JOHNNY AND BRIDGET

I am sitting in a comfortable chair in a comfortable room, with a glass of water on the table beside my laptop, a warm light on a pleasant evening, and no one who cares very much what I have to say about anything. Thousands of miles from here, Johnny is keeping up a constant stream of messages to the outside world, by way of letters written on sheets of paper that sympathetic guards smuggle in, which he then passes to Red Cross inspectors and the occasional priest or nun. He’s trying very hard to explain himself, though the Johnny I knew would have considered such an effort beneath his dignity. Other forces, infinitely more powerful than myself, have surrounded him and control what he does from moment to moment: nations, security forces, diplomats from many countries, peace groups and activists, news organizations, heads of state. I watch helplessly, I might as well be on another planet. I did try to call his mother, using a number I found in an old address book. The phone rang on the other end in a pattern I’d never heard before, so I had no idea what country she was in. It went straight to her voicemail—at least I think it was hers, the outgoing message was a stock recording—and I left a message, though it was no doubt inadequate. I would have been surprised if she called me back, and she didn’t.

I’ve read some of the excerpts from Johnny’s letters, which have been posted on the internet by a British newspaper: long, rambling disquisitions on the progress of Western history, the push of money, the etiology of disease, the fathomless turns of love and time, and how they all interacted to create a universe that’s both unbearably cruel and irresistibly beautiful. It was his obligation to try to untangle such a world from itself, he says. Not his calling, but his duty: he was not a messianic man, not when I knew him, not at all, and neither was he vain. We are all incomplete, he once told me, though he may have been teasing me. He often liked to cross back and forth between sincerity and sport, and challenge me to tell the difference. In these statements he’s produced from his confinement he is not, of course, so blithe, but his respect for fragility and defeat is apparent there, too. His own attempt to sort things out, he admits, had been unlikely to succeed, but he’d found one loose thread and decided to start there.

I know Johnny well enough to be sure that his communiqués haven’t been undertaken for publicity, at least not for its own sake: he may believe publicity will save his life, but I would be surprised if he really cared, and besides, he must know it’s unlikely. He was very much a realist, even a pessimist, by temperament, experience, and philosophy. That is part of what I want to explain to you. Still, publicity has come for him, and rather than flaring and then fading, it has grown and grown. Already there are books being planned—at least two that I know about, one written by a British man, who, with the cooperation of Johnny’s family, apparently has access to his papers. This is in accordance with his wishes.

But you see, Johnny and I met where the sea of history, looming and dark, meets the shore of days. We were young and we didn’t know much, but we knew not to mistake the tide for the total. Still, we were students, and both of us had relied, again and again, on people who had written down everything; so I’m going to write down everything and leave it somewhere where no one can be hurt by it—for that someday littoral where I’m buried beneath the waves, along with everyone I know.

Johnny and I met at Columbia, where I’d gone to pursue a graduate degree in Classics, in part because I loved it, and in part because it was the most useless kind of accreditation I could imagine. Johnny, too, was a graduate student, but in Political Science, where he was preparing himself for a career in international relations. He and I had met early in the first semester of my second year, in a seminar on Milton, a subject well outside of either of our fields; I think the gratuitousness of the study was part of what drew us to each other—that and our shared contempt for the class itself, which was taught by a middle-aged woman on loan from Berkeley, who would place her index finger on a passage from Paradise Lost and drone on absently and endlessly, in a voice so soft that I could hear the air passing through the registers overhead. To be fair, my own department wasn’t known for its thrills—most of my professors were odd, aged, and unkempt—but the comic futility of it was much of the point, at least to me; and besides, the faculty was known for hosting eccentrics of all kinds, so there was always the chance of some interesting scandal, usually one involving freshman boys. The Milton class was ridiculous the way television in a foreign language is ridiculous: its flaws were all I could see.

I stopped going within a few weeks, so Johnny and I must have met early in the semester, falling into conversation in the hallway outside the classroom, a wide corridor with the pleasant, nodding smell of wood polish and unfiltered cigarettes. Oh, God, I said to him. Are all graduate English classes that bad?

I honestly don’t know, he said. It’s not my department. He paused and pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. — I thought it was quite interesting, actually.

For a moment, I thought I’d misjudged him, and I was just about to mutter some pleasantry and slip away, when he suddenly threw his head back a bit and burst out with a clap of laughter, so loud that the sound echoed down the hallway and students coming out of another class turned to look at us. — No, he said, turning away from the doorway to hide his mirth. You’re right, it was dreadful. Of course it was. Poor Milton. Just then the professor herself shuffled out of the classroom, and we both went silent; she raised her hand in an absent sort of half-wave as she passed. Do you think she knows what a disservice she’s doing? Johnny said when she was gone. To a poet she must have once admired.

To Milton? I said. I don’t know if she owes anything to Milton, but her students deserve either some real teaching or some uninterrupted nap time. At this, too, Johnny laughed, albeit more softly; and so we became friends, though that was the last time I read Milton. Johnny saw the course all the way through, though according to him it never got better. In any case, we had met.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine or explain what drew us to each other. We had almost nothing in common. I was a New Yorker, born and bred, one of those small, scrappy middle children that large Irish families breed; my parents were liberal about everything, in a laissez-faire sort of way, except for education, which they took seriously enough to send me to Regis to study with the Jesuits. As for Johnny, his story was almost absurdly complicated, and it was never quite clear where he called home. He went by an English first name, but his last name was a conjunction of abutting syllables in one of the scores of Volta-Congo languages. He once challenged me to pronounce it properly and laughed as I struggled. — No, no, Yankee man, he said. You’re aspirating the n. And the l is rounder than that.

He was taller than me by a good four inches, his skin was very dark, he kept his hair cropped close and his eyes were deep brown. Sooner or later everyone asked him where he was from, I must have seen him answer twenty or thirty times, always patiently, often with amusement, and almost never with the truth. Once I watched him try to convince an undergraduate girl that he was from Queens, a ruse he might have been able to pull off if he hadn’t tried to fake the accent, producing, instead, a bizarre mishmash of syllables that even the girl, who was from Oklahoma, recognized immediately as an imposture.

In time I learned that his mother’s family was from West Africa, though they had detoured, for two or three generations, through the Caribbean, so he had some distant Spanish cousins whom he’d never met, and a rumored great uncle who had been an Amerindian tribal chief. His paternal grandfather had been too poor to measure and lived in some now-forgotten village on the British-controlled edge of the Gulf of Guinea, but his father had done very well in school, qualified for a scholarship at Oxford, became a geological engineer, and returned home to start a company that made storage containers for natural gas. It had made him rich, tremendously so by local standards, and he had sold the business when Johnny was a toddler, then served for some short period as the Minister of Energy under one of the country’s less vile presidents—who had promptly been overthrown in a coup, sending Johnny’s family into exile, first in Caracas, then in Frankfurt, and finally in London, where his father had taken a job consulting with an oil firm—which in turn assigned him to various stations around the world, usually for a year or so. He died when Johnny was twelve in somewhat mysterious circumstances: killed in a single-vehicle car crash, in broad daylight on a well-paved road outside of Kampala. There was reason to believe it was an assassination: My father made some political mistakes, Johnny once told me, though he never explained to me what they were. Afterwards, his mother, who had been quite a bit younger than her husband, surprised everyone, including herself, by moving back home and becoming a spokeswoman and an activist. For what? I asked him, and he said, Oh, you know: justice, reform, healing, he replied.

All of this history emerged slowly and in a sidelong fashion, so while there were many things I knew about him, many basic facts remained mysterious to me. It was unclear, for example, what passport he traveled under. Though we ate together often enough, he never favored one kind of food over another, or mentioned any childhood dishes; he measured distance in kilometers, temperature in centigrade. He had grown up with a governess, who had moved with them from city to city. His father listened to BBC news on the shortwave, and it wasn’t until they arrived in London that they acquired a television at all, and then just to watch BBC news on TV. His mother read to him when he was a child, and then he read to himself: Dickens and the like. His English, then, could be formal to the point of eccentricity—he was the only person I’d ever heard use the word bosom in conversation—his diction was immaculate, and his habits were old-school to the point of mannerism. He played cricket with his friends. — Cricket? I asked. One of the unimpeachably pleasurable byproducts of colonialism, he said. One of the very few. I think most people thought of him as British, if only for lack of an alternative. I thought of him as Johnny.

I was a heedless young man, and what I knew of the world I knew through curiosity, not experience. If you had asked me whether I really intended to spend my life teaching Latin grammar to recalcitrant freshmen, I would have said, Of course, and I may even have believed it, but the truth was that I was hiding out in academia, waiting for the sullen years of my early twenties and all their attendant police to pass me by, before I emerged again, free and still free. Johnny had much more to gain or lose. He was the only one of his mother’s children to be in a position to honor the family’s name, both forward to his descendants and retroactively to the reputation and renown of his ancestors. In fact his family, by his own account, scarcely distinguished between past, present, and future: it was all blended and alive, a spirit always beside him, which he treated with layer upon layer of sarcasm, amusement, affection, and gentle anger. My brother is a ne’er-do-well, he once told me—the only time he mentioned that he had a brother at all—and you know how it is with people like mine. There was a quarter-tone of self-mockery in his voice and a quarter-tone of weariness; the rest was simply factual. The family’s name, the family’s honor, these are all that matter, he continued. Well, that and the family’s money.

But we had more in common than our differences might have suggested, and for two or three years I saw him more often, and talked to him more openly, than I did anyone else. Together, we formed a little rampart in defense against the university itself, which we regarded with a combination of skepticism and gratitude, frustration and affection. It was an impressive place, in its way, sober and scholarly, and with a history that had been polished, over the centuries, to a deep chestnut color; but it was monkish in its isolation and dedication, and like a monastery, almost proud of its irrelevance. Many of our professors had been there for decades, some had done their own graduate work in the very same rooms in which they now taught, and while they earned a modicum of respect for having the good sense to find their place and stay there, deep in their devotion to whatever chalk god they prayed to, the other students, both graduate and undergraduate, were harder to take seriously. They were almost universally callow, unworldly at best and ignorant at worst, and occupied with things that neither Johnny nor I cared about at all: good grades, career advancement, and the pressure to be loyal to the school itself, for no other reason than the fact that we were all there. — Patriotism in miniature, Johnny once called it, with his usual accuracy and vividness: all those men and women, most of them a few years younger, wearing sweatshirts branded with the school’s name rendered in its distinctive stale blue; the row of fraternities on 114th Street, where every Sunday morning one would find filthy mattresses stacked up on the curbside; the young man in the apartment next to mine, whom I knew only through legend, because he spent all his time in the library, living on a diet of vending-machine pretzels that proved to be so lacking that he actually contracted scurvy, collapsed in a chemistry class, and had to be sent home; the circles of friends that formed as much out of mutual competition as genuine affection; and their helpless prostration before professors who, in another context, would have been ignored, and from whom they sought, not even the cynical dispensations of a job, but simply the assurance that they were bright and belonged. All this I found more dull than disturbing, and what was worse, inescapable; for while I had friends from high school still living in town, they had jobs, they had weekends, whereas I had a tiny stipend and an ever-replenishing stack of books that needed to be read.

Johnny had a princely air about him, a slight hauteur coupled with the tentativeness of a regent, for whom more things can go wrong than right, and who must therefore suspend his instincts indefinitely. He was worldlier than the rest of my friends: he was, for example, the only person I knew who’d done military service, an experience that told in his posture and a bit of fussiness in his dress. But he was naive in ways that were hard to predict. Manhattan was both rule-bound and enigmatic, and he couldn’t quite resolve it. He often relied on me to explain things to him, and it was endlessly entertaining to do so, and touching to be asked. He didn’t understand, for example, how the neighborhoods could change so quickly from block to block, nor how to find the borders—where Morningside Heights became Harlem, or Little Italy turned into the Lower East Side. Nor was he ever quite sure which was a bad block and which a better one; they all felt very much alike. He was appalled and disgusted by the presence of cockroaches in his kitchen, and shocked to discover that even rich people had them. I taught him the phrase Las cucarachas entran, pero no pueden salir, which amused him to no end, but when I told him that it was from a subway ad, he shuddered: he’d been told that the subway was as unsafe as a favela, and was surprised to find that I took it all the time. I never could convince him that the chances of anything happening to him were small; instead, he took cabs, which meant he was always broke, or buses, which meant he was always late. Whenever he saw a policeman, he would immediately stop whatever he was doing, no matter how innocent, a habit that led to him being questioned twice and searched once, which in turn made him more uneasy when he saw the next.

He had never seen a snowstorm before, and when the first one struck, surprising everyone midway through November, he didn’t know how to react. For one thing, he had a winter coat that was warm but not weatherproof, and he had no wool socks or boots: it hadn’t occurred to him that his dress shoes wouldn’t be sufficient for every occasion. He tried to call me that night, but I had gone for a walk down Broadway, enjoying the sight of the buildings hung from the sky, the soft scrim of snowflakes, the antique silence interrupted only by the occasional sound of a car creeping by. — You went out? he asked me the next time I talked to him. It turned out he hadn’t left his apartment in two days, and toward the end had almost fainted from hunger, because it hadn’t occurred to him that restaurants would deliver in such weather.

Above all, he was bewildered by New York’s women, whom he found both entrancing and impossible; though his taste, I found, could be unexpectedly common. I remember him going on about a beautiful creature he had seen the night before. She was, he insisted, extraordinarily attractive, intelligent, a true and worthy wonder. He was perfectly serious about this, and it took me a while to realize that he was talking about a lifestyles reporter on a local morning show. When I tried to explain to him that she was mostly an illusion, a bleachy sprite whose primary skills were reading from a prompter without moving her eyes and making three or four seconds of small talk in between segments, he said, That’s the trouble with you, Mike. That is exactly your trouble. You have no sense of romance. Another time he took me aside to ask me what, exactly, a cheerleader was, whether that was all they did, whether they received scholarships for doing it, and who chose that path rather than, say, gymnastics.

— But I don’t mean to portray him as leering and shallow. He was, in virtually every regard, more sophisticated than I was, and in most regards more self-possessed: discreet, courteous, considerate, honorable. He liked and respected women almost universally, whereas I liked some, didn’t like others, and respected some portion of both. On the other hand, I enjoyed them, whereas he seemed to consider enjoyment a form of ill-treatment.

He was a brilliant student, and not just because he was intelligent but because he cared deeply about what he was studying. It wasn’t merely coursework to him, it was the vantage point from which he gazed upon the world and himself in it, from an altitude so high that the air was thin and the atmosphere was completely transparent. I think even his professors found him a little bit daunting: graduate students are, for the most part, a timid bunch, a quality that usually makes them neurotic, and sometimes makes them aggressive, but rarely makes them formidable. Johnny was simply absorbed, as thoughtful and professional as any diplomat. Moreover, he was the beneficiary, and perhaps also the victim, of a rare mystique. It wasn’t just a recognition of the difficulties he must have faced in the past, or those he would face in the future. It was a kind of awe; because he came across as a natural-born aristocrat—a concept he would have been the first to denounce.

By contrast, I was merely smart, a very good student but not destined to be a notable figure in my field. I was undisciplined and easily distracted: it wasn’t unusual for me to write papers from beginning to end the night before they were due, or again, to finish them weeks before I was supposed to hand them in, depending on what kind of mood I was in and how interested I was in the topic. And I didn’t have Johnny’s evenness of manner, his poise. I was raw and blue, and had none of his filigree and finish.

He had a name to protect: I only had a reputation, which I cared little about and couldn’t have managed even if I’d wanted to. I was the sort of man about whom people are willing to believe almost anything, and what they believed was equal parts real, reality misconstrued, and sheer conjecture. Perhaps I invited it, though not deliberately. Certainly I was an anomaly in my department. For one thing, I knew the city and knew how to live there cheaply, an incalculable advantage, since it meant I didn’t have to rely on the sad formalities the university put in place to provide students on stipends with a social life. And the department in which I studied was an unusually delicate one, a small program, conscious of its own eccentricity and anachronism; and I was indelicate. My professors were thoughtful, deliberate, and peculiar: athlete-worshippers, middle-aged virgins, an alcoholic or two; a few would-be Caesars, stuck in a modern world that they found both vulgar and unappreciative, and within which they cleared a space to exercise palace intrigues and moments of tyranny; dreamers of poems in long-forgotten languages; grammarians for whom the exact meaning of an unusually formed verb was worth an entire volume of essays and debate. They were prone to attacks of overt contempt for anyone who disagreed with them on the slightest matter, but their aggression ended at the door to the department. One had a grand apartment on Riverside Drive that was decorated with nautical memorabilia. Another, Scottish-born and Oxford-educated, wore a bolo tie with a large turquoise stone in the center. They were smart and they could be funny, and as tender over a line of Thucydides as a dowager over her cabbage roses. They were learned, cultured, generous with their time. But, like any small group of people fastidiously and competitively engaged in an arcane task, they had elaborate codes of behavior; and they liked to gossip. They gossiped about everyone; they gossiped about me.

