the radio station for servicemen in Saigon. He’d never seen real action. But he spent nine months inside a radio station, reading off lists of dead and MIAs and POWs in between the Stones and Roberta Flack, and the greatest effect it had on him was that he’d lost the ability to be indoors for long.

He loved to window shop. “I’m a consumer,” he said as we passed a head shop. “Everything I see, I want to buy.”

“I always buy things I don’t really want.”

He shook his head as we paused in front of an antique store. There was a walnut chest in the window he said he liked. He knew it was walnut because of the grain and the color. “I like walnut and oak best,” he said. “What do you like?”

“Formica.” I was a little annoyed.

He laughed and said that sometimes he found me very funny.

“You know, if you’ve never just walked to Times Square for the hell of it, it’ll do you good,” he said, as he started walking. At Lincoln Center we bought some ice cream cones at an outdoor Italian cafe on Broadway. “Why will it do me good?” I didn’t see anything good about spending the evening walking around Manhattan when the humidity was 94 percent and the temperature about the same. “It’s very hot. Why don’t we just sit in front of Lincoln Center and watch everyone go to the opera?”

“You’re an urban planner. And you don’t experience the city. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t need to experience anything. I look at maps. They tell me what I need to know. I look at charts; they tell me how many people live somewhere, walk somewhere, how many cars go by in an hour, and so on. Then I write elaborate grant proposals for millions of dollars based on those facts.” I was being glib and stubborn. In truth, a large part of my time was spent examining neighborhoods and writing rather emotional reports about urban conditions.

“In other words, you wouldn’t go to Times Square unless you had tickets for a show?”

“That’s about right.”

“Well, a change will be good for you.” I wasn’t sure I liked being told what would be good for me, but lately I wasn’t necessarily the best judge anyway. Sean wanted to see the night life up close. He wanted to feel the pulse of the city, get its filth all over his shirt, his neck, his hands. “I always know when I’ve been to Manhattan,” he said. “My shirt gets dirty in half an hour.”

Two transvestites and a bag lady passed us. The neighborhood was starting to change. Street people appeared, the emaciated kind who took drugs. Panhandlers. People with no place to go. And no one to go to. We passed a peepshow and Sean stopped. “Have you ever been inside one of these?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “It really doesn’t interest me.”

“Have you ever been inside?”

“Let’s go somewhere nice, O.K.?”

“We’ll go somewhere nice but I’d just like to see what it looks like inside one of these places.”

“I think,” I said, “that this is one of those things in life I can live without.”

But he was already handing a few dollars for admission to the shriveled lady with no teeth and very little hair, and we walked into a room filled with little booths, the kind you take four pictures in for a quarter. Some of the booths had their curtains closed and I could see pairs of shiny shoes that businessmen wear. I decided I was in no immediate danger. We picked a booth, closed the curtain, and dropped a quarter into the slot. “Do you do this often?” I asked Sean.

“Every chance I get.” We both peered into the movieola as the film began. It was an eight-millimeter, home-type movie that seemed to have some kind of plot. A woman is devastatingly drawn to another man’s male lover. The man seems to be her husband or fiance. While the men are willing to fondle and tantalize the woman, they end up making love to one another, though the picture fades before they actually get into anything too complicated.

As we left our booth, we saw a small group of men, very middle-class, homebody types, in jackets, heading into what was called “the theater.” The word “Theater” was written in very elegant pink letters with lots of swirls, each letter outlined in black. “Must be some kind of vaudeville act,” Sean said.

“The theater” consisted of about twenty booths, all in a circle, each with a curtain at the entrance and a black window in front, facing the stage. We entered a booth, closed the curtain, and put another quarter into another slot. The black window began to rise and we heard music coming from the other side of the window.

When the window was up, I saw two women, in G-strings and with spangles on their nipples, writhing on the stage and clawing their way toward the windows that were open. Pairs of little eyes peered from their windows and the eyes seemed to grow glassy as the dancing grew more frenzied, and for a few moments I found myself transfixed by the shimmying breasts and gyrating hips. The women seemed to have some kind of oil on their skin, and when one of the women sat back on her heels, swaying in a circular motion in front of our window, she looked like a snake in heat as she crawled in the direction of our window.

“All right,” Sean said, catching me by the elbow as I hailed a cab. “I made a mistake. It was a big mistake. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would upset you.” Regular Broadway theater was getting out and there weren’t any cabs to be had.