I remember, for example, some months before meeting Bridget, inviting a girl I knew, who was then a freshman at NYU, to a lecture on historiography delivered by a distinguished and elderly professor from Leipzig. I’d mentioned it to her because she was smart and she was curious, and it didn’t matter to me that she was nineteen. She was just a friend, someone I’d met in a dilapidated club we both frequented in the East Village: I’m not sure I’d ever seen her in daylight. She came north a hundred blocks and met me in the hallway outside a classroom, dressed very much the same way she dressed at night, braless beneath her ragged black silk shirt, torn stockings, and a startling smear of crimson lipstick. She was a college girl trying to look like a child prostitute; she came off as a child prostitute trying to look like a college girl. Even the lecturer noticed her; I saw him glance her way repeatedly, and at least once he lost his place in his notes. When he was done, she raised her hand matter-of-factly, exposing a very pretty, porcelain-white armpit. The three or four other people with their hands raised immediately lowered them, leaving the distinguished scholar no choice but to call on her. I don’t remember what she asked, but it was a perfectly well-formed question, one which he had some difficulty answering.

Thereafter I was fair game for any supposition, mostly unspoken, though no less obvious for that. Of the two women who worked in the department’s office, for example, the elder, funnier one became more solicitous, asking me on Monday mornings how my weekend had been, and once telling me an off-color joke; the younger one became more sour, and grumbled when I asked for another copy of a handout I’d lost or permission to use the telephone. Beyond that, there were remarks made now and then, not-quite-sincere compliments on my clothes (which were poor-man’s downtown black), and once, in a seminar, when I said that I considered Catullus’s venustas a version of Cicero’s virtus, my professor said, almost under his breath, Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Two students behind me laughed.

Yes, I would: Wasn’t charm another form of leadership? Think of Alcibiades and the power he acquired, simply by causing others to fall in love with him.

At that very moment a group of undergraduate women walked by outside, and while I looked at them more briefly than my classmates, they all turned to look at me when the girls had passed, and I knew I had lost my argument.

Then I showed up in a morning seminar still reeking-drunk from the night before, a monstrously stupid thing to do; and while I acquitted myself well enough, I knew that I would thereafter be known as dissolute. A few days later, one of the younger professors took me aside in the hallway and asked me in a low voice if I knew where he could get . . . something, I’m not sure what, for he was so afraid to ask that he couldn’t bring himself to name it, and assumed that I would know what he meant. I didn’t, nor did I want to, and the encounter ended with the two of us, equally embarrassed, nodding and smiling as we backed away from each other, he with his leather satchel somehow undone, so that a half dozen blue exam books slid out onto the floor. He knelt to collect them and I turned away.

Johnny was unaware of all of this, at least so far as I know. Our conversations were almost always about our studies, only occasionally about life beyond them. My politics were more radical than Johnny’s and certainly more naive: for while he was neither conservative nor cynical, he was very much the skeptic, and grew more so whenever the topic we were discussing—the future of the Soviet Union, which was just then on the verge of collapse; the miners’ strike in Britain; the fate of Cuba—became more polarizing. I was given to enthusiasms and grand pronouncements: I remember an evening that I spent trying to convince him that we were entering an era in which out-and-out warfare would become obsolete, to be supplanted instead by various forms of economic shackling and information aggression, and that oil, which at the time was the Fist in the Pocket, would soon be supplanted by water, which would grow scarcer and scarcer. Johnny was not convinced, but more than that, he found such predictions absurd. You never know, he said, smiling a bit and shaking his head. It’s easy enough to look back on history, see it as determined, and assume that one can project into the future, at least in principle. And it is determined, yes it is, but we shall never know enough to know where we are going. And then, as if to signal that the argument was over, he pushed his eyeglasses back up on his nose.

He was right, so I changed the subject. Why don’t you get yourself some contact lenses? I said. You spend about half your day adjusting those glasses.

He laughed, took off the glasses altogether, and studied them thoughtfully. Because, he said, I refuse to put my finger in my eye, and more than that, I refuse to have pieces of plastic resting on my corneas. You want a prediction for the future? I’ll tell you what: twenty years from now there’s going to be an epidemic of blindness, brought on by the too-hasty adoption of what is clearly an unwise practice. Eye cancer—that’s what will bring down the West.

There’s no such thing as eye cancer, I said, though I didn’t know that to be true.

There will be, said Johnny, and then you’ll see. What’s the saying? In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king? He put his glasses on with a flourish. Do you know who coined that expression? No, you don’t, because you don’t know anything that happened after the sack of Rome.

Erasmus, I said.

Johnny pulled his head back in surprise. Lucky guess.

Jesuit education, I said.

Yes. I always forget that about you. I suppose that’s where you learned to bust my balls.

This was an expression that I had taught him, and one that he found so delightful he used it as often as he could, enunciating each syllable impeccably, and swapping chops for balls if he felt the context or the company demanded it. Brilliant language, American, he used to say. Vivid, flexible, truly democratic. Everything that’s best about this country is represented in its language. Do you know what my favorite word is? I waited while he basked in anticipation, a little too long: Johnny always did have a bad sense of timing. — Sure, he said at last. I love this word, he said. Sure.

He had a collection of idioms, which he deployed in the midst of his more formal diction. Kid was one, a word I doubt he ever spoke before he arrived in New York. Jerk was another; and once he told me that he’d been standing in line at a pizza parlor when an undergraduate ahead of him had loudly denounced his roommate, using a word that Johnny couldn’t bring himself to repeat. The man behind the counter had said, Hey! You kiss your mother with that mouth? He asked me what the question meant, I explained it to him, and he was awestruck. There isn’t a culture in the world that wouldn’t appreciate such a remark, he said.

He was contradictory, surprising: he could drink copiously, for example, though I only knew by counting: after five or six glasses his features softened slightly, but I never saw him lose his diction, let alone his judgment—nor, for that matter, did I ever see him with a hangover. He took no drugs at all and found the very idea peculiar. He had moved so often that he was constantly forced to restudy subjects that he’d already mastered, and had no opportunity to learn those he missed. As a result, he was unexpectedly knowledgeable about some things—architecture, for example—and shockingly ignorant of others. He was adept at numbers but hopeless at geometry, and unsure of the difference between an atom and a molecule. He could sing great swaths of opera, his right hand waving in teasing imitation of a conductor, but he couldn’t recognize a Rembrandt; he could recite Hölderlin from memory but had scarcely heard of Beckett. Somewhere he had acquired a detailed knowledge of the history of avionics (he could tell me which version of a 707 was flying overhead by the sound of its engine), but couldn’t distinguish between an El Dorado and a Volvo. Everything else was hit or miss. His father had worked as an adviser in Egypt under Nasser, but Johnny was unwelcome at the Western schools there and had found himself, instead, in a local private school, where classes were taught in English but students were required to memorize long suras from the Koran. He could still recite many of them, but more or less phonetically—his Arabic was poor—and he’d long since forgotten what they signified. It was an eccentric upbringing, he knew that. He once told me that he had experienced the Enlightenment in real time, as it were, that when he first studied it he reacted in much the same way as Europe had in the eighteenth century—all those hoary old metaphors, he said: a light turned on, a door opened, a road revealed. It was just like that, you see.

He was different from everyone else, black, brown, or white. I suspect anyone would seem different if they came under the kind of scrutiny Johnny is getting these days; and all friends are singular to those who knew and loved them; and time is a diopter, bringing some subjects into pin-sharp focus while leaving others blurred or lost behind a blind spot. But I hope these things I’m setting down will be useful for any future scholars who may find this whole horrific affair worth examining. — Context? Johnny would say, whenever someone accused him of lacking it. Context is overrated. Voltaire didn’t emerge from a context, he would continue, using the honed diction he brought out whenever he was being purposefully contrary. He was the context.

I knew that he didn’t believe this, quite; no scholar could. He was simply trying to vex people whose reasoning he found sloppy. In any case, here I am, and context is all I really have to offer. I’m trying to be careful, I am trying to be useful, but I can’t help but wonder if I’m doing it as well as he deserves.

The night we met Bridget, I was in the midst of ending an affair with another woman—or rather, she was ending it with me. It had been a month of angry tears, desperate coupling, rooms left behind. She was a bartender down on Houston, a small, blond, and somewhat unkempt woman who lived in a sad sterile apartment near Penn Station. From summer to November we’d been profoundly in love, and we expected to have fun forever. I don’t remember why she left me, but I remember that it felt deeply unfair at the time.

Winter was coming, the weather was mean, the streets were decked with trash, the sun went down before dinner. Then it was Thanksgiving break: the holiday meant nothing to Johnny, and my parents had gone to Maine to visit their own parents, so he and I spent several days drinking together in a tiny, pitch-dark bar on Broadway and 125th Street, underneath the elevated subway tracks. It’s no longer there, and I’m not sure if we knew the name of it even then. We called it Rusty’s because that was the owner’s name; he was a solid and slow man, Harlem born and bred, who poured shots with the parsimony of an elderly woman fishing in her change purse. Still, they only cost a dollar a throw, and we got drunk by the thimbleful, night after night. That winter it was my favorite place in the world.

Rusty was uncomfortable around Johnny; once, when I was in there alone he said, Where’s your biggity friend tonight? I shrugged, and when I mentioned the remark to Johnny, he laughed, with something too close to contempt for me to laugh along with him. Thereafter, he was as likely to recommend the place as I was. It was as if he had entered into some kind of silent battle with the other man—a standoff of sorts, that had been transformed over time into a little ritual, unchanging, forever unresolved, and somewhat comforting precisely because it was slightly irritating, like a pair of shoelaces that won’t stay tied. There was a trace of sadism on both sides that bothered me more than it bothered either of them.

We almost always went to Rusty’s, almost always sitting in one of the booths in the back room. And since one element of Johnny’s subtle torture of the other man was to walk in, say a cheerful hello, and then disappear for the rest of the night, I was usually the one who went to the bar to get the next round; and that was how I happened upon Bridget.

Her parents were divorced, and she hadn’t been able to decide whether to go to her father’s house or her mother’s for Thanksgiving, so she had chosen neither. But she’d only arrived at school a few months earlier, an undergraduate transfer from a state school in Northern California, and she didn’t have many close friends; the first few nights of the break she spent studying in her room, and then, on the Sunday before classes resumed, she decided to venture out on her own. How she found Rusty’s, I don’t know; it was on the very edge of the area around campus generally considered safe. Nor can I imagine the noise in her head that she must have needed to come in by herself; ordinarily, the only women who sat at the bar alone were either middle-aged alcoholics, younger drug addicts, or prostitutes of various ages; but even they had gone somewhere for the holiday. Bridget, I soon discovered, had a curious mixture of timidity and fearlessness—or rather, not a mixture, but a striation, like a cocktail: bitter girding the sweet. She could, for example, be absolutely stricken by the thought of having to go back to the store to return a defective lamp; but I once saw her approach Professor Youngerman, universally regarded as one of the most forbidding men on campus, and insist that he had completely misinterpreted a poem that he’d been teaching for nearly forty years, which had been written by a man, long since in his grave, who’d once been his mentor and had probably been his lover. — I can’t believe you did that, I said to her afterwards, and she laughed and said, I can’t believe it either.

When I first saw her at Rusty’s, she was sitting on a stool by herself, alone as alone can be, with a glass of something-and-soda in front of her, a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes beside it, and her bag in her lap. She was wearing a white leather coat over a pair of blue jeans that had become slightly frayed at the waist, revealing a pale inch of flesh, and she had long eyelashes, sleek dark hair, and a slight, ’60s-style overbite peeking out from between her berry-red lips. I assumed that she was waiting to meet someone, though she appeared to be settled in and wore an expression that suggested that, as far as she was concerned, nothing was going to change any time soon. I must have been looking at her with undisguised appetite, because she glanced at me, momentarily unsure whether to be flattered, amused, or annoyed, or if she should ignore me altogether. She settled for a sort of mild friendliness, ducking her head slightly to hook my gaze with a punitive smile. — My name’s Bridget, she said. — I’m Mike, I replied, though apparently indistinctly.

Happy Thanksgiving, she said, raising her drink slightly and then sipping at it through the straw.

That’s a great coat, I said.

Do you think so? she said. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or not, so I nodded. She said, You’re in school around here?

Tonight, I said, gesturing around Rusty’s, this is my school.

You’ll go far, she said, and turned away.

Then she turned toward me again and looked me up and down. — What is it? I asked her.

Nothing, she said.

I told her I was sitting in the back with a friend and invited her to join us, and she thought about it for a second and then said, I don’t know anything about you.

You know my name, I said. My friend’s name is Johnny; you’ll like him. You’ll like him more than you’ll like me. She didn’t answer. — Do you want me to leave you alone? She gestured to her drink and said, Let me think about it. Maybe I’ll come back when I’m done with this.

I went back to the booth, where Johnny sat reading the gossip page of a tabloid newspaper he’d found abandoned on the bench beside him. I wasn’t sure that Bridget was going to join us, so I didn’t say anything. At length, Johnny said, What’s a hoofer? A dancer, I said, and just then Bridget appeared, with a fresh drink in her hand and her bag slung over her shoulder. Johnny watched her approach with mild curiosity, and then did a take when she came up, pulled out a chair from the end of the booth, and sat down. — Hi, I’m Bridget, she said to him. I understand you’re very likable.

He looked at her, he looked at me, and he looked at her again. I don’t have an answer to that, he said.

Good, she said. I like you already.

We met at the bar, I said to Johnny.

I’m just a barfly, said Bridget. A floozy.

A what? said Johnny.

I like your accent, anyway, said Bridget. — A floozy. A woman of questionable character and judgment.

Floozy? said Johnny.

Johnny’s vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds tonight, I said.

It’s a real word, said Bridget. I like the way you say it. Say it again.

Floozy, said Johnny obediently.

There you go, said Bridget, and Johnny stared.

Some time later, we were talking about movies and musicals, and Johnny said, Mike can sing the entire score of . . . what’s the name of that movie again?

What movie? I said.

Bridget said, I thought your name was Ike.

Ike? I said, more startled than annoyed. Do I look like someone named Ike?

Yeah, actually, said Bridget. Yes, you do. Johnny laughed. Short for Isaac, she said. It’s a good name, dignified. Mike? I nodded and she sighed. OK, then. Mike.

Johnny looked at Bridget with admiration. Enough about him, he said. Now to you.

What do you mean?

Now we’re going to talk about you. Tell us how you wound up here tonight. Like many fundamentally kind people, Johnny had the unfortunate habit of coming across as peremptory just when he was trying his hardest to be expansive.

I don’t think so, said Bridget.

No, said Johnny, now aware that he’d said something wrong, but still unsure of what. I’m sorry. I certainly don’t mean to put you on the spot, I was simply wondering . . .

She gave him a cunning smile. Because a man can walk into a bar all by himself, just to have a drink, but if a woman does the same there must be something wrong with her, right? She must be crazy, or slutty, or so horrible that she has to drink alone.

Honestly, said Johnny. I didn’t mean that.

There was a long, difficult pause. . . . So which one is it? I said.

Which one what? said Bridget, turning on me.

Which one are you: crazy, slutty, or horrible?

She looked directly into my eyes, the conversation had gotten combative rather than clumsy, and that was much more interesting to her. Johnny flinched slightly, as if he thought she might physically attack me, but she just said, All three.

Now Johnny was even more uncomfortable; this form of double dare was unfamiliar to him, and what’s more, the lights had gone down and then up again, revealing Bridget and me on a certain stage, while he was trapped in the wings. I wish I could have explained to him why that had happened, but it wouldn’t have made much difference; Johnny was incapable of being anyone but Johnny, just as Bridget was incapable of being anyone but Bridget. And me? I was just incapable. I should have been the first one off the planet.

Bridget’s glass was empty. There was a cherry in the bottom that she hadn’t eaten. Why don’t you go buy me a drink? she said to me.

I stood obligingly. West Side Story, I said softly.

What?

Is the name of the musical. — I waited until I saw her smile and then I went to the bar.

By the time I returned, the two of them were having a respectable conversation about Sacramento, and I was happy to lean back in my chair and watch them, noting that every so often Bridget would glance my way, with an expression on her face that I couldn’t quite read: she might have been preparing to spit at me, or to unzip my pants, or it may just have been the way her look was made. But at the end of the night, when I realized that she lived near me, I was the one who walked her home, while Johnny, who lived on Riverside, separated from us a little ways down Broadway. As we left, his eyes flicked back and forth between Bridget and me just once, and then he looked away again, and the expression on his face registered a dismay that for a very long time I pretended not to see.

Walking home that night, Bridget and I passed through a series of Academic Zones, like climate stripes on the city: the Valley of Lawyers and Peacemaker Hill, Poetry Plaza, the Great House of Engineers, Medical Heights, Actors Row. I could feel the wind change as we came over a crest and looked down on a dormitory, inside of which were worlds within words within worlds. Bridget wanted to detour across the main campus, though it took us out of our way; the Walk was empty, as were the lawns in front of Butler; on the stairs leading up to Low Library there was a lone man huddled in a long, shabby coat, drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag. She shivered: I gave her my scarf—cashmere, black—hardly daring to look at her face as I tied it around her thin white throat. There was something about her that made me hesitate. She had a fierceness that I didn’t want to awaken; and a fragility that I didn’t want to trample upon; and a capacity for judgment that made me want to surprise her, if only by failing to confirm everything she thought she already knew about me. Moreover, I was still upset over the loss of my last girlfriend, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to start something new, and Bridget was not the sort of woman I would have treated carelessly.

We came to Amsterdam. She was telling me about a professor of hers, an Eastern European woman, apparently a recent refugee, who nevertheless taught a dense political theory course that promoted the very communism from which she’d run. (As I write this, I find myself surprised by the memory of communist countries: Bridget, they are gone, all gone, documents and dust.) The professor, she said, was a mystery; her students liked to speculate on her story, imagining feverish tales of tragic suffering, but no one had the temerity to ask her, nor would there have been an opportunity even if they had, for the woman had developed a peculiar lecturing style: she arrived in the hall where she taught exactly on the hour, read aloud from a prepared text for precisely sixty minutes, and then quickly scurried away; and her office, despite its posted hours, was almost always locked. Bridget had heard that she couldn’t really speak English at all, that the entire exercise was a charade of sorts, that they might just as well have had one of the graduate students stand up there and read the woman’s notes. I should have dropped it when I had the chance, she said. Now it’s too late.

By then we’d reached the corner of Amsterdam and 110th Street, the crossroads empty, eight lanes of traffic and not a car to be seen, the light turning from yellow to red uselessly, pointlessly, and with a slightly uncanny effect; it was like walking into a dead man’s house and finding the television still on. Bridget said, Ohhhh, this city really scares me sometimes. I said nothing, because I was enjoying the feeling of emptiness, the blocks abandoned but for we two; she took my silence as a rebuke and said, Sorry.

Sorry for what? I said. She didn’t answer, so there we stood, both of us thinking about her, until the light turned green again and we crossed. There was a panel truck on the southwest corner of 109th Street, passing out dinners, as late as the hour was, to a small line of ragged shadows. Bridget was unhappy to see them, I could tell, but I didn’t know why—because she should have been helping; because she could easily have been one of the beggars of New York and might yet be; because winter’s abrasions were time-keeping on her sensitive California skin. When we reached the corner of 107th, she said, How long have you known Johnny?

About a year.

She pulled her white leather coat tighter against the cold and retied my scarf. I wouldn’t have thought of the two of you as obvious friends. I shrugged: what she meant, of course, was that she was wondering if I could be redeemed. I couldn’t help her there. I was exactly the man I appeared to be.

She shook her head in a gesture of wry disbelief at the way the night was carrying her along. Bridget had a kind of clairvoyance, which visited her from time to time and told her exactly what the future held for her. She could be extraordinarily impatient, temperamental, and rash, but she was touched by an implacable foresight, I’m quite sure of that. I know because she hated it, and that kind of gift is always bestowed on those who know least what to make of it, who resent it and defy it—which is how you end up in the belly of a whale, or fighting angels in the middle of the desert, or wasting away in a room at St. Vincent’s, in a city that absorbs love endlessly but only gives it back as corruption. As for me, I knew very little then. You were just a baby, my wife says, and I suppose I was, though you couldn’t have told me that at the time. What I saw was the tiny tilt of Bridget’s head; what I didn’t see was that she was listening to the prophets who followed her around, shouting: they were telling how it was going to go, perhaps not in all its details, but the hue and tone of it—enough, in any case, to make her want to walk right through me.

I asked her what she was doing the next day, and she said, I’ve got my job tomorrow. The placement office got it for me, arranging the archives of—and here she mentioned a name that I didn’t recognize and to this day can’t remember. He’s a playwright, she said. Lives in that enormous apartment building down in the 70s, she said. A famous old building, what’s its name . . .

The Dakota? I said. A streetlight overhead blinked off, stayed dark for a few seconds, and then blinked on again. She shook her head. Not that one, she said. The other one with the name. It’s on Broadway. It’s got a big gate. — Oh, you know what I’m talking about, it’s a big, fancy place. It’s right there, between 73rd and 74th Street. Babe Ruth used to live there. And what’s his name, the opera singer . . .

The Ansonia? I said.

That’s the one. He’s got two apartments in there, actually, one where he lives and one where he works. He has me going through all his private papers, I don’t know. A taxi pulled over at the corner, and a man in a long coat got out of the back, ran into a bodega, emerged again a few seconds later and jumped back into the cab. I thought people like that had all sorts of secrets, said Bridget. And I guess he does, but he’s not trying to keep them from me.

So . . . ? I said, and when she didn’t answer: Have you come across anything shocking?

She shook her head. No, that’s the thing, she said. Other people’s secrets, I think that’s what I’m learning. They don’t mean very much. She shivered, and we started walking down 107th, back toward Broadway. We were about halfway up the block when she stopped and turned. I wasn’t sure why. I’m right here, she said, pointing over her shoulder. The building with the broken window in the doorway. Where are you?

We passed it a few blocks back, I said.

You’re walking me to my door. I nodded and she hesitated, trying to decide whether that made me a good man or one on the make, and in any case what the difference was and which she preferred. She cocked her head and frowned. At the top of her stoop there was a metal door with a thick pane of reinforced glass, which nevertheless had a silvery crack running through it, glowing from the gun-blue light of the fluorescent bulb in the hallway behind. It must have taken considerable force to do that kind of damage, a baseball bat or a metal pipe; I was hoping it wasn’t somebody’s head. There was such mystery to violence, arising suddenly and then retreating again, leaving nothing behind but something broken, and no way of knowing how it happened, no one to ask. Bridget was silent, and I turned. She was looking at me but she didn’t say anything.

We’re snowing, I said.

She didn’t move, but she winced slightly. Say that again.

We’re snowing, you and me.

We stood there, the two of us, and looked at each other, without touching, without moving; it wasn’t a stare-down, exactly, there was no aggression in it, but neither was it simply curiosity. It was a kind of mutual appeal, and it seemed to last a very long time, though it might have been just a second, or less than that—a brief hold placed on the winter city, the girl with the breath of a smile on her face. Then her smile broadened, and with dazzling purity she quickly rose up on her toes, kissed my cheek, then turned and walked up the half dozen stairs into the vestibule of her apartment building, fetching her keys from her bag and vanishing through the door, leaving me alone on the street, listening to the cold noises along the block. When I got home that night the apartment was dark, the wind was whistling through the window frames, a poltergeist had taken up in the radiator and was cheerfully banging away. I fell asleep in front of Channel 13, and woke at noon the next day with the television still on and a blue-white wind blowing all across Manhattan.

At the time I was living in a tiny two-room apartment with very high ceilings, the result of a larger apartment that had been subdivided and then subdivided again. The larger of the rooms was circumscribed at the top by a simple molding, but the walls had been painted over so many times that they had a rubbery feel to them. My roommate was a man named Dominic who was studying dance at Juilliard, and who despised his fellow students so much that he’d refused to live with any of them and had posted a notice on the Columbia campus instead. I seldom saw him: he spent ten hours a day in classes, rehearsals, and practice, and most of the night I don’t know where, returning, when he returned at all, just before dawn, when he would slip quietly into his own room, leaving, as evidence that he was there, a pair of worn, ankle-high black Italian boots that he invariably positioned just inside the front door.

He didn’t sleep very much, not that I saw, though he had finder’s rights to the apartment’s single bedroom; I slept on a convertible couch in the living room, which as often as not I kept unfolded. Every so often I would cross paths with him, usually in the evenings before he went out, and we would sit in the apartment with glasses of gin and tonic while he tried to sell me his philosophy of love, telling me stories of his encounters with other men, which he had, by design, everywhere but at home. In fact, he once told me, he’d never had sex in a bed—or maybe just not in his own, I don’t remember. I couldn’t, he explained. I just couldn’t. All those sheets and things, all that softness, all so clean . . . Who decided that a bed, of all places, was a turn-on? Beds are for dying. A bed is just a grave above ground.

I regarded him with the same mixture of curiosity and amusement with which he regarded me. He was no better at living his life than anyone else I knew, though he was no worse, either: soon after moving to the city he had fallen in love for the first time, with the assistant in a Midtown art gallery who was older than he was by three years, to the day. We had the same birthday, he told me, with something like wonder, as if it were enough to indicate that heaven itself had lent a crystal dome to house their affair. They’d spent a perfect month together, and then the other man had panicked and decided that he wasn’t gay after all, which sent Dominic into two years of misery that had just recently started to lift. Some months previously, I’d found his flyer tacked to a board on the first floor of Philosophy Hall, met him for coffee somewhere on Broadway at two in the morning, passed whatever careless test he had for roommates, and moved in.

I thought of Bridget over the following weeks. What was it? Why? She was very pretty, with her pale skin and her savage little mouth. I wanted to kiss her all the time. But we were in New York, and there were pretty girls everywhere, reading in the libraries, dancing at parties, walking through Riverside Park, sitting together at the far end of a subway car. Bridget did more than shine. There was a density to her, a gravity. She always seemed to be standing with her back to a corner, even when she wasn’t, because the corner was her territory. There were girls I saw regularly on campus, bright things shuffled regularly into view by the gears of days, lovely creatures I would never meet. Such days! One evening in mid-December, the girl who’d left me called—Just to say hello, she said sadly, which led to another week of talking, fighting, and one night in bed that was prefixed by talking and suffixed by fighting. She was, I realized a bit too late, one of those women who try to elevate a perfectly amiable disposition coupled with no great character into an almost maniacal innocence, willing to admit to weakness but never to malice, and wanting only to be despoiled. It was my first encounter with that sort of thing, and the whole matter kept me too busy and too unhappy to talk to anyone else at all, so I didn’t see Johnny until final exams and the Christmas break were upon us. I remember meeting him a few times during those dark and dwindling weeks, once for coffee to argue about history and once for a drink, when the semester was finally over; and then he left the country—to Paris, I believe.

It was an especially cold winter, infamously so: almost every day the tabloids ran headlines about the disruptions caused by the so-called Ontario Front: services suspended, subways iced to the tracks in dark tunnels, people who froze to death in their own apartments when the heat went out in the middle of the night. And there was the mayor, by turns clownishly posing (snow shovel, snowman, snow fort, snowshoes) and solemnly swearing that his administration was doing everything it could. The weather even put Dominic out of commission for a few weeks: it was too cold to fuck anyone, he said, so he took a Greyhound bus down to Florida (though he later told me he only made it as far as Charleston, where he met the son of a Baptist minister in a gas station bathroom). I went to my parents’ home on Christmas Eve and, despite my mother’s protestations, returned to my own apartment late on Christmas Day.

I’d expected to be alone, I had some research to do on Cicero’s exilic years, and how better to hide from the weather? But my reading ran out at the end of the year, or anyway my interest did. I found myself unable to concentrate, and ended up alone and home, ignoring a pile of books that had frozen along with everything else. The telephone never rang. Outside, the wind blew, the sky was opaque, the sun was too weak to do more than dodder down. There were days of amazement, when the entire city was formed from a single dark crystal, all sharp cold edges and hidden crevasses; days of abandonment, almost too empty to be endured; and days of dread, for at the age of twenty-three I felt that I was growing old, and I could see the next half-century standing before me like a wall, as if the calendar, too, had seized up from the cold.

On New Year’s Eve I found a party through a friend from high school, and woke up on New Year’s Day with a woman named Liz, who had black bangs, blue eyes, and dimpled knuckles, and who had never before slept with a man she’d just met. She didn’t tell me her last name, and she slipped out while I was in the shower, leaving nothing behind but a cherry lipstick kiss on my mirror. I never saw her again. Did she make it this far? She was the kind who would; I hope she did. She was sweet to me for a couple of hours, and I remember those things with an unfair fondness, the way a child remembers a single bestowed candy more vividly than years of nourishing meals. On my deathbed, will she come back to me and tell me who I was? She was wetter that night than any woman I’d ever encountered, and once, when I was inside her but not moving, she laughed at something I said, and I could feel her slippery walls rhythmically contracting. I hope she wasn’t lonely for long, and only sad when it suited her. I hope her children have children, and stay warm and well-fed.

A few days after New Year’s I saw Bridget again; it wasn’t an accident. There was something I wanted from her, I couldn’t easily describe what it was. I felt no special heart-quickening or desire, no sense that having her would bring any bliss or station. It wasn’t sex, though it was something like it. A man leaves home because of a famine.

I came up with a few excuses to walk by her building, but it was too cold to linger outside. Classes hadn’t started yet, and the campus was empty. I stopped by Rusty’s one night and asked him if he’d seen the white girl in the white coat, but he had no idea who I was talking about. By January 6th I was getting frustrated: Was it really so hard to find one girl in one city? In my city? I knew where the Ansonia was, but I didn’t know how often she worked there, or whether she was working at all over the break. Still, I had plenty of time, and besides, wouldn’t Cicero sound sterling in a coffee shop? He was a man of the world. So for a few days I took a small stack of books to a Chock Full o’Nuts down on 74th Street, where I sat at the counter by the window, drinking coffee after coffee and looking out on the street every so often, just to see if Bridget would pass. She didn’t, but everyone else did: elderly women in rich black coats and fine leather gloves, with shopping bags dripping from their fingers; academics without portfolio, middle-aged and invariably wearing eyeglasses with black plastic frames; aging beatniks twenty years out of the Village but still carrying themselves as if they half-expected to be jumped and beaten, and Spanish boys in groups of two or three who postured as if they were half-ready to jump them; beefy delivery men, ballet dancers on their way down to Lincoln Center, and once, a towering transvestite in a rainbow-dyed fake fur coat, who marched to the corner and flagged a cab with an enormous, ring-bedecked hand. Then, late one snowy afternoon on the third or fourth day, I raised my gaze just long enough to see Bridget pass, wearing a dark green suede jacket over a thick black sweater, neither hat nor gloves, nor my scarf, either, and her shoulders hunched against the wind. She always knew how to dress, but she never knew how to take care of herself.

I knocked on the window, startling the elderly man sitting a few feet down the counter from me, but by then she’d passed and she didn’t hear me, so I flew to the door and dashed out onto the sidewalk in my shirtsleeves, calling her, Bridget. At first she ignored me, as if I was some street person who wanted to harass her and just happened to know her name; and then she whipped around, a scowl on her half-declined face. — What! she said, blinking angrily into the wind. It’s me, it’s Mike. Her expression didn’t change; I pressed on. We met over Thanksgiving in a bar uptown. I walked you home. She was hopping up and down, she stopped to tuck back a lock of hair that had been dislodged, then softened. Oh, she said. Yeah. I thought . . . One thing I hate about this city is people constantly interrupting you when you’re trying to just walk down the street. She lowered her head farther into the collar of her sweater and looked at me; I had left my coat inside and I was shivering uncontrollably. Never mind. What are you doing out here, dressed like that? she said, looking over my shoulder to see where I might have come from. You’re insane.

I was having a cup of coffee, I said, or tried to, anyway: I could barely get the words out, I had the jaw of a ventriloquist’s dummy, dropping, clenching, clattering. Museum, I said, or something like that: whatever it was, it was a lie.

You’re walking around dressed like that?

No, no, no, I said. I stopped here—I twisted on my feet to show her—to have a cup of coffee and saw you walking by.

You better get back inside, she said.

I said, Why don’t you come join me? and she hesitated, but she didn’t have much time to think about it, hostage to my cold suffering. OK, she said, and then turned and walked into the place ahead of me, as if she’d been waiting there for me, rather than vice versa. Later, when we were a couple and people would ask us how we met, she would say, I took pity on him.

There was that flurry before she settled, finding a place for her bag, removing her coat to reveal a sweater so threadbare that I could see a white T-shirt through its distended weave, then she looked up at the counter to see if she wanted to order something, and if so what, and then she looked around the room to see who else was there, if there was anyone she knew or anyone interesting. There wasn’t: there was me. By the time she settled, her cheeks had pink rosettes from their thaw, and she was sniffling girlishly. What did you say about a museum? she said. Natural History, I said, it’s just over there. But the walk back to the subway was so cold that I stopped here for a cup of coffee. Then I saw you walk by . . .

She believed me, and she seemed happy to see me. I asked her if she’d gone home for Christmas, and she said she had, but just for a few days, because the playwright had told her that he needed her and had offered to pay her airfare back. — I had no problem with that, believe me, she said. A few days is about as much as I can take out there. But this cold. I mean, God.

She’d ordered a cup of hot chocolate, but the first sip burned her tongue and she put it down. A single pane of glass divided the two of us from a harsh world; outside, everyone was the same person, because they weren’t her or me. I asked her about the playwright, and she told me that she hadn’t known anything when she’d first taken the job: she didn’t know his work, didn’t know much about theater, really, and couldn’t say she cared. But she thought it would be interesting to see how rich people, successful people lived—whether it was like it was in movies, all perfumed furs and fast talk. Broadway, she said, gesturing at the street. I wanted to see what someone had made of it. She paused and giggled, flashing a glimpse of her glamorous pink tongue. But he’s not at all what I expected. He’s perfectly nice, she said. He’s . . . very well-mannered. He’s been married to the same woman for forty years. I think one of his sons has been in a mental hospital, but I’m not sure.

She was wearing a slender silver chain around her neck; she reached up and caught it in the crook of her index finger, twisting it slightly so that it tightened against the flesh of her throat.

What about his plays? I said.

What about them?

What are they like?

She looked embarrassed. I still haven’t read them, she said. She shifted in her seat. Did you ever do anything like that?

Anything like what?

Anything artistic. Write poetry, paint paintings. Paint paintings, she said again. Poet poetry. Sing songs.

I shook my head. I played violin in my high school orchestra, I said. Does that count?

That counts, she said. She had resumed her hot chocolate by running her index finger along the edge of the cup and then licking the tip. Why did you stop?

I’m left-handed, I said and held up my left hand as proof. She looked at my palm as if she expected to see something written on it, and then made a questioning face. You can’t really go far if you’re a lefty, I said. Conductors don’t like it because it destroys the symmetry; other players don’t like it because you’re constantly banging into them.

She was offended on my behalf. That’s not fair.