“I’d just like to go home. Is that all right?”

He held me firmly by the elbow. “I made a mistake. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m an actor; I make movies. I didn’t think going in there would cause this crisis.”

“You’re apologizing again,” I told him. “There isn’t anything to apologize for. I’d just like to go home.”

Sean held me tightly, but when I stared at where his fingers had wrapped themselves around my arm, he loosened his grip. “I didn’t take you to a peepshow to upset you. I didn’t take you there to make you feel bad or because I thought it would be good for our souls or so you could stage a protest on Seventh Avenue or walk away from me or so we could have a disagreement about my inappropriate behavior or so you can decide all men are impossible. I took you there as a goof. For the hell of it.” I was staring at a piece of gum, flattened on the sidewalk, as I told him I didn’t think it was “a goof” to watch people humiliate themselves.

Sean stared at the same piece of gum I had my eyes fixed on. It was a brownish wad that had gotten walked on for a long time. For decades, maybe, and it was in the shape of an eyeball with a dent in the middle, where someone had put a cleat, and it seemed to be staring back at us. A miserable, brown eyeball, a wad of gum, permanently embedded in the sidewalk of Broadway. Chewing gum comes from Chicago, where I come from, and at that moment I wished more than anything that I were home. That I’d never left home.

He raised his voice. “Sometimes I think you like to have a bad time and take everything so seriously. I think disagreeing and being very serious makes you feel nice and safe. Do you want to know something? Everyone is scared. Everyone is just as scared and afraid as you are. Everyone. And I haven’t been with a woman in a long time, so why don’t we just say that we’re all scared and we all make mistakes and start the evening over.”

A small crowd had formed, ready to absorb any tragedy that came their way in New York, and watched us argue. Sean shooed them away with some determination. I looked around Broadway. All the cabs were filled. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t see what the big deal was. Walk to Times Square. Watch some sad people make a display of themselves.”

He rubbed his forehead. “I really am doing it all wrong, aren’t I? I just haven’t been with a woman in a while.”

My hand reached up. “You know,” I began, “you can drop out of fine universities and risk your life doing stupid stunts, waiting to make it big somewhere, and make all kinds of profound statements about how other people should live their lives and what they should do and what they need, but in the end I don’t see where your life is any great model for how we should live. You know what you are?” I went on. “You’re a watcher. You look at people and make judgments. You sit back and watch and criticize. No one means anything to you. Nothing means anything to you. That’s why you’ll never be a great actor or director or whatever you want to be. How can you understand someone else if you can’t even understand yourself?”

“Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that you push people away from you?”

What was I doing in this mess? I glanced around me and looked at a sign across the street. It was one of a man, the size of a building, continuously smoking, an endless flow of vapor, day after day, year after year, pouring from his mouth. Like some steamy oracle, some deadly pronouncement, he ruled over us. I looked back down at the wad of gum and knew I was being watched on all sides, and those writhing breasts at the entrance to the peepshow seemed to be observing this as well.

The light above me was green and a sign read WALK, so I walked. I crossed Broadway and left Sean standing in front of the peepshow. I was aware of traffic that came to a halt, of screeching brakes, and then of people pushing past me. I crossed to Forty-second Street and headed down the steps into the subway. Pimps and hookers in their pink satin heels were doing business on the stairs. Puerto Rican boys, radios blasting, raced down. Theatergoers used the railing, walking arm in arm.

I went with them all. There was a big procession of us, heading to the token booth. I went down with the Chinese and the Japanese, the blacks and the Chicanos, the tourists and the permanent residents. The rich and the poor. The native New Yorkers. I went down with the cops and the criminals, the runaways and misfits and members of the Racquet Club and the illegal aliens and the professors and the Times reporters and the single people and the divorced and widowed people and old people and frigid and impotent people and those who looked like they’d had too much sex altogether and those who looked like they hadn’t had it in years. I walked among the workaholics, the alcoholics, the coffee drinkers, the pill poppers, the weight watchers and Turkish bath users, the chain smokers, the people who’d stopped being chain smokers, the people who’d been hypnotized, terrorized, mesmerized, analyzed, declawed, defanged, who’d improved themselves, exercised themselves, rid themselves of any germ of selfdestruction. They were coming home from night school; they were going out to mug somebody. Everyone was going to improve themselves somehow. Everyone was going to take the same goddamn express train I was going to take.