I shrugged and dropped my hand to the table. Fair or not, I was out by the end of ninth grade. It was probably just as well, because starting in tenth grade you got molested by the music teacher. Outside, a gust of wind blew a parking sign so hard that the pole swayed back and forth. She was staring at the air where my hand had been. What? I said.

I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that there are high schools that have orchestras. She snorted softly. Mine had a football team, that was about it. The edge of her nostril was glistening, and she rubbed it with the wrist of her sweater. An elderly black man shuffled into the coffee shop, slowly enough that the door remained open for a few seconds, and Bridget shivered. The overcast afternoon was quickly turning into an overcast evening. A couple walking by outside glanced at us simultaneously, she from over a wool scarf, he from beneath a tall black fur hat. Bridget cocked her head at me. How old are you? she said.

Me?

You, she said.

I’m twenty-three, I said.

I’m already twenty-four. I’m older than you. Do you want to know why?

Because you were born a year before me? I said, and she glared at me briefly.

Why I’m still an undergraduate, she said. But now I’m not going to tell you.

One of the prerogatives of middle children is a cheerful ignorance about years: I’ve never been very good at guessing people’s ages or recognizing the protocols they call for. Johnny, for example, might have been two or three years younger than me, or four years older than me. I didn’t know: I still don’t. But Bridget abruptly stood up and said, Let’s go somewhere, little boy, and immediately I felt like just that: clumsy and uncertain. She smiled more broadly, allowing the tip of her tongue to slip between her teeth, turned happily and collected her bag from the back of her chair, and then turned back to study me. You’re strange, I like that about you. Tell me what you’re thinking about, right now, she said.

I was thinking about her ass; I didn’t say anything, and she knew exactly what I was thinking about. She gave me a snarling kind of smile. I wanted to play with her—together with her, I mean. For a moment her face went absolutely blank, then she said, Let’s go somewhere.

Where to?

Let’s go downtown, she said. Or, let’s go to the Plaza Hotel bar, I don’t know. Anywhere that isn’t the Upper West Side. I just got paid, she said. Come on.

Sex in those days was dirty and funny, and often confused and badly executed, but always with its own jalopy beauty: drunken kisses, wrong names, ringing ears, torn underthings, the honey’d middle of the night, a cigarette left so long on the edge of a bedside table that it burned a black streak into the wood before dying. It was a harmless rehearsal, though no one had any idea what the main event would be, nor how we would arrive there, whether in a chariot or barefoot. In another age, it might have taken weeks before Bridget and I grew comfortable enough with each other to sleep together, and it’s possible that we never would have. Instead, she turned to me, in the bar on Avenue A where we ended up that night. She was nervous and she said, Oh, well . . . and she kissed me.

I’d like to be able to say that when we crossed the threshold into my apartment, later that night, the stars hushed in the sky and the city itself sighed in satisfaction. It wasn’t so. Instead we were nervous, as one: mumbled words, inelegant moves, mismatched glances, and once she accidentally elbowed me in the throat, hard enough that I spent a minute trying to catch my breath. She was using a half-empty beer can by the side of the bed as an ashtray; there was another one, just like it, on the opposite night table, and at one point I sipped from the wrong one and choked in disgust. What saved us was a simultaneous burst of idiot laughter, brought on by the sound of my next-door neighbors having a bout of their own sex, silent but for the rhythmic thumping of their headboard against the wall we shared. Bridget rolled off me, trailing giggles; then she rubbed her nose and promptly fell asleep, with her hand over her belly, snoring softly.

When I woke, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, fully clothed, looking at me. It was the middle of the morning. I have to go, I have a class, she said. I left my number on the kitchen counter. She looked sad for a second, and then she was gone.

I could smell her on my skin all that day, on my fingers, on my lips; I could smell her hair and taste her breath, half ghost and half drug, an omnibus of flowers and resin. I called her that afternoon, and we spent the following night together and almost every night thereafter. There was no reason not to; we just wanted to be together, in bed. I was in love with her tongue. Her sweat was like a teenager’s, sometimes sweet and sometimes rank, strawlike on her forehead, thin and salty at her neck, with an almost herbal, medicinal feel to it, like witch hazel; sugary on her breasts, and by the time my mouth had reached her belly, it had thickened enough to add a translucent pink sheen to her blue-white skin. Her goo—that was what she called it—was as fresh as seaweed; I liked to smooth it along the skin of her thighs, tracing the faint map of her blue veins, drawing nonsense and invisible smut. What was that? she said. — A dandelion. She turned her head, not to watch what I was doing but to look me in the eyes. What’s that? — Those are my initials. — Why? — Shhh. Later, she told me that she hadn’t expected me to call her at all. I thought you were one of those men, she said. I’m not one of those men, I said. — I thought you were. I thought you were one of them. I’m not, I said. I know, she said. I thought you were.

We hid inside through the blossoming spring. It was easy; no one cared. Bridget had her own friends, of course, but she didn’t seem to be especially close to them. I can picture one or two of them, though I think there were five or six in their little group. They were a miscellaneous bunch, thrown together as much by circumstance as by affinity; I gathered they had all arrived at Barnard at the same time, had been put through some kind of orientation together, and may even have shared housing for a semester. On the few occasions that we all got together—dinner at a Chinese restaurant on the last day of midterms, a birthday party in someone’s tiny, dim apartment, with warm beer and homemade curtains on the windows—they were polite and somewhat distant, and in retrospect they’ve all blurred together like background extras, but for two. One was a transfer from somewhere down South, who’d once complained to Bridget that no one on campus took her seriously because her accent was so pronounced. The other was a Jewish girl from the Upper East Side, hardworking, sensible, with an intense but placid gaze. Her name was Stephanie, and she made a point of not speaking to me, though once, for no reason that I could see, she produced a small camera out of nowhere and took my picture. I thought she was jealous, though not of Bridget: of me.

It was some time before I figured out how she ended up an undergraduate at the age of twenty-four; she was vulnerable on the subject and I never asked her directly. All I knew, at first, was that she had transferred in from a state campus in California, where she’d been so unhappy that she’d dropped out. In time, she told me that she hadn’t been convinced that she needed to go to college at all, and instead spent a few years waitressing in San Diego; then she changed her mind—in fact, and typically, reversed course—and began applying to the best schools she could think of, starting with Amherst and proceeding in alphabetical order until she ran out of money for the application fees. She arrived in New York with enough credits to consider it her sophomore year, which meant that she was supposed to choose a major, but she was finding it difficult to decide on one. She had come intending to study comparative religion, but she quickly soured on that. She’d tried philosophy next, and that animated her for a little while. She found the questions it raised fascinating, but in time—and time for Bridget meant a few weeks—she grew frustrated. The classrooms were too full of argumentative young men, she said, and the professors were impossibly irascible, and spent all their time considering ludicrous beliefs, only to dismiss them for ludicrous reasons.

Despite her difficulty settling into a discipline, she thought of the university as a refuge; she’d worked hard to get there, and it served as an escape from everything that she wanted to leave behind—the parochialism of California, the anonymous concrete-and-sunshine of the school she’d attended previously, the disruptions and unhappiness in her family—her parents had been too busy, first with their affairs and then with their divorce, to pay more than perfunctory attention to her, nor had her teachers prepared her for life beyond the town she lived in. Only a small portion of the students in her high school graduating class had gone on to college, and most of those went to study business. To me, academia was familiar enough, if not entirely satisfying; and over the course of his life Johnny had attended a dozen estimable schools on two or three continents, and had become so adaptable that he treated a new campus the way he would treat a new airport: as long as he could find a decent cup of coffee, he was fine. But most of what Bridget knew she’d taught herself. In many ways her curiosity was purer than mine, but she always felt she was missing some essential foundation or set of skills. She felt clumsy and made up for it with daring, but it wasn’t always enough. If she got a mediocre grade on a paper or lost her way through a reading list, she would mope about for days, while I tried to reassure her; then she would grow angry with me, either because she found it patronizing—an unpardonable sin, for which she was ever on the lookout—or because she had become comfortable with her insecurities, and resented the possibility that they might be taken from her. I preferred anger to despond, but I never did learn how to avoid one or the other.

I saw Johnny less and less frequently, not just because I was spending time with Bridget but because he’d taken a research position with a prominent economist, a significant appointment, especially for someone as young as he was, which took up as much time as he had for it. We tried to meet for coffee every Wednesday afternoon, but often enough one of us couldn’t make it, because Bridget had something she wanted to do, a show in a museum, a neighborhood to explore, or because Johnny had an unexpected deadline. When we did manage to get together he was distant and distracted. He was finishing up his coursework; I had a year left, myself, and I was already beginning to lose interest in it, but I missed his company. Occasionally, Bridget and I would meet up with him together, to attend a lecture or go to a movie, and once to go downtown to a gallery opening she’d heard about. Sometimes she would come collect me from Rusty’s, where he and I still went about once a month, and sit with her knee touching mine under the table while we joked about school, about politicians and criminals, and rehearsed the latest madness, fires on the subway tracks, a cornice that fell off an East Side building and killed an elderly woman who was in the back seat of a taxi below, a string of murders in the West Village, packs of wild dogs prowling around the abandoned financial district late at night. These were the companions of our conversations as the city lifted toward summer.

When the school year ended, Bridget and I decided to live together, and we found a small apartment up on Claremont Avenue. It was easy, we had very little to move, and Dominic was indifferent to whether I stayed or left. The new place was on the third floor of a walk-up on the north end of the street, where the elegant apartments for visiting professors gave way to tenements and overflowing trash cans on the sidewalk. It was June and we left the windows open, a pair of multicolored, ’50s-style curtains blowing ever inward on the noise from the street outside. We didn’t do much, aside from playing house. Her internship had ended, and she was picking up shifts at a Russian restaurant down on Amsterdam, one of those places that’s on deathwatch from the day it opens, where half the tables are empty, the maître d’ is by turns forlorn and agitated, and the liquor stock is slowly bled dry by the waiters after hours. I was working in a used bookstore on Broadway, midway between Columbia’s campus and the Upper West Side. Together we made next to nothing, and spent it all on next to nothing: breakfast specials at a Cuban-Chinese place on Broadway, used cassette tapes of salsa music, paperbacks, subway tokens, forty-watt light bulbs and bottles of vermouth. One night she came home with an enormous jar of caviar that she’d stolen from the walk-in at the restaurant where she worked. — There are about a dozen of them in there, she said. No one ever orders any: they’re just going to go bad. We had to raid the change we saved for laundry day to pay the electric bill, but for a month or so we had caviar with almost every meal, until we became so sick of the stuff she began to put it out in little dishes for the stray cats that lived in the basement.

I had never lived with a woman before, and Bridget had never lived with a man. Each little morsel of domesticity was a discovery: showering together, learning each other’s languors, taking phone messages, brushing her hair. She had never seen a styptic pencil, found it fascinating and impressive, and immediately began using it after she’d shaved her legs. There was one night when she decided to bake a banana bread. Baking! I don’t think I’d ever turned on an oven in my life, and now look: my experiences were doubling by the day. In the next room the television was tuned to a news report about an Indonesian separatist group that had hijacked an Australian cruise ship. What are we doing Sunday? she said. It was Thursday. Nothing, I said. I waited for her to explain why she asked, but instead she rapped an egg against the rim of a glass bowl, then peered in and fished out a fragment of the shell with her fingertip. She opened a drawer at her hip. Where’s the whisk?

I wasn’t sure what a whisk was. They’re going to kill someone on that boat, I said.

On which boat? I gestured to the television, where there was a long, blurry telephoto shot of two men on the bridge of the cruise ship, waving automatic rifles in the air. What do they want? Bridget said.

Some prisoners released, I said.

In Australia?

No, I said. In Indonesia. I’m not sure if the cruise ship was just in the wrong place at the wrong time or if there’s some reason Indonesians are pissed off at Australia. A silence. Johnny would know, I said. He keeps track of these things. Another silence.

He’s not Indonesian, she said.

He’s not? I replied, but she missed the sarcasm in my voice.

No, she said. Jesus.

I was going to point out to her that Johnny kept up, ferociously, with most of the world’s injustices and injuries, that it was both his vocation and his habit to do so, and that he had no doubt seen this coming from a considerable distance. Instead I went back to watching the television and said nothing. Do we have cinnamon? she said at last. I doubt it, I said, and got up to help her look; and when it became clear we didn’t, she sent me down to the bodega on the corner. In the hallway I listened to the chirp of a smoke detector with a dead battery. In the elevator I read the elevator inspection certificate for the thousandth time, and I still remember the inspector’s name—T. D’Alessandro—and his signature, as familiar as Picasso’s. The bodega that sold food had no cinnamon, so I tried the one that sold dope, though they had nothing in the window but a few bottles of laundry detergent and a line of botanica candles. The man behind the plexiglass was as wide as a refrigerator; his arms stuck out at his sides. He leaned back a little bit when I walked in. — I’m not a cop, I said before he had a chance to ask. I live upstairs. The shelves behind him were almost entirely bare, though there were a few cartons of cigarettes stacked on one side. He leaned back a little farther. Do you have any cinnamon? He squinted a little bit. My girlfriend is making a banana bread.

Cinnamon, he said, and I said, The spice. The actual . . . spice.

He rose from his seat and disappeared into a back room, while I wondered if he knew what I meant or if he was going to come back with a gram of coke, or a gun, or if he’d simply left me there to realize that he couldn’t help me, and wouldn’t have wanted to even if he could. A few moments later he was back with a little plastic bag in the meat of his hand; he studied it briefly and then pushed it through the slot; I put it in my pocket without looking at it myself. Three bucks, he said. I thought it was little enough to pay, and if I was wrong, Bridget and I could always get high, so I pushed three singles into the tray below the plexiglass, thanked him, and left, looking straight ahead as I crossed the street, possessed as I had always been by the superstition that if you don’t look at anyone, no one will suspect you, and waiting to fish the baggie out and open it until I was back inside my apartment building. Collected along the seal at the bottom there were a few teaspoons of a reddish brown power: I smelled it carefully. It was cinnamon.

When I walked into the apartment, Bridget was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, cradling a yellow bowl filled with tan batter. I told her about my little adventure, holding the baggie up as if I’d brought it back from a long sea journey. She laughed in her goofy, sudden way, then she looked down at the bowl. On the television, a newscaster was saying something about a deployment of special forces from the Australian navy who had stormed the cruise ship. There were ten dead, twelve dead. She glanced at the TV for a second and then said, Vanilla.

I stared at her: she stared back at me, mirroring my question, and then her eyes widened mockingly. She dipped her index finger in the bowl of batter and held it up to me, and now I really was confused. You’re an idiot, she said, and she laughed again. She was a tattered and feral kitten, scampering through the ruins of a private palace. Vanilla, not cinnamon, she said. I sent you out for vanilla.

An apostrophe on Bridget’s ass, curved as all good things are. The eye seeks its isomorph in the world, and finds its deepest satisfaction when it succeeds. Cities have been built upon a dimple, and destroyed for the love of a navel. Handwriting, the smoke from a cigarette, the arc of a baseball in the blue sky; the slope of a wave, the billow of a sheet, the spring in a watch. I once knew an architect who kept a set of silver French curves in a wooden display case in his office. He claimed that they were reminders of his student days, but I always suspected, by the look in his eye whenever his gaze fell on their neat little shell-shapes and languorous bends, that they served as a kind of abstract pornography. Bridget’s ass was the white disk of a full moon, the finest calligraphic D, a stone polished by a thousand years of river, the hollow on the bottom of a bottle of wine, the cheek of a plum. She was not a tall woman, but her butt was high; it made her look like she was up on her toes. There was a faint indentation at the very base of her spine, nestled within the muscles of her lower back; below that there was a small, flat channel, and then the flesh began to gently swell and split, forming a palmable, pink-white globe with a gentle depression on either side, and a gratuitous upward curve at the bottom, which arced inwards for a few degrees before yielding to the back of her thighs. The whole was wonderfully allusive, almost expressive: impertinent and slightly insolent, more buttock than bottom and more rump than either, a delight, an ode, a dollop, evidence of an art in her creation. I used to try and linger in bed for a few moments in the morning so I could watch her walk to the bathroom, ass in underwear if the room was cold or she was feeling modest, naked in the summer or when she was feeling careless. I would say to myself: I can touch that. It was like having a Cellini on the kitchen table.

In moments when I felt anxious, overworked, worried, or just bored, I liked to slip my hand into the rear pocket of her jeans, just to touch her there, the way children touch their stuffed animals, or Catholics their rosaries. Forward, to our apartment, forward to our bed, where I once grabbed her ass so hard that I left bruises. — Look, she said afterwards, twisting around so that we could examine the fading purplish marks together. She sulked theatrically: You did that. She met my eyes and I didn’t know what to say, until she laughed wickedly. You’re a brute, she said, and then she laughed again.

But we both were: beastly children, with no money but all the time in the world, living on a large and generally unmade bed. We treated each other terribly and enjoyed ourselves enormously, laughing at our own gluttony, our selfishness and cruelty. I used to stand her up against a wall and raise my knee just enough to press it between her legs, opening her up until she spilled, rain on a dirt yard. I learned to pull her hair in bed, to spank the inside of her thighs until they were red and burning. I liked to frustrate her almost as much as she liked to be frustrated. She could never mask her excitement, nor hide the aim of its ascent, and I would pull out and pull back just as she was about to come, while she grabbed at me and swore. Then we would start again, with twice the rage and ardor, and if I was feeling strong I’d deny her again, and maybe one more time, until she held her arms around me so tightly I couldn’t get away, and used me to get under-over. She would bite my lip, my cheek, my neck; she didn’t apologize and I didn’t mind. Once, while sitting astride me, she commanded me to open my mouth, and when I complied she pursed her lips and slowly drooled onto my tongue; I think she sharpened her nails, the better to engrave my skin. I never felt it while it was happening, but one morning, I noticed that I had scratches all over: on my arms, on my neck, my torso, and what looked like a bite mark on my leg. When she came it was like the backdraft in a house fire, she sucked everything into herself: desire, rage, affection, fear, need, joy, disgust, along with that thread of knotted quicksilver that she pulled out of me. All of this she held for as long as she could, and then let it out with gritted teeth and a howl of relief that began so low in her throat that it sounded, at the beginning, like a complaint; and her eyes widened and her thighs shook, and one of her hands would wrap around the muscles in my neck and hold on tight. Her sternum would flush and she’d bend up and look down at our hips as if they were catching on fire. If we’d drunk wine, which we often had, I could smell the change on her breath as she neared it, like an extra fermentation inside her, boiling until it flashed, and I would have sworn that she gave off light—not a glow but a burst, painful and bright. I had never seen anything like it, she didn’t whimper or cry out, she gave birth to a blood-red star, and when she was done she would put her weak fingers on my hip and say, Stop . . . stop . . . stop. Then we’d both laugh, as if we’d just parachuted into the ocean. Oh, we were happy, fucking angrily and fighting affectionately.

Bridget was contrary, Bridget was difficult; she was fragile and intricately made, and therefore often angry, and just as often tender. If I agreed with her on some point of art or fact she thought I was playing her; if I laughed at one of her jokes she would sometimes regard me with suspicion; if I was enthusiastic about a plan she had devised she’d often take it as a sign that we should really do something else; if I thanked her for something she would, likely as not, dismiss it as inconsequential—or worse, accuse me of being insincere. She could be undone by her menstrual cycle, which was unusually heavy and hard for her, leaving her dismayed at one moment, ferociously aroused at another, combative at another, so that we would find ourselves arguing over nothing amid sheets smeared with blood. She had fits of jealousy, during which she would constantly accuse me of planning to betray her. It was impossible to reassure her; denial didn’t work, nor did exasperation, offense, or anger. And she could turn almost any compliment into an insult, sometimes with great imagination. Once, for example, with a single candle burning dangerously on the windowsill, and the sweat drying in the pit of her throat, she asked me in a whisper if I wished her boobs—her word—were bigger. I didn’t: they were pale and elegant, and unusually sensitive. I told her that there was an old French maxim to the effect that a woman’s breast should fit perfectly into an upended champagne glass—and she blanched and turned away from me, leaving me to stare at the downy wisps of hair on the back of her neck. I asked her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me. Bridget, I said. Bridget. Bridget. At last it came out that she thought I’d meant a flute, and that the whole thing was some kind of joke against her. I explained and she was embarrassed by her mistake, but she was still convinced that I’d set her up.

So you see, I never told her that I loved her: she would have assumed I was lying, and depending on the occasion, she might have been right. There were moments when I sank happily into devotion, well over my head, and long periods when I waded in its shallows, and I was always crazy about her in ways that were close enough; but I always had a sense that the dear waters could drain in a moment, leaving us both cold and exposed. She must have felt the same. She never told me she loved me either.

The grating over the window before the fire escape pushed to one side, and both windows open, ice cream truck music, a dirty day down on Tompkins Square Park, coming home on a subway that stopped in the tunnel and didn’t start up again for half an hour, Five Percenters hawking pamphlets on a folding table in front of an OTB on Broadway, and beside them a man selling housewares and years-old pornographic magazines from a worn blanket. Bridget used to buy old volumes of poetry in languages neither of us could read, cocktail glasses that we never used, and old soul albums for seventy-five cents.

She was always looking for something; she might find it inside the tattered sleeve of a record; she might find it in my arms, she might find it at school. The summer made her anxious, and she thought about taking some classes, but she couldn’t find anything she liked, and besides, her scholarship wouldn’t cover the tuition.

She had grown up around bland California churches and hated religious people. Hypocrites, all, she thought; vain, ignorant, cruel, coarse. She could go on. My own experience had been more muted; Regis was a Catholic school, of course, but only mildly so: Christian thinkers were required readings, but belief was not a required trait. My parents took me to church on important occasions, but only then, and I had come away from it with neither animosity nor affection. This fascinated her. I remember one night, toward the very end of summer, when we were sitting in the front room of our apartment. The window was open, the fan was blowing in the smell of the city and the sound of two Puerto Rican girls laughing on a stoop across the street, and a police radio that was broadcasting loud but incomprehensible instructions, though when I went to the window to look, there were no squad cars or officers visible. The fan was spinning invisibly at my waist, its solid blades converted into mist and a dangerous low thrumming noise. Down below and across the street, the girls were leaning back lazily on the stairs, grasping brown velvet paper bags in their long-nailed hands. Both were dressed in the green plaid skirts and white blouses of the Catholic school up the block. What are you doing? Bridget said.

Just looking, I said, but she could hear the girls herself and her voice grew tense.

Who are they?

A couple of girls who live in the building across the street. I heard a noise behind me and I turned to find her standing up; I said nothing as she came and joined me, and without touching me glanced outside. When she saw the girls she calmed down: I don’t know why. Do you think they’re cute? One of the girls looked up and saw us there, standing in the window, me in boxer shorts and Bridget dressed in one of my T-shirts and no bottom, as if we were so poor that we had to split a full set of underwear between us—an image not so far from the truth. The girl pantomimed a loud laugh, bending down and hiding her face behind her friend, who said, What? The first girl looked up at us again and grinned and the second girl followed her gaze.

Catholic girls, said Bridget softly. Like the ones you grew up with. Is that your thing? The little gold crosses, the shoes, the uniforms?

God no, I said. I had to wear a uniform myself.

Really? she said. What was it?

Blue blazer, white shirt, nondescript tie. Every weekday for four years. I hated it, the blazer especially.

Really? Bridget said again. Now she was standing behind me. Her hand reached around to rest on my abdomen, then slowly drifted down until I could feel her fingers, first fluttering around the fly of my underwear, then rising up, pausing, and slipping under the elastic. I hissed a little and my head went back. It’s definitely my thing, she said. One of the girls below was still watching, with an expression that I couldn’t quite parse: wonder, disbelief, or perhaps it was nothing to her, just a couple of white folks fooling around in the window. Her friend was flipping through a magazine in her lap. Bridget was murmuring in my ear, Catholic boys in school uniforms, you just want to see what’s underneath. — And now she was petting me so deftly that I almost fell to my knees. I turned, and she widened her eyes at me, took my hand and led me to the mattress, where she lay me down on my back and carefully straddled me, leaning down so that I could smell the soap on her skin, and beginning things with a sticky kiss somewhere near my mouth. Such a nice young man, she said softly. So formal, so polite. Such a soft cheek. Such a sweet boy. I couldn’t tell if she really found that sort of thing exciting or if she was just trying to throw me off-balance; or maybe it was throwing me off-balance that she found exciting. Her hips levitated and then sank down again, an unexpectedly delicate and graceful move, for someone who was trying to burn me down.

As classes began again and we returned to campus, we began to see more of Johnny. He was still working in the economist’s office, but at night he’d come to the library to read. It was not a happy time for him. The man was supposed to be his mentor, but he was distant and imperious; and he was advancing a thesis—it was about the economic effects of oil exploration in Nigeria—that Johnny found both mistaken and dangerous. But what am I to do? he said, smiling slightly. It was mid-September and we were drinking at Rusty’s, and I could tell he’d had more than his usual share, though Bridget couldn’t. One refuses these things at the peril of one’s career, he continued. He looked different to me, a little thinner, a little faded and frayed, surrounded by murk, like a tropical fish that’s been kept in an unclean tank. He shook his head back and forth in a long, mournful arc.

Did you try talking to him? said Bridget. I winced; Johnny settled into an exaggerated patience.

After a fashion, he said. One doesn’t just . . . talk to a man like that.

A man like what? said Bridget. He’s just some guy . . .

No, said Johnny. He’s not just some guy.

I tried to change the subject. The movie theater down on 96th is having a festival of kung fu movies, I said. I think we should go.

Johnny, said Bridget. He stared at his fingers, which were wrapped around a short tumbler. Just tell him what you think. Or maybe you could sabotage his research, throw in some fake statistics or something.

One just . . . doesn’t, he said. Politics, after all, is compromise. As are many things. Compromise is everywhere; it’s one of the few constants of the human condition. He couldn’t look at her as he said this, and she took that as a sign that he needed convincing. I could see that it was going to end badly, but I didn’t know what to do about it, in part because it was spoiling so quickly, and in part because I didn’t know quite where my loyalties lay. Ordinarily, I would have done whatever I could to protect her; she was mine, and at the time I believed that she was the more vulnerable of the two. But I had known Johnny longer, and besides, she was both wrong and insistent. Just then, I wished I didn’t know either of them and even considered finding some excuse to leave them there, but my boots wouldn’t move. Instead I just watched.

Come on, said Bridget, you have a choice. She didn’t mean much by it, but I saw Johnny pause, one of his delicate hands gently rotating a paper napkin on the tabletop.

A choice? he said, his voice rising. Perhaps for you. For you, yes, all right, you do nothing but choose. But you don’t realize . . . you take my father—here he faltered, his brow darkening, as if he wasn’t sure how far to go with this. And then, for the very first time, I watched him lose his temper—not by raising his voice, but simply by saying things I’d never heard him say before. My father spent his entire life compromising. Doing things that he knew were wrong, and why? And not little things either. Why? Because otherwise his country would not have had a chance, he would not have had a chance. I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for my father’s compromises. I wouldn’t be anywhere. They would have forced him to watch while they raped my mother, and then some drunken fool would have—shot him dead. Just as they did to my uncle, my mother’s brother, a good man. A gentle man. A gentleman. And he left behind nothing at all. No family. No estate. So my father lied for people who had more power than he did, and by doing so became very wealthy. And then they killed him anyway. And here I am, in your lovely country, using that wealth to study at my leisure, and helping some foolish old man perpetuate the very same kinds of lies.

Johnny, I said.

No, no, no, he said, turning to me.

I put my hands up slightly, in a gesture of mild surrender. I’m just saying . . .

You’re just saying . . . what? That these are things I mustn’t consider, as I sit here enjoying my drink?

No, I said.

What are you saying, then? What is it? Go on. I glanced at Bridget, her eyes were wet. Johnny wouldn’t look at her at all.

I’m saying that you’re among friends, I said.

Friends, he said slowly, so slowly that he began the word almost sarcastically, modulated into irony and distress, and ended it with true warmth. We waited, Bridget and I. Yes, he said at last. You are my friends. You may be my only friends. He sighed and shook his head. And here I am, yelling at you. I’m very sorry. He looked at Bridget, though now it was she who couldn’t look at him. Really, he said, please. Forgive me. I was afraid that if she didn’t answer he was going to start begging her, though she wasn’t withholding her pardon; on the contrary, she was too embarrassed to speak.

It’s all right, it’s nothing, I said pointlessly, since he was still looking at Bridget, who was now openly crying.

Honestly, said Johnny. Her tears were alchemical, a stain on her face. Honestly, he said again. I apologize.

But of course she didn’t want him to apologize, and she found his obtuseness and his helplessness frustrating. She’d done something wrong and needed to say so; he was robbing her of the opportunity by apologizing himself. She shook her head, and I felt a teardrop as hot as solder land on my wrist. Oh—fuck you! she said at last, pushing back, standing, snatching her bag from the back of the chair, and hurrying out of the bar and into the night.

Johnny looked down at the table, as disconsolate as I’ve ever seen a man. I don’t know what he was thinking; I doubt it was anything more specific than misery. Don’t worry about it, I said, and he replied with silence. She just . . . I said.

You should probably go after her, said Johnny, and I said, Yes, but listen . . . — He raised his hand and said, I’ll be fine, go talk to her.

By the time I got out the door onto 125th Street, she had disappeared. I went home, but she wasn’t there. She must have known it was the first place I’d look. I stood in the living room, feeling panicked, while the night raged and subsided in darkening waves. I wanted to throw open the casements and call to her, but instead I lay down on the bed—not to rest, to smell her. I don’t think I’d ever in my life wanted so badly to find someone.

I went downstairs and started over to La Salle, and I was going to head south, stopping in whatever bars might be open at that hour to see if she was sitting alone, but instead I turned back, dog-legging over and making my way down into Riverside Park. It was a gloomy night. Overhead, the leaves were rustling in the wind, and there was no one about, no one at all. There was graffiti on the walls of Grant’s Tomb, and there was Bridget, sitting at the top of the short flight of stairs, holding a tallboy in a brown paper bag and watching me as I approached. She didn’t move, she didn’t even acknowledge that I was near, but when I arrived at her feet, she looked up, and I could see that she’d only just stopped crying. Her eyeliner was smeared, and even in the darkness I could see that the tip of her nose was pink. She made a sarcastic toasting motion with the beer; I smiled slightly because I didn’t want her to think I pitied her. Well, she said, I fucked that one up, didn’t I?

I shrugged. She would have hated me if I’d lied to her. I said, He’s got a lot on his mind these days. She cocked her head. Her face was shining—and then she laughed in that sudden, awkward way that’s barely distinguishable from crying.

There was an ugly odor in the air, a whiff of vomit that made me wrinkle my nose involuntarily. It wasn’t me, she said. Some guy came by here about five minutes ago. Didn’t say a word to me. Puked over in the corner, and then left again.

Why are you sitting here?

I was waiting for you, she said. I held out my hand to her, she took it, stood, and then suddenly hugged me, as tightly as she could, her face buried into my shoulder, the sour night city decaying around us while we indulged in that binding moment that comes from shared misery, confusion, doubt, and regret.

You know, I said. You were right. She pulled back and looked at me with a fiercely skeptical expression. I said, If he thinks the professor’s wrong, he should say so.

I believed this. There was an element of convention about my friend that I found disappointing. But of course that wasn’t really what they had fought about: I knew that, and so did Bridget. Off in the distance, a car horn played La Cucaracha. Come on, she said. Let’s go home. I’m tired.

Is there anything more exhausting than grief? She wasn’t just tired, she was utterly expended; she could barely make it back to our apartment, I thought she might actually faint, and I had to hold her arm as we walked up the stairs. She leaned against the wall of the hallway while I unlocked the door; once inside, she sat on the edge of the bed while I went into the bathroom to wash my face. By the time I came out again she was fast asleep on top of the bedclothes, fully dressed but for her shoes, and so motionless that I stopped breathing myself; and time would have no purchase, at least for those few seconds. Then I saw her swallow, as if she was finishing off a morsel of dreaming, so I undressed her tenderly and tucked her in, and then sat in a chair across the room for a few minutes, watching her sigh in her sleep, before joining her under the warm, aromatic sheets.

Bridget was one of the very few people I knew in New York who owned a car, even my parents had never bothered, and she was certainly the only one I knew who used it. She’d driven it out from California, it was an old red Toyota, and she refused to give it up, even though keeping it was an enormous amount of work. She hated and feared the subway, especially at night: the graffiti made her queasy and the shriek of the brakes gave her a headache. She liked to read the tabloids for the latest horror, a woman pushed in front of an oncoming train by a disturbed man, rats scurrying across the tracks. When she learned that I kept a ten-dollar bill in a different pocket than I kept my wallet, so that I could still get home if I was mugged, as I had been several times over the years, she scowled and said, I don’t understand how you can live like this. But she lived like that too. Within a week of getting to town, someone had broken the passenger window of her car and stolen her stereo.

I didn’t have a license, myself, though it took me some time to convince her that I didn’t: she found it hard to believe that someone had reached adulthood without learning how to drive, though I’d learned the rudiments while joyriding with a friend one summer on Long Island—knew enough, anyway, to put the thing in gear and circle the block a few times, looking for an empty space. It was a nuisance, that car. I can’t tell you how many nighttime hours, in total, we spent searching for a legal place to park, nor how many mornings I got out of bed, threw on whatever clothes happened to be lying on the floor—including, once, a T-shirt covered in tea roses that was actually hers, and which, because I had to be in class in twenty minutes and it took me fifteen to find a free spot, I ended up wearing all day—and rushed downstairs to move the thing before it was ticketed. A ticket would have cost us a week’s worth of wine.

Driving in the city made her so tense that it was painful to watch, her fists clutching the steering wheel, her head craned, the car lurching and stopping as she waited for someone to let her into a lane, the sudden discovery that the street she was looking for was one-way in the wrong direction. It was a waste of time, that car, but so was time itself. We drove everywhere, which almost always meant downtown, and it was on one of those nights that Bridget would have killed us both.