Sean was right about one thing. I had only been thinking about myself for a while. But who was he to try and take my mind off it? As I entered the subway, my future suddenly seemed in doubt. The token taker hollered at me as I pulled out a twenty. I fumbled for a five while people standing in line behind me sighed impatiently and someone asked me to move out of the way.

I decided to get lost, to lose myself underground. I decided to ask the pimp in the pink suit if he could use an extra hand. I walked toward him and he started to smile. All his teeth had been filed to gold points and he had a dozen gold chains around his neck. He was tall and shiny on top, like the Chrysler Building. The pimp smiled as I walked toward him through the tunnel and he seemed to be leading me deeper and deeper inside and I was lost somewhere in the bottom of the city I knew by heart on a drawing board.

Sean was standing in the same place where I’d left him, staring at the brown wad of gum stuck into the sidewalk, and he glanced up when he saw me coming, a look of sadness in his eyes. My hand was raised in a clenched fist. He was a stuntman, after all. He could take a punch for me. I don’t think I would have hit him, but he caught my arm and held my wrist lightly between his fingers. “I’m really sorry,” he said.

“So am I,” I replied.

I don’t know how long we held one another, but it seemed like a long time, long enough for the tourists from New Jersey, those shell-shocked housewives from the Oranges and their husbands in green leisure suits, to stop and stare at us, as if we were the show they’d paid those exorbitant bridge tolls to see. After a while, we walked slowly. “Look, what do you want to do?” Sean asked me.

“I think I want to go home.”

He agreed to take me home, but only after I agreed to see him again the next night.

 

That was the night we ran into Mark and Lila. We had gone down to MacDougal Street for Indian food and were on our way to the Lone Star when I saw them walking toward us. It was too bad, because Sean and I had been having a fairly good time that evening. He’d done an imitation of a Hindi accent in the restaurant and folded his napkin into a mouse so that it frightened the woman seated next to him. We were laughing as we strolled up Fifth Avenue and my arm rested in his.

I squeezed Sean’s elbow gently. “Listen,” I mumbled, “I’m not sure what I should do, but my husband and the woman he lives with are walking toward us.”

Sean looked up discreetly. There were a lot of people on the street but somehow he knew who I meant immediately. “Do you want to avoid them or do you want to say hello?”

I looked up, expecting they would have disappeared, turned off down the block, or, rather like phantoms I’d just conjured, vaporized and floated away in the air. They could not have had any real substance; they seemed more to be figments of some perverse side of my imagination. At times I have thought we invent the world with our minds, that the weather, the people, what we do with the people, can all be controlled with some simple act of will and that if you will evil, you will have it, and if you will good, you will have that.

I knew I wanted to avoid them but I refused to just cross over. The age of gladiators, of knights and great heroes, is long gone and the great battles are now being fought quietly at home or in the heart, but they also require enormous courage. I said, “I think we have to say hello.”

“Then just keep walking.” Sean folded his free hand over my fingers. “And act like you’re crazy about me.”

Mark and Lila had seen us as well and they seemed to be having a similar conversation. They were reaching the same conclusion. They kept coming toward us. If Sean hadn’t been with me, I think I could have killed her. I’d spent months fearing this encounter, terrified to walk into the Museum of Natural History, to ride the 104, not knowing what I’d do when at last I ran into them, as I knew I would. I think I could have killed her not only because she was with Mark, but because I’d helped her conjugate French verbs back in high school, when she could hardly spell her own name, and it seemed to me that people with that kind of history owe one another, if nothing else, an apology.

They stopped first and acted surprised. “Well,” Mark said, “small world.” He pecked me on the cheek. Lila was silent, morose, though forcing a smile. I could tell I’d ruined her evening. It was difficult to know if they were happy. Lila looked a little yellow to me, as if she were recovering from a disease.

Everyone was uncomfortable, so Sean picked up the ball and carried it marvelously. “We were just going to hear some music. You folks going to dinner?” They were going to eat “something.” They’d just seen a double feature at the Waverly. Mark looked as if he needed to eat. He seemed thin to me in his khaki pants, and Sean seemed strong beside him in his jeans and workshirt.

Mark sneezed into a handkerchief with ML monogrammed on it. He liked having his initials on his belongings, as if he needed to be reminded of who he was. Lila said “God bless you” twice. She seemed a bit uneasy, the way Helen must have felt when she realized what she’d done to Troy.