It was October, and there was a faint, fresh note of fall in the air. We had decided at the very last minute to drive down to Alphabet City. Where were we going? I don’t remember, but we were late. We were always late when we went somewhere, always rushing, always dressing and dressing again, bickering and apologizing, forgetting things until we were on the sidewalk and then dashing back upstairs to fetch them, always laughing as we got lost. Evening had passed and night had fallen; we couldn’t decide whether we wanted to go at all, and then suddenly we were leaving, trying to remember where we parked the car, midnight was approaching. We can make it, she said. We’ll just go fast. We stopped for cigarettes and then got on the West Side Highway. When she was nervous or excited, Bridget could smoke like a schizophrenic, desperately, compulsively, and without pleasure, impatient to finish one so that she could start another: more than once I found her alone in our living room with two cigarettes burning in an ashtray, one just an inch shorter than the other. That night, she unwrapped the pack with both hands, steering with her wrist, and then tried to light one from the car lighter, but it didn’t take, and she clicked her tongue in frustration and tried to put the thing back in its socket, missed, and looked down; and then, for no reason that I could figure, she started to take the exit at 79th Street, then changed her mind and jerked the steering wheel back, causing the car to clip the concrete barrier on one side of the exit with a monstrous metallic sound . . . then swim slowly and soundlessly through the air . . . like a zeppelin, I thought . . . and then bounce violently up the curb on the other side—I heard Bridget squeak—and strike a streetlight on my side before coming to rest on the small grassy triangle that flanked the exit, somehow facing uptown.

But that’s not what I mean when I say she almost killed us. We checked each other and we were both all right, or so it looked at the time. (Later I would discover a wide purple mark, almost black, running directly across my waist where the seat belt had restrained me, and by the next morning Bridget had developed a strawberry-colored contusion on the side of her forehead, origin unknown. — I had just turned to say something to you, she told me later, but now I can’t remember what.) I could smell gasoline in the air, but that isn’t what I mean about getting us killed either. Her door was half-opened, and she stepped out. Mine wouldn’t open at all, so I followed her on her side. I hugged her, we were both shaking. Fuck, fuck, she said, her voice wet with frustration, over the lost car, the lost occasion, the entire suite of consequences that the night had conjured. That’s it for my car, she said. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Someone passing must have seen the accident, because there were sirens and lights in the distance, and Bridget said, They’re coming. — And then she thrust her bag at me, said, Hang on, and darted back into the car. I could hear her making distressed sounds as she struggled to open the damaged glove compartment, and when she emerged again, she was holding a small pistol in her left hand, and she grabbed the bag back from me and tucked the gun inside it just as the carnival lights of an arriving police car broke over the dark tableau. That’s what I mean: if they’d arrived a few seconds earlier they would have been perfectly happy to shoot us both.

There were two cops at first, though later another car pulled up and two more joined them. Of the four, I remember that three had mustaches. They were weary and curt. Bridget said that she had been driving and had gotten distracted, and one of them asked me why I wasn’t the one behind the wheel. I told him that I didn’t drive, and he shined the flashlight in my face for a few long seconds. Then how do I know that you are who you say you are? he said. I gave him my university ID, while Bridget fished her driver’s license out of her purse, so swiftly and elegantly that she could have been carrying a human head in there and they wouldn’t have noticed. One of their radios repeatedly burst with chatter, dispatchers and beat cops chatting and joking. A pair of citizens, I heard somebody say, and someone asked if we needed an ambulance. One of the mustaches said, Negative. At the same time, another one said something that made Bridget laugh, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t her real laugh. As if by magic, a tow truck appeared, its yellow lights spinning lazily in counterpoint to the police cars’ red ones, and without a word to anyone the driver winched up the car and spirited it away. Later, one of the police cars took us home while we held hands in the back seat and watched the starry city pass in reverse, like a film projected backwards; and in our dark apartment, we listened to doo-wop songs on an oldies station and drank warm wine without looking at each other, musing in the sweet, silent wake of disaster. As for the gun, she said only that her father had given it to her when she told him she was coming to New York, she had no bullets for it, had no idea how to fire it, and kept it in the car only because she didn’t want to have it in the apartment. The next day, we took it down to the river and threw it in.

What else can I say about her? This is a portrait in chemicals, when what I want is blood. She was warmer than I’ve made her out to be, less harsh. She cried very easily, at a movie, in an argument, and often enough for no reason at all that I could see. I found this so vexing that I would become inarticulate, which almost always made it worse—though sometimes, seeing how nonplussed I was, she would grin through her tears, a little deviously; and then she would be the cheerful one, and I the churlish, and she would tease me about being too moody and emotional. What else? I loved the way she dressed. I, who rarely wore anything other than jeans and a T-shirt, found this part arcane and delightful, her pants and skirts, tights and boots, her bracelets and bras. I wanted to go shopping with her, just to see how she did it—to learn what everything was called, the tiny sleeveless undershirts, the sheer black leggings that left mildly angry crenulated marks on the skin of her thighs—but she never let me. She read fashion magazines with the same combination of lust and shame that a teenaged boy would bring to a stack of pornography, though they never had any effect on what she bought or wore. Once, when I came home with the news that I’d won a small award from the Philology Society for a paper I’d written, she cheered me like I’d singlehandedly liberated Paris, and said, I’m so proud of you! Dust on the baseboards, a brownout lamp in the living room, little jam-jar glasses lined up in the drying rack next to the sink.

She was mildly superstitious, I would discover that in time. No full moon rose without her noticing, there were secret signs here and there, designed to give her a little more grasp on things: horoscopes, lucky pennies, ways of negotiating obstacles on the sidewalk, signatures I only noticed when I was with her. The world was a rebus of good news and bad, and that was how she converted belief into knowledge, how she ordered herself among fields of serenity and dread. These forces were not to be handled casually: one late night down in Little Italy we came upon a palm reader open after hours. I wanted to stop in for a psychic reading but she protested vehemently, not because I entertained the idea, but because I didn’t take it seriously enough.

She once spent an hour watching a man dealing three-card monte on a cardboard box in front of a movie theater. She never placed a bet, no matter how obvious it seemed, but she never figured out how the con worked either. She read the books assigned to her ferociously and all in, and I would often hear her clucking or murmuring sympathetically or snorting with amusement as naturally as if she was in the middle of a conversation, though when I asked her what had struck her, she wouldn’t tell me. She took assiduous notes, but I never saw her reread them. She could draw beautifully, but I didn’t know as much until she left me a note one morning: Good morning, sweet boy, it said, and around the words she’d sketched a circle of parading elephants, each holding the tail of the one before in its trunk.

She began to hear things about me, I don’t know where, and she pretended, at first, to be amused by it all. — Is it true that you had an affair with the wife of one of your professors?

I said, No. That’s crazy. Have you seen my professors? Have you seen their wives?

What does that have to do with anything? she said.

When was this supposed to have happened?

Whenever it happened.

But it didn’t happen, I said.

And you had a drunken fistfight in a bar. You lost a tooth.

That was years ago, I said, and it was hardly a fight. Someone hit me. I don’t even know why, I’d never seen him before.

As far as she was concerned, I’d admitted some part of some rumor, however trivial, and she was almost gleeful, as if I had granted her license to indulge in her worst fears about me, like a child allowed into an R-rated horror movie. What did you say to him? she said.

I didn’t say anything, he thought I was someone else. Who’s telling you this? She didn’t answer. I couldn’t imagine where it was coming from: not Johnny, he wouldn’t have, and besides, he didn’t know these things. Perhaps it was one of her friends, or someone from my department. Most likely she was making at least some of them up, feeling around in the dark to see how I responded, if I would give anything away.

She kept tiny souvenirs in a wooden box on her dresser, bar matchbooks, a small stone or feather or bead, single flower petals that had almost returned to dust. Several times she came home triumphant with a houseplant, and each time it died within a fortnight. There was nothing she did but she just had to do it, and nothing she didn’t but she hated it. I never once saw her mistreat anyone, except me, and perhaps Johnny.

She had elaborate bedtime rituals. She could not, for example, sleep without her own pillow; before we moved in together she would carry it over to my apartment in a brown paper supermarket bag. She brushed her teeth every night with infinite care, flossing and whatnot, while I waited impatiently in bed. She wore contact lenses, and was purblind without them, but it was only after several weeks that she would let me see her in glasses; instead she would half-intuit her way to the edge of the mattress, her eyes clouded and slightly unfocussed. She always slept on the left side of the bed, often with one leg hanging off the edge until it almost touched the floor. She occasionally spoke in her sleep, though usually incoherently; and she often had peculiar things to say in the morning as she was waking up: non sequiturs left over from her dreams, though she never told me the dreams themselves. — Don’t worry, she said to me one morning as she was waking. It’s just a pin: it’s just a needle. Another time: Go away, you bomb. Another time she woke and immediately announced, Bees are yellow and nuts.

She was terrified of growing old, she referred to her age all the time—twenty-four, and as I write this it’s been twenty years since I was twenty-four. Bridget, it’s not so bad. The hardest part is missing people, and wishing you’d been better.

I told Johnny about the car crash the next time I saw him. He laughed softly and said, Well, that sounds like an adventure, and a lot of luck.

Luck? I said.

I didn’t say good luck, he pointed out, laughing even more softly at his own sophistry. We were sitting over coffee in one of the graduate student lounges, at a beautiful polished wood table surrounded by three or four mismatched chairs, and some bookshelves stocked with ancient editions of academic journals, written by obscure professors long since forgotten. Through the window drifted the sound of an anti-apartheid demonstration underway on the steps leading up to Low Library, a voice demanding something over a loudspeaker, though by the time it reached us it was impossible to say what. Johnny regarded such things with a mixture of sympathy and disdain. It wasn’t that he thought the matter was trivial: on the contrary, he regarded it as almost too grievous to discuss—and he was always being asked to discuss it, to join this or that cause, to speak at a rally. I never knew him to accept. That afternoon he rose to shut an open window, which made the room much quieter. Then he said, My mother is coming to town next month. What do you suppose I should do with her?

I was surprised at how casually he brought it up, and then realized, from the stillness in his demeanor, that he wasn’t casual about it at all. Has she been here before?

Several times, he said. That’s part of the difficulty, you see. I’ve already taken her to the landmarks, the museums. Oddly enough, I think she liked Chinatown the best, but I’m afraid she’ll find this weather even less appealing than I do.

I guess that rules out ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, I said.

He lowered his eyes and smiled. That would be a sight, he said, wouldn’t it? But no . . . my people don’t ice-skate. I should suggest it to her, though, just to see the look on her face. — And by the way, she wants to meet you, if you’re available.

Wants to meet me? I said.

You look alarmed, he said.

I was, a bit, and for several reasons. We were at that age when one lives in a world without parents; Bridget hadn’t even met my own, though they lived ten minutes away by cab. And they would be a formidable pair, he and his mother, who were bound to have shared experiences, a culture, a language, perhaps three or four of each, that I knew nothing about. Had I thought about it, I might have realized that Johnny was familiar with just this sort of uneasiness: he was forever a stranger, not just for an hour or two of dinner but for years on end. But I was not quite wise enough to see that. Instead I said, It’s just that I always thought of her as a figure from some legend. A hippogriff, or something. And this was true. There was something slightly stiff about the way Johnny had spoken of his mother in the past, for one thing using the relationship as her name: Mother wants me to send her a souvenir from the Statue of Liberty, he said to me one afternoon, by way of explaining why he was spending an afternoon making the trip. Another time we had stopped on the street to watch a television through a store window, where a Rastafarian was holding forth on a local cable access show. Mother thinks no one takes a man with long hair seriously, he said, and we started away again. His formality made her seem distant and redoubtable: The widow whose grief was too deep to be fathomed; the reformer who successfully stared down gangsters; the demanding steward of his own brilliant calling.

A hippogriff? said Johnny that afternoon, arching his eyebrows and cocking his head. Are you implying that my mother is a jungle creature?

A hipp—, I said, then stopped myself and stared at him, exasperated. He laughed. I’m implying that she’s a completely imaginary jungle creature, I said.

Well, he said, she’s very real, and, I might add, quite civilized, and she said she would like to meet my friend Mike.

I’d be happy to come, I said.

Over the following weeks, he proved to be uncharacteristically uneasy about his mother’s visit—nervous and slightly obsessive: once we’d set up a date for dinner, he reminded me of it a half a dozen times, and even went so far as to suggest that I might want to buy some new clothes for the occasion, or at least find something decent in my closet. She has a thing about . . . comportment, he said. That stung me a little: I reminded him, not too gently, that I was quite capable of being presentable, when I wanted to be. He darkened a bit and apologized. The truth is I don’t really know her that well, he said. Isn’t that an odd thing? He paused, I said nothing. He was worrying his spoon and saucer, scooping up a quarter-moon of cold coffee, contemplating it for a few seconds, and then turning it over into the dish again. After my father died, she withdrew a bit. Back home, the death of a husband is an extraordinarily complicated event, full of rituals and ceremonies. I suppose that’s true of most cultures, but I was a bit surprised at how readily she embraced it. She followed the traditions. You see? A full year of mourning, special clothes, special meals, prayers, a long stream of condolence calls and visits. All of it. Almost all of it. That’s what I mean: I find her hard to read. My mother . . . he paused. She believes my father is still with her, watching over her from the sky, I suppose, or perhaps a spirit on the ground: she talks to him quite a lot. She likes to say that she’s a Christian, and of course she is, in many ways. But you know how it is: they make it their own. I find it all very . . . what’s the word? Well, the word is primitive. He stopped and then started again. If anyone else said that, I’d be outraged. He looked up and blinked at the light. What a thing to say of one’s own family.

My people eat the body of Christ, I pointed out.

He smiled. Yes, you do.

Bridget didn’t join us. Since the accident, she and I had been fighting, sometimes and then often, always over nothing, and with a viciousness that I often found shocking and disturbing, mostly for what it brought out of me. I hadn’t known I could say such things: foul and despicable things, we said them to each other, almost reveling in our ability to be hurtful, best if it was no more than a sentence, a look, a sigh of frustration. Then the animosity would subside, usually as quickly as it had appeared, and we would both act as if nothing, but something, had happened. I wondered if it was the crash itself that had broken us: it felt like nothing so much as a wrecked engine, gears catching and un-catching, making a fearsome loud noise, while the carriage lurched and then settled into an uneven idle, which might stall or might not, and was therefore difficult to drive. I wondered if it was simply time-the-disease, from which all things suffered. I wondered if this was what it meant to be an adult, and if she wondered the same. The weeks went by, we fought and we stayed. We never spoke of separating.

She had made plans to take the train down to Baltimore to see some friends who were in art school there. It would be the first time she’d left the city in almost a year. — Look at this, she said, holding a clump of hair out from the side of her head like Raggedy Ann. Look at my eyes. I didn’t see anything wrong with her eyes. — The skin under my eyes. Still I saw nothing wrong, but I could tell she was tired by the slow way she moved, and the fraying at the edge of her voice. Go, I said. Have a good time, it’ll be good for you, and I’ll see you in a couple of days. Of course, I meant that it would be good for both of us. Of course, she knew that. But when she left I felt like she’d taken one of my senses, and I worried about her all that night, woke up cold in the morning, and skipped an Ovid seminar to stay home in bed, where I wore one of her housecoats, though it stopped above my knees, listened to the traffic below, and read a paperback copy of a trashy novel that she’d bought on the street a few days earlier. As night fell, I rose at last, showered and pulled on the suit that I’d carefully dry-cleaned and set aside. I had a white shirt and a somber tie as well, but for shoes I had only a pair of scuffed-up, secondhand wing tips that I’d bought in a thrift store a few days earlier. As I was leaving the building, the Puerto Rican woman who lived on the second floor said something to me in Spanish, and when I looked back she was nodding with a half-smile on her face. I met up with Johnny at the top of the subway stairs; his hair was smoothed down and anchored with a part so sharp that one could have rolled a dime down it. We looked each other up and down, and then laughed.

We met his mother in the lobby of her hotel, a place at once intimate, grand, and slightly time-worn, which took up a full block on the East Side. Ah, the desk clerk said to Johnny as soon as we approached. You must be Madame’s son. Johnny paused and then nodded. She told us you were coming, the clerk said. She’s very proud of you. He reached for the phone to call her room; I turned and saw a maid standing in a far doorway, the bare white walls of a usually hidden service hall behind her, smiling broadly at Johnny and me.

Johnny’s mother emerged onto the pearl-grey marble floor a minute or so later, smiling from something the elevator operator had said to her and waving goodbye to him; and at once a sort of receiving line formed before her: bellhops, the maître d’ of the hotel’s restaurant, the night manager, the maid I’d seen standing in the doorway, all making a casual cordon simply for the pleasure of seeing her pass. She addressed each one by name as she went by, and introduced several of them to her son and his friend, using a name for Johnny that I couldn’t quite catch, a mash of d’s and n’s that I had never heard before—a diminutive, I assumed, since he balked slightly at the sound of it, even as he greeted everyone pleasantly, while I hung back a bit and nodded a series of hellos. The whole process took several minutes and would probably have taken longer if his mother hadn’t glanced at her tiny gold watch and, with a rising lilt, said, Oh, dear, we’re going to be late. Well, good night. Good night. Good night. Good night.

Would Madame like a taxi? the doorman said when we bustled out the door.

She stopped, and Johnny paused apprehensively. Now, why is everyone calling me Madame? she said to the doorman with the kind of easy, elegant smile that implies the very regality it is meant to refute. You mustn’t call me Madame, that is much too formal. The doorman, though uncertain about what he’d done wrong, nevertheless started to apologize; but she continued, still smiling: You must call me Matilda. Yes, ma’am, the doorman said. Can I get you a taxi? On the street, the late autumn air was cold and slightly silvery, like a freshly washed window; Johnny’s mother turned and looked at him, he looked at me, and I looked at the brightly colored scarf she was wearing. Let’s walk, he said. It isn’t far.

We turned toward Park, the sidewalk barely wide enough to accommodate the three of us, but there weren’t many people out, and those we came across readily moved aside to let us pass: Johnny’s mother carried herself in a way that suggested she was used to deference: she was neither severe nor superior, but she had a glamour about her and you could see it coming. I wondered what Johnny’s father was like, and whether her self-possession had come from being his wife or being his widow; or perhaps it was why he’d married her in the first place. What a man he must have been, if this woman was his partner. I remembered a story Johnny had told me, about another man, not his father, a poor singer who’d been in love with her, and had written a song called Honey and Ashes for her, which had rescued her from a period of obscurity and made her famous again. You must call me Matilda, too, she said to me, but like the doorman, I couldn’t bring myself to be so familiar; instead I avoided calling her anything at all for the rest of the night. A lovely city, she said, and at first I thought she was being sarcastic: up the street there was an ambulance parked, the lights on top flashing but no siren going; a subway rumbled underfoot, passing beneath a grating and leaving in its wake a blast of train-breath. But when I looked over at her, I saw that her eyes were raised to the windows of the skyscrapers, and she was right: it was a sight, no less so for the fact that I’d been living under it all my life. I remember my first time here, she said. I asked her why she’d come, and she said, Well, I was giving a little talk at your university. Johnny never told you? But, yes, I did. The very same one you are attending. There was a professor there, and her husband, who had been a dean. They must be long gone, but they were very good to me. It was right after my husband was killed, she said. For some time thereafter, I took up his mantle, yes? It was expected of me. She laughed a bit. I was so . . . prim in those days, prim and proper, and younger than my years. I had two sons at home, you see, but I was just a schoolgirl inside. My husband had quite spoiled me. And then after he died I was expected to travel around the world, speaking for him. Not as him, you see, but for him. And this city, you know, when I first arrived I was quite overwhelmed. You can imagine, she said, though in truth it was hard for me to imagine her being overwhelmed by anything at all. But everyone was so kind to me, and very quickly I started to feel at home. I think in another life I must have been a New Yorker. And now—she took Johnny affectionately by his upper arm—I have an excuse to visit whenever I want.

Johnny had chosen a French restaurant, one of those quiet places with interchangeable names that dotted the Upper East Side: Le Quelque Chose, with starched white tablecloths and dim lighting—the kind of restaurant where they spent more effort on placing the silverware and announcing the house specialties and fussing over water glasses and butter plates than they did on the food itself, though to be sure I was no gourmet, and Johnny’s mother was perfectly happy with the place. The waiter came by and asked if we wanted drinks. Not for me, thank you, said Johnny’s mother. I waited to see what Johnny would do, and when he ordered a glass of red wine, I asked for the same. Ah, she said. What is the age, then? — Eighteen, said Johnny. I can never remember, she said.

I saw Johnny start, and wondered what he was about to say; possibly something about the reach of the state in modern times, its role in the delineation of societal mores; possibly just a joke about how I, being Irish, had been drinking whiskey since I was seven. In any case, he stopped himself, she either didn’t notice or pretended not to, and for the following minutes she engaged me in what I recognized only later was a kind of interview, though I don’t know if it was out of genuine interest, polite conversation-making, or a test to see what kind of people her son was associating with. She wanted to know what I was studying, not just the department but the details, and when I faltered over the subject of my dissertation, she graciously turned the topic. She asked me what it was like to grow up in Manhattan, whether I’d found it frightening, what I did for fun or vacation, whether I’d had dinner with my family every night; and when I was done she said, I do wish Johnny would get out more. Enjoy himself, not spend all of his time studying. Will you take him to one of these clubs? Though she had only the faintest of accents, she’d once again pronounced his name in an odd, muddled way. We both looked at Johnny; he looked back at us both. I know he’s here to learn, she said, but part of learning is getting to know the people, don’t you think?

I was still trying to puzzle out what she had called him when Johnny said, Mother, he doesn’t know me by that name.

Well, I don’t know why not, she said. It’s the name your father and I gave you. She turned to me. What do you call him, then?

Johnny, I said, feeling a bit silly.

No, no, said Johnny’s mother. No, Dieudonné, you see? She pronounced it again, more slowly. It means given by God, in French. It’s a very traditional name, and I’ve always thought it was lovely. I don’t know why he refuses to use it.

Because, said Johnny calmly, sensibly, and with I don’t know what in his heart. No one here can pronounce it.

She was neither put off nor dismayed, but she was puzzled. It’s a perfectly good name, she said. You should teach them.

He nodded. I got the impression that this was a common form of exchange between them, the stubborn son rehearsing his eccentric authority before his stately mother, who demonstrates her approval by the mildness of her complaints. Well, you can’t expect me to call you that, she said cheerfully. She reached over and touched his hand, gently, affectionately, but also as a form of ownership, as if to say, Whoever you are, and whatever you’re doing, remember that you are mine. It was a winning response, both very delicate and very powerful. I could see, then, why the dinner had been important to him, and why it had made him anxious: he was revealing to me at one and the same time his weakness and his strength, his anger and his tenderness, and I could see both in his expression.

The rest of the dinner was thankfully less fraught, made up mostly of small, generous talk. At the end of the night, as we were walking her back to her hotel, Johnny’s mother took me by the arm and let me squire her down the sidewalk; and in the lobby she thanked me for coming all the way down to Midtown to have dinner and for being a friend to her Dieudonné, and I thanked her for inviting me, and hoped that I would see her again. There was a bit of business between her and Johnny as they were parting—I held back to give them some privacy—and when he came away from her and joined me his face was quite blank. I don’t know what they said, but he had a twenty-dollar bill that she had given him for cab fare. We were quiet on the way home. We crossed Central Park, each of us looking out of opposite windows at the silent, skeletal trees, until we reached the lights of Columbus.

That went well, I said. He didn’t respond, but when we reached 116th Street, he got out with me, and he waited until the cab had driven away before he spoke. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his jacket. I want to thank you, he said to me.

I cocked my head in curiosity. You’re welcome, I said. For what?

For coming out this evening.

It was a pleasure, I said.

Was it? he said. He was looking at me intently.

Yes, I said. Of course it was.

He nodded, started to say something else, and then thought better of it. I waited a moment to see if he was sure, but he just clapped me on the shoulder and said, Good night.

There was a trio of undergraduate girls sitting on a bench on the median; one of them surreptitiously sipped from a large bottle with a red label, then handed it to the next, who hid it between her legs and glanced at me darkly as I passed. I could hear the train conductor on the platform below announcing something, I couldn’t tell what. The red light on the corner seemed to be stuck, so I cut through the traffic and then turned north, choosing quiet Broadway over quieter Claremont, stopping for a pack of cigarettes and a few cans of beer, one of which I drank shivering on the stoop, thinking about Johnny, who had so many choices and so few: the whole world was his school, but none of it was his home. He was doomed to wander, and never mind that he’d wander from one capital to another, from one splendid university to the next; that he’d be met at the airport by people he didn’t know, who would shake his hand warmly and ask him thoughtful questions on the ride into town. I found it enviable; I found it horrifying. I went upstairs at around eleven, missing Bridget, and drank the second beer in the blue light of a black-and-white television, putting cigarette after cigarette out in a cereal bowl that I had left uncleaned after breakfast.

I came home from class the next day and found Bridget sitting in the hallway outside our door: she had lost her keys somewhere along the way. She scrambled to her feet when I stepped off the elevator, ran toward me in her stompy black motorcycle boots, and literally leapt into my arms, laughing hard, she took my face in her hands, her hair falling all around, I could smell her cherry chewing gum and hairspray. Did you miss me? she said, and before I could answer she kissed me, lapping at my lips like a cat. Baltimore had been so much fun, it had been so great, running around with her friends, museums and parties. It was just what she needed, she had forgotten that there was life outside the city, out past the headlines and the hustling, away from everything. She had come to understand something that she hadn’t understood before, though she didn’t know how to explain what it was.

On Thursday, amid bare trees and along windy sidewalks, I went to my department’s holiday party. These were drab and dreary affairs, more or less obligatory, which began in the slant-light of late afternoon and ended in the sudden darkness of evening. On a table in one corner of the seminar room there was an elaborate samovar filled with tea, and a few china plates with an assortment of dry biscuits arrayed upon them in weary semicircles.

By then I was almost done with my coursework, which gave me a kind of status—the sort, anyway, that compelled a first-year student to take me aside beforehand and confess that he was having a miserable time of it. He had come from Notre Dame and he didn’t belong, and he was ever falling behind on his work. He asked me if it got better and I lied to him without hesitation, until he thanked me for the reassurances and then made a quick round of the room and headed home to study.

For reasons I never could fathom, Bridget found these sorts of things more enjoyable than I did and often came along with me; by then she was well-known and well-liked, and she would often wander off on her own to chatter with whomever: the professors, their wives (they were all wives: of the two female faculty members, one was either single or very private, and the other was a widow), other students and staff. But we had argued that evening, and she’d decided to stay home.

I left the department at nightfall and stopped to buy a bottle of wine, which cost more than we could afford. She was reading in the living room. I asked her if she wanted a drink, and she said, No, without looking up. I thought she was acting sullen, but when I went to the kitchen and turned on the light, I realized that it was me. It had struck me quite suddenly, the way only the most obvious things can: I didn’t like school, I hadn’t liked it in some time, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever really enjoyed it, and I was going to finish my coursework and then drop out. I was exhausted from the quarreling city, and tired of being broke. I sat in the kitchen and finished the bottle, neither quickly nor slowly, but with great deliberation.

Bridget, too, had lost the joy she’d felt a few days earlier, and that was the last joy she would have to spend on me. Instead, she was distracted and unhappy; she undressed for bed as if she was disrobing for a doctor, shivered once, and then crawled beneath the covers. She was wearing her favorite best underwear, the ones I’d bought for her a few months earlier, after I’d torn off two cheaper pairs on two successive nights, but she immediately presented me with her back, which I stroked softly, feeling the knuckles of her spine rising and falling under my fingertips: she didn’t respond. I stopped and turned away from her, and she was up on her elbow, hovering over me. Mike. I turned my head to look at her, and she kept perfectly still, breathing shallowly. Mike. Mike. I didn’t answer her: Would all of this have been different if I had? They say there’s always another world. Wave if you can hear me, Bridget.

When I told her, a few days later, that I was leaving the program, she was shocked. Was I leaving her too? No, I said, not at all: but I was changing. She responded with a mistrust so profound and varied that I could hardly grasp it, let alone reassure her, and I quickly grew weary of trying. In the days that followed she presented me with a new rumor or two—one involving a tryst I was supposed to have had with an ex-girlfriend in an empty classroom in broad daylight, and another that ended with a night in the Tombs. Neither was true. Did you spend a part of your first-year fellowship on prostitutes? Girls you picked up on the street corner and paid, they would do whatever you wanted. And you put your thing in me, that had been in them.

Where are you getting this from?

People, she said. Are you lying to me?

. . .

Hookers? said Bridget. Mike?

Yes, I said sarcastically. I’m lying.

This time, at least, she told me where they’d come from: she’d run into my old roommate Dominic on the street, and they’d sat on the median for a little while and talked. A few weeks later I saw him in the supermarket and asked him what he’d said to her, and he insisted that he hadn’t said anything at all, except for the bit about the fistfight, and then only because he thought it flattered me. He was quite bothered about the rest, and convincingly so, leaving me to wonder if she was making it up to try to throw me off-balance, or worse, so that she would have me to blame for whatever needed blaming, or worse still, because she believed I was so readily faithless and foolish. The earlier anthology of these transgressions of mine had given her pause, but the pause had passed with no damage left behind. These new ones, she said, upset her much more, and began to spin out into vague but powerful suspicions, based on trivial evidence: the smell of perfume in my hair just because I happened to be in an elevator in Philosophy Hall with a woman who was wearing too much, my name overheard in someone else’s conversation. (There are lots of guys named Mike, I pointed out. They meant you, she said. I know they did.) It sounds like madness, but I’m not sure that it was. It was a bad time, and the days were getting dark. I was weary of defending myself, and insulted by her inability or unwillingness to take my smile as a smile. So I became cold and critical about little things, about nothing. Did she really need to lock the door after I left, even if I was just going to the corner for a pack of cigarettes? Could she decide more quickly whether she was going down to the basement to do laundry? It used to be cute when she played keep-away with her kisses, but it wasn’t anymore, and I turned away. That made her angry: that made her cry. The old system was quickly breaking down, it only took a week or two, and there was no new system to take its place.

I know she went to Johnny, who listened to her with all the patience and kindness he could bear, to make up for the fact that I, the indicted one, was becoming increasingly incapable of either. She came back from each session with him calmer and more confident, if a little dazed, like a woman after a seizure, missing, slow, and with a little smile that was tinged with death. I had no idea what they talked about, or even if I was always a significant part of it. In any case, I was certain he said nothing against me. He didn’t think all was fair in war, either.

The end came swiftly, and it was more sordid than ceremonial. We had taken a weekend apart; I went upstate with a high school friend to stay at his parents’ country house. It was late in January, and there would be fresh snow on the hills, hard contrails in the sky, and the kind of quiet only other people could buy, but Bridget didn’t want to go. She was still acclimating to her new classes, she said; there was an exhibit of Indian silks at the Met that she wanted to see. She wore the passive, defiant expression of a small child dragging in a grocery store, and I was accordingly irritated and tried to reason with her: she could read on the bus, the exhibit had just opened and would be up for weeks. — You can’t make me go, she said, an assertion that allowed for no reply, since it was obviously true and obviously irrelevant. — You can’t make me stay, I said, and finally I left her there, sitting on our broken couch, looking deliberately out the back window as I walked out the front door.

I took a bus upstate, and as soon as we passed the Cloisters I began to feel better. The weather was perfect, with that curious smell of burnt rubber and apples in the air. And it’s true I met a woman up there, black-haired and pink as an April moon, a friend of my friend who’d decided to join us at the last minute. She had just gotten her first real job, as an assistant to an editor at a newsmagazine. We sat on the porch and drank and talked, and we walked into town together the next day, where we spent a happy hour shopping for groceries; halfway home she made me stop so she could pluck a burr from the sleeve of my jacket. If sin or infidelity consists, as the Jesuits taught me, in desire as much as deed, then perhaps I sinned; but the deed wasn’t done. No touch, no kiss, I slept alone. I don’t know why, it wasn’t entirely virtue on my part, though I had a little of that. An equal part was simply that I didn’t know who I was. The woman’s telephone number wound up scrawled on the first page of a book I’d brought with me, above the copyright and under her name, but I thought of it more as a souvenir than as an invitation.

When I arrived back home, on a cool, sharp Sunday evening, Bridget was waiting for me, sitting at the kitchen table, one hand toying with the small silver bracelet on her other wrist, and a choked look on her pretty face. She didn’t dissemble, she didn’t even wait for me to ask. She had gone out for coffee with one of her TAs; it had turned into dinner, then drinks, and then she’d spent the night with him.

I looked around the apartment, and we had very little: a white-painted wooden table that she’d brought over from the last place she’d lived, a chest of drawers I’d found on the street, a pile of cheap shoes on the floor, some books and an old typewriter, take-out menus, yesterday’s newspaper wedged into the cushions of a worn blue couch. A sticky jar of honey on the kitchen counter, a pair of ashtrays, both full, beside it. It wasn’t much of a home and it wouldn’t be much to leave. You would have done it if I didn’t, she said. But I hadn’t, and all I could manage was a shake of my head. For a long time neither of us said anything. I gave her a few more minutes to explain, to blame me or defend herself, but she was speechless: instead, she played with her bracelet a little more attentively. Her silence was more painful to me than anything she could have said, more final, in its way, than her betrayal. What do you want me to say? I asked, but she had no answer to that. What do we do now? She said nothing, I stood up, and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and a fixed, anticipatory expression, as if she was expecting me to hit her, or smash some dishes. She wasn’t afraid—I think she was hoping I would, because she needed to hear the sound of something breaking; and in fact as I was leaving I heard her take something—a glass, a plate—and dash it on the kitchen floor.

I took a taxi downtown, let myself into my sleeping parents’ apartment, wrote a short note that I left on the kitchen table, drank a half-bottle of my father’s whiskey, and finally fell asleep in my old bedroom, fully clothed and on top of the covers. After that, I spent a few nights at a friend’s apartment on the Lower East Side, drinking too much and generally making a nuisance of myself. At last I called Bridget. We started out angry, then we both cried a bit, but just a bit and on the telephone. Then she pretended to be fine, so I pretended to be fine. I’m going to find another place to live, I said. It may take me a week or two. When I do, I’ll come get my things.

OK, she said softly, and she could have been wearing any expression. I don’t remember going by the apartment, but I must have; I’m sure she wasn’t there, and I took very little. I moved downtown, and when school finished that spring, I left the program.

Bridget and I lived in the same city for more than fifteen years after that, but I never saw her again, never spotted her on the street or ran into her at a party, on a subway platform, in a park, at a bar. Johnny and I resumed our friendship, but on a tempered and attenuated basis; once I moved, it was harder for us to get together, and when it became clear that I wasn’t going to finish my degree, we had less to talk about. Only once did Bridget’s name come up, the following spring. He’d taken a bus all the way downtown to meet me in a restaurant in the West Village; he was dressed in a well-cut suit and a white dress shirt open at the neck. We spoke of his mother, of his research, of an article in a policy magazine about natural resources in Nigeria; and then he said, By the way, have you heard from Bridget? I told him I hadn’t, not since the previous winter. He lowered his head. I think she’s having a hard time, he said. I changed the subject.