“Got your allergies early this year,” I said. Lila flashed my way, as if I weren’t supposed to know that my own husband had hay fever. But I looked back at her. I wanted her to know that I knew about more than his hay fever. I knew about the two little moles at the base of his spine, the scar below his nipple where he’d been stabbed in a street fight with a pocket knife; I could find his circumcision scar in the dark. I knew him as well as I knew Manhattan. I knew his body as well as I knew anything.

“How’s the Bronx project going?” Mark sneezed.

Lila said “God bless you” again.

“The council keeps pushing us back. I’ve written all the reports.”

“You write terrific reports,” Mark said. Lila was displeased. She didn’t like it when someone else was praised. She had her thick hair pulled back with a red ribbon. She used to wear it that way when we were teen-agers, and all the boys pulled the ribbon. Once I thought she was cheating off my paper during a French exam. I moved my arm away so that she could see. I always wanted to cheat off her paper during European history exams. Lila knew the dates of all the big battles.

I looked at Lila with all the objectivity and scrutiny of a judge about to hand down a terrible verdict. I looked at her jaundiced features, her chestnut hair, her thin legs. She was transparent and tough as a spider’s web and with about as much substance. I memorized her, the way a spy memorizes his instructions before setting them on fire.

“Where do you work?” Lila asked Sean.

“In film.”

“You look like an actor.” She smiled.

“Thanks,” Sean replied, uncertain if it was really a compliment.

“So, how’ve you been?” I asked Mark. I didn’t care so much to know the answer as I cared to detain them more, in the face of Lila’s discomfort and desire to move on.

“Busy, busy, busy. The wheels of progress turn slowly.” Had he always spoken in clichés? I tried to remember. He used to always repeat himself for emphasis. Once he repeated himself so many times in court “for emphasis” that the judge finally said, “Mr. Lusterman, I believe you’ve made your point.”

“We’ve got a big rape case in the office now,” Mark continued, seeming to free-associate. “Lila refused to defend the guy. She took one look at him and said, ‘That’s a rapist if I ever saw one.’ You should see this guy. Nobody wants to defend him.”

“Isn’t he entitled to a defense?” Sean said. “Isn’t that what you guys do?”

“Where’d you go to law school?” Mark asked.

“He went to Yale,” I broke in. Mark had done his undergraduate work at Queens College and had always been jealous of those who had Ivy League educations.

Sean squeezed my fingers, trying to divert a fight. “I didn’t go to law school. I know a great little Indian restaurant, if you guys are hungry.” They weren’t particularly hungry.

“It was nice running into you.” Lila turned to me.

“Wait.” I’m not sure what I was going to say, because Sean tugged me and led me away, but I know I was prepared to insult her. He put his arm around me and we went on down Fifth Avenue. For a few moments we walked in silence. “I want to go home,” I finally managed to say.

“You always want to go home.”

“This time I mean it.”

But Sean bought the Voice and decided we had to go to the Village Gate, which was in the opposite direction, because Howlin’ Wolf was playing the eleven o’clock set. I didn’t want to go but he led me, and I followed numbly, not caring very much where I went. We found a table in the back of the smoke-filled room. I felt as if it were happening for the first time. As if Mark had just left me and it was happening again.

“I just want to go home,” I said.

“In a little bit.” Between sets Sean said, “Do you want to talk now or do you want to just forget it?”

“I want to forget it.”

“You don’t want to talk?”

I shook my head. I never wanted to talk again.

“You know, you’re completely transparent. It’s so obvious what you’re feeling.” I didn’t know that. “Interesting thing about polar bears. They have no facial expressions. That’s what makes them so dangerous. You never know if they’re going to attack. You’re different. You can’t hide a thing.”

I was getting involved in the analogy. “Does that mean I’m not dangerous?”

He paused for a moment. “No, it just means you’re different from a polar bear.”

Someone came up and asked him if he was Robert De Niro.

“Robert De Niro doesn’t have a beard,” Sean said.

“You do look like him.” I examined Sean’s face. That was when I decided I would go to bed with him. Or rather, that I should go to bed with him. I could not, after all, continue being faithful to a man who no longer loved me, except for an occasional encounter with a hitchhiker half my age.