One screaming cold and whomping drunk night, nine months later, I dialed directory assistance and then called the number they gave me from a telephone booth on the corner of Houston and Bowery, and listened to the empty line ring and ring and ring.

It was Bridget herself who showed me the letters. I was in my thirties then, and living down on Barrow Street with R., the woman who is now my wife and the mother of my children. In the intervening years, my friendship with Johnny had dwindled down to an e-mail every so often; and each time I contacted him I had to find him all over again, following him through appointments, visiting professorships, and fellowships at think tanks as he moved his way up from his first job, at the American University in Cairo, to Stanford, and then to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was an inverse souvenir, traveling the world while I stayed in New York.

Then there was a morning when R. came back from an errand and dropped a handful of mail on the kitchen table, including the yellow slip for a package that couldn’t be delivered—as, indeed, no package ever was, because our mailbox was the size of a paperback book, and besides, all the locks had been jimmied open years before by junkies looking for Social Security checks to steal. I picked the slip up and R. shrugged. She was wearing a red-and-white striped top, and she had her hair in a ponytail that had come partly undone. I was here when the mailman came, I said. If he buzzed, I didn’t hear it. She smiled ruefully. Our mailman was an overweight man with tiny eyes and grey skin, who disliked everyone and hated us.

The next morning I went up to the little post office on Hudson, only to be told that whatever it was I’d received was being held at the larger station on Varick, where I waited in line for an hour and a half before discovering that it was out for delivery again. — Did you sign the card and leave it for the mailman? the surly woman behind the counter asked me. It came just yesterday, I said. It says here that you’re holding it for pickup. The woman stared at me as if I alone stood between her and contentment. You can try back tomorrow, she said. I left, passing a gulag line of penitents and beggars. Fortunately, I arrived back at my apartment just as the mailman was leaving, and when I showed him the slip, he examined it carefully, noted that I hadn’t signed it, asked for my ID, and then finally turned over a small box, wrapped in floral paper, sealed tightly with transparent tape, and addressed in a handwriting that I recognized immediately. The very sight of it made me pause, puzzled, and then suddenly suspended in a solution of memories.

The package was still sitting unopened on the kitchen counter when R. came home that afternoon. What is it? she said. I don’t know. It came from an old girlfriend of mine, Bridget, I told you about her.

Was she the Puerto Rican woman with the ex-husband who was a cop?

Cuban, and it was her brother, and no, I said. Bridget and I lived together for a year or so when I was in graduate school.

Well, go on and open it, she said. R. was mildly curious about my past, and occasionally surprised by it, but she never took it personally. So far as she was concerned, the real Mike had been born the moment she started loving me, and before that there had been no more than unformed clay.

The box was wrapped like a gift, and carried the same tremble of mystery and anticipation, and the faint hesitant fear that one will be disappointed. When the paper was off I found a small, glossy navy blue cardboard box, tied with a thin white ribbon. R. made a small noise, part intrigue and part concern. I felt the same, and for a second I considered the possibility that there was something terrible inside, the product of years’ worth of gathered fury. I was going to suggest to R. that she step into the other room, or out of the apartment entirely, but when I looked at her she just raised her eyebrows and nodded at me to go ahead.

Inside, I found another box, this one ochre and tattered, as if it had been opened and closed many times, or carried on a long journey. Taped carefully to the top there was an unaddressed envelope, and inside that a note. I have the whole assemblage here beside me. She wrote:

 

Hey, little boy, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? You’re probably not so little anymore.

It took me some time to find you. I hope you don’t mind hearing from me. We had some trouble there at the end, I know. I don’t think I ever told you that I was sorry, so: I’m sorry. Late, I know. I’ve always been late, and soon I’ll be late again.

I’ve been saving these for a long time, and now I don’t know what to do with them. So I’m giving them to you, and you can keep them, or destroy them, or you can pass them on, whichever you decide. I never thought you were as bad as I pretended you were, and I’m sure you’ll make the right decision.

Anyway, I’m doing well and I hope you are too.

Here’s a couple of kisses, one for each cheek:

x   x          

Bridget    

 

That was all she had to say, and it wasn’t true, she wasn’t doing well at all, but I didn’t know that. What I knew was that a time must have come for her; she would have been thinking about sending me this box, she would have written and rewritten her letter, paring it down until it said almost nothing. She would have wrapped it up and put it to one side, waiting. Anything at all might have inspired her: a death in her family, a month of remembrance, the discovery of an old photograph, a conversation with a friend, a man barely glimpsed who was wearing a black suede jacket like the one I used to wear. She didn’t tell me; she never would have. I took the box to the table.

Inside there were several stacks of letters, nestled side by side, the sheets hastily folded and entangled, in contrast to the neatness of the package they had come in. There were scores, hundreds of pages; a book of love, want, honor, and grief. But who had written them? I had left her notes from time to time, mostly silly and affectionate things that I taped to the mirror in the bathroom. These weren’t them, they were in postmarked envelopes mailed from New York to New York. I picked up one: it was dated the summer Bridget and I started living together, but addressed to her box in the college mailroom, where she stopped every so often to pick up administrative material and her check from the playwright. Then it was him? That elderly man whose marriage she’d once described as different but perfect? My darling, it began, and I stopped there, mystified. The handwriting was precise and elegant, in a way that seemed schooled and old-fashioned, and the language was slightly archaic, with the kind of ungainly formality which can be very beautiful if the heart behind it is large enough. My love, my breath, my future. But why would she send them to me? At the bottom of the page, it was signed Johnny. The planet underfoot was spinning and stopping, spinning and stopping again.

The next letter was even higher, half-mad, besotted. I feel as if I’ve been forsaken all my life, and will always be forsaken.

Well? said R.

They’re love letters, I said, a banal phrase that was inadequate to the depth and strangeness of the occasion.

Yours? she said, quietly. I shook my head. Hers? said R.

They’re from my friend Johnny, I said. To her. The rose, the lily, — the orchid, the most beautiful of them all.

Why is she sending them to you?

I don’t know. I haven’t seen either of them in years.

She came to the table, hugged me from behind, glanced down at the sheet in my hands, and said, I’m going to go return some phone calls. I kissed her wrist and she left.

My thoughts divided into nauseated waves. I was shocked and shame-sick. He had written to her over and over, fashioning the letters by hand and carrying them, with who knows what nervous purpose, to the blue boxes in the college mailroom, wondering, as he did, if everyone was watching him, if he was being foolish, if he was being unfair. He wrote to her helplessly, shivering and crying out, joyous in his pain. He was a prince and a mendicant, a skin mystic, part animist and part courtly lover, and mostly singular, as if he was inventing a religion for her on the spot, with all its traditions and mores. He despaired, he sang, he complained, he became lighter than air and then heavy as a stone. Each letter was a lash, and after almost every one I thought of stopping, of folding them all back up and burning them in the bathtub, but I didn’t stop, not for a little while. Instead I read through, turning.

Johnny hadn’t dated the letters, though for some reason he’d put the day of the week on the top right of every first page; and Bridget hadn’t kept them in any order. I began to try to organize it all, looking for repeating phrases, cryptic figures, front-to-back references, even as I shuddered and flinched. This season of lights entangled in trees must have meant Christmas. A sentence that mentioned a newborn baby left on the altar of a church was probably written the following March, when just that had happened in Harlem.

Others were more difficult to date. There was a reference to your new home, which could have been written around the time she moved in with me, or around the time I moved out. Another, claiming that a blood red moon is most auspicious for tests of every sort, might have been written anytime: I remember no such phenomenon, and it’s not clear whether the tests he was talking about were school exams or something more personal. Then he would be overcome again and time-travel in pieces to someplace medieval, as if conveyed by passions that struck him like blows on a drunk: he was slow to see them coming and responded by falling to his knees, only to rise in time, looking the wrong way and finding himself knocked down again from a side that he hadn’t seen. You were brought to me, like a lamb carried by an overflowing river. He must have started soon after we all met; his early references spoke of the cold, her distance, the bitter night. At other times he was calm, even sensible, offering her unaffected advice about her classes, about where to live and how. And then he would catch fire again and become hortatory, confessional, spendthrift, blue. Shall I pursue life through to the end without ever feeling your breath on my face? That is unbearable to me, but what can I do except bear it? As for the end, she apparently broke off contact with him a year or so after she and I split. He responded with two notes, one by turns stern and pleading, and the other repetitive and aggrieved, asking her why she had failed to show up for an assignation one afternoon and hadn’t returned his calls since. There was nothing I could positively date after that.

Did he write about me? Very little, though he would offer her comfort, forgiveness, advice. It pained me to see how much she needed all three. But he never undermined me or tore me down; and nothing in the letters suggested that either of them had ever betrayed me with so much as a kiss. He was discreet, my friend Johnny, loyal, and instinctively dignified. His protests were all positive, adoring, chaste. I do not believe that you can possibly be right in thinking he’s repulsed by you, he wrote in one letter, in response to what I can’t say; and of course I never was, and was stunned to find that she thought otherwise. And then a further surprise: You tell me he is breaking your heart, and you ask me what to do. I suggest to you that perhaps you simply think about him too much. You tell me you can’t stop, and I sympathize: I am in the same position. — Breaking her heart? Nothing she ever did or said to me indicated that she was suffering that way. It couldn’t possibly be true, and if it was true, I couldn’t possibly have known; and if I had known, I couldn’t possibly have fixed what she herself had broken. At last Johnny wrote: He’s one of the lucky ones; he doesn’t bear the burden of the future, and that was surely true; but I was going to bear the burden of remembering.

I was embarrassed by the carelessness of my fortune, like a naive tourist surprised by a beggar. Then I was angry at Bridget: she had been cruel to him. She could have discouraged him if she wanted to. She must have needed him, she should have let him go. Johnny should have contained himself, he should have drawn a line. As for me, I had been the cruelest of all. I should have known how he felt; I should have known how unhappy she was. God knows, I was ill-equipped to take care of her, to minister to her insecurities and soothe her anger, especially since I was usually the one who brought them out of her. Bridget! who was racy and funny, and the best company when she wasn’t in the worst mood, who struggled to believe in me, who was capricious, fearless, faithless, and proud. We were very young: Was that an excuse? Did I need an excuse? Someone would love her the way she wanted, someday, I was sure of that, but my thoughts were buzzing, distorted, and then they began to feed back, just a whine at first, gradually rising to a howl that was hard to control. I found myself confusing myself: maybe I was Johnny and I’d loved her, after all; maybe these were letters I myself had written, which she was sending back to me. When I see you in my imagination, I see your eyes, your lips, floating over the treetops. Maybe I had gradually come to lie to myself, over the anteceding years, until it covered my grief the way burled skin grows over a wound.

No. All around me there was the set dressing of my present life, the real one: magazines stacked on a chair, magnets affixed to the refrigerator, wineglasses in a drying rack by the sink, a box of laundry detergent. R. wandered back into the room, her hair down and her T-shirt rumpled. I guess I fell asleep, she said. What time is it? I had to check. Nearly dinner, I said, and began to box the letters up again. So? said R. She stepped into the bathroom to splash water on her face. Does she want you back? she called from across the hall. — No, I said. Not at all. Good, said R., now back in the room and kissing me with wash-cold lips. She can’t have you. I closed the box and put it on the shelf in the hallway closet. Why did she send them to you?

This I couldn’t answer. It was one of those acts that’s so far outside the boundaries of ordinary conduct that one can’t tell whether it’s grotesquely immoral or virtuous on a level one can’t comprehend. I didn’t know what she wanted me to feel: And did she expect me to respond? She hadn’t included a return address, so I had no way of knowing where she was, or where she’d last been. Did she want me to look for her?

My wife has the courting letters her grandfather wrote to her grandmother during the latter years of the War. She inherited them from her grandmother herself, just before the woman died; they were the founding documents of a sixty-year marriage that had eventually led to the bed in which she was conceived. But what of all those loves that miss their mark, those that were spurned, or unrecognized, or led to a broken or brief affair? And what about the words that were never written down, the sighs on the telephone, the shouts and tears? There must be millions just like Johnny. What happens to their ardor? Love completed becomes history at the least, family at the most, but love unstarted, or undone, is as volatile as acetone: powerful when it’s pouring, but when it stops, it vanishes, leaving nothing but a sharp odor in the air, which itself is soon dissipated. Bridget had those letters and no one to give them to, so she gave them to me. Even now, from the vantage of my maturity, with my oldest child old enough to have had her heart broken, with the city so changed you’d think all of us were new to it; even now I’m sorry—not for the things I did, but for the things I was too crass and callow to notice.

A puzzle, if it be too much puzzle, makes a dunce. A decade passed before I discovered that Bridget had died, just a few months after she mailed me the package; and then I learned it only because I happened upon a picture of her in a book of photographs, an artful miscellany of the days that once were, which I found in a store on Prince Street one afternoon when I was waiting for my daughter, who was then in middle school, to finish her guitar lesson. Such a bright and colorful street, then; all the black-and-white had been buried, but there was Bridget, emerging from a halftone print, a slightly leering smile on her face as she sat at the banquette of some long-forgotten restaurant, grasping both a beer bottle and a cigarette with her right hand, while her left was brushing her hair back. Underneath was her name and below that her telephone number, which struck me as a curious thing to publish—until I looked closer and saw the faint, poorly printed smudge of an initial 1, which turned seven digits into eight, a pair of years encompassing all the time there had ever been a Bridget. Then I felt something peculiar crawling between my shoulder blades, as I realized for the first time what I now take to be an immutable law of the universe: that any two things grow farther and farther apart over time, edging away from each other while facing in opposite directions. Later still, I would meet a man at a fundraiser for a local arts organization, who had known her in her running days and who told me, not without a witless satisfaction, that he’d always known she wasn’t going to last, that girls like that seldom do—though when I asked him what girls like that were like, he caught my tone, or perhaps my posture, and said, Oh, I don’t know.

I have spent some time thinking about those ever-branching worlds, the ones that exist only in might-have-been, where Bridget and I had never met, or having met as we did, had felt no attraction to each other, or had felt something but had no opportunity to act on it; where she hadn’t passed by the window of the coffee shop that snowy day when I sat waiting for her; or where we’d loved each other honestly and enough that we could stay together longer, even to the ends of our lives; or alternately, if she had loved Johnny instead of me; or again, if she’d disliked him enough to discourage him from wanting her so badly; again, if she had taken better care, if her immune system had been more composed and ready, if that pathogen hadn’t found a home behind her glorious pale skin, slowly smothering her, leaving her wasting at the age of twenty-nine (the life spoiling, spilling, unused); if Johnny hadn’t loved her still, perhaps more than ever, as a man will sometimes love a memory; if he hadn’t discovered that she’d died, severing his ties with a more innocent society, one where love was the heavenly thing, leaving him cast out, with no equity in this world; if he had been in New York, where he could grieve in a city where grief had taken up residence in every building, occupying them like a shadow severed from the body that had formed it (to me he belongs to New York, and always will); if, indeed, he hadn’t watched from his Paris home as the times grew so parlous and untenable in his ruinous West African home, with its madman playing President-for-Life, its frail economy, and incursions from a neighboring country perforating the border—a place he barely knew, though he had spent his life in filial obedience to it; if he hadn’t fallen in with a group of young men, who together had grown angrier, more desperate, more proud; if he hadn’t been charismatic enough to rise to a position of leadership—Johnny with his flawless English, his passable French, his rudimentary Arabic, and his American nickname; with his education and his military service; and his pedigree, his self-possession, his compelling intelligence, and his charm. In the course of his communiqués to the outside world, he’s mentioned Bridget only once by name, but identified her as the cause of my cause.

He’s changed considerably, or else they have him all wrong. Or perhaps it’s both. I can’t say. Somewhere along the line he became an American citizen, even as he reverted to his given name (the newspapers call him what his mother called him: Dieudonné) and married an Eritrean woman who waits for him now in Rome. He has a twelve-year-old son. Wife and child were left behind while he pursued his campaign, which seems to have been something between a run for office and an attempted coup: they announced his candidacy just a few days before the elections, managed to win or take over a few radio stations, had talks with a troika of generals whom they hoped might support them. The whole thing might have been heroic, had it had even a slender chance of succeeding. He was arrested on Election Day morning. His trial was the next day and lasted eighteen minutes.

I can imagine him, sitting in some dark, well-guarded jail cell, I can sense the stink of the place, the dampness of the rainy season condensing on the bars, punishments past and punishments to come squatting heavily on the air. I can imagine him calmly reading Vico, say, or perhaps a volume of Rilke, to while away the hours between beatings and the days before his execution. In the meantime, the State Department has registered a stern protest, the French have made an effort to get him freed by diplomatic means, and a consortium of supporters, composition unclear, is rumored to have raised a considerable sum to ransom him home. All have been rebuffed. I now believe our government must have needed him for something, though I don’t know what. Some value had accrued to him in the years since I’d known him: rare skills, important friends. A few nights ago, when the Atlantic sky was blotted with clouds, an American Special Forces team attempted a surreptitious rescue, coming in low over the border from an airfield in the nation next door. It ended in disaster when the moon, at the very last minute, broke through, and their helicopter was shot down by local forces with shoulder-mounted missiles. Outside my window, New York trips along, parti-colored as a felted jester, the air smells of car exhaust and fresh bread, the sky overhead is decorated with snowy contrails, and my old friend is scheduled to die on Thursday.