Sean turned back to me. “Why do you let other people run your life?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t see how anybody was running my life. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean you’re letting them make you miserable.”

I shrugged my shoulders, not really seeing that there was any alternative. “I suppose you’ve got control over your life.”

“I have some control.” He asked the bartender for the bill. “I’m controlling myself right now.” From what he would not say. “I mean, I can understand you’d be upset after running into them, but why don’t you just call her up and tell her what you think?”

My fingers clenched the bar. “I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.”

“Satisfaction? What is this? The Middle Ages? If you’re upset, get it off your chest.”

I stared into my drink. The ice cube had melted with a hollow spot in the center and I stuck my finger in. “You don’t understand.” I turned the ice cube with my finger in the hollow spot.

Sean sighed. “Maybe they fell in love, maybe they were just right for one another. I don’t even think you really want him back. But keeping it inside like this can only drive you nuts.”

“I’ve known that woman since I was a little girl. She used to eat peanut butter sandwiches that my mother made for her at my house. You just don’t go and do what she did.”

“So tell her that. If you haven’t talked to her about it . . .”

“You just don’t understand. You don’t get it, do you?” The bartender looked our way. “I hate her. Do you understand that?” The bartender motioned for me to keep it down. People at the bar were staring at us. “I hate her. I hate her.”

In the cab I sat far away from him, my arms folded over my chest. “O.K.,” he said as the cab sped up Sixth Avenue. “I can see why you hate her, but you’re only hurting yourself.”

But I didn’t understand that. My rage had suddenly become a precious point of honor to me. If I was hurting myself, it was only as the kamikaze pilot hurts himself in completion of the mission and destruction of the enemy.

When we got back to my place, Sean took off his shoes and made himself comfortable. I curled up beside him. “Listen,” he said, “I know you’re upset, so I’ll sleep here on the couch, all right?” I shook my head. “Oh, you want me to leave?” I shook my head again. “You want me to sleep with you?” I nodded. Sean got up and poured himself a cognac. “See that outside? That’s morning. I think we should just get some sleep.”

“I don’t understand.”

He came back with the cognac. “Listen, somewhere along the way I got to be a realist. If I touch a table”—he touched the table—“I want to feel the wood. If I touch a lamp, I want to feel the heat of the lamp. And if I touch a woman, I want to feel that woman.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“What I’m saying is, I don’t want to make love to you when you’re thinking of someone else.”

I’d never heard anything more ridiculous. “Is that very important?”

He laughed. “Not usually, but I’m afraid I care about you.”

Sean unbuttoned his shirt, and when he was down to his T-shirt, I saw a large gash, as if something had bitten into the side of his arm. I leaned forward and touched it. It was a smooth, cratered hole in his shoulder, running down the biceps, and he’d gotten it in an explosion while doing stunts for a war film a few years back. “That’s when I decided to do some serious work behind the camera,” he told me, fluffing a pillow.

Five blocks away Mark slept in Lila’s arms, and that was the worst pain I’d ever known. Women don’t usually go to war or to sea, and most of our adventures are of the heart. We all fought our own wars and Sean had almost fought in a few real ones. All the wounds I’d ever known were inside and had a kind of unreality about them. And suddenly the internal wounds seemed insignificant to me, the way all the people you’ve had crushes on are gone in the face of someone you can really love.

He tucked me into my bed and kissed me on the forehead. I tried to pull him down. “No, not tonight. I don’t want it to be tonight.” But we were both exhausted, so he flopped down on the bed next to me and fell fast asleep.

It was almost morning, and the birds were just starting to sing. Five blocks away Mark slept with Lila, and I hadn’t stopped wanting him back with me. The sky was a translucent blue, the color it turns just before they turn out the street lamps, but it seemed so very dark to me. I was thinking about Mark and Lila lying in bed together and I couldn’t break away and the world was so very dark and empty as I tried to arouse Sean and have him make me forget. But Sean wouldn’t be aroused.

The first night Mark and I lived together in our Cambridge apartment, we stayed up half the night. We cleaned the whole apartment, and when we were done cleaning, he pulled my shirt out of my pants. He lifted the shirt and unbuttoned a few buttons that exposed my belly. He touched the dark line that divides me, the one that descends from my navel to my groin. He followed the line up and down, then landed on my navel. He said because I love you, I know something about you. I know you have a light right here in the middle, a pilot light, and you can’t let it go out. You must never let the light go out.