A Week as Andrea Benstock

Tuesday April 5, 1966

She stirred when the telephone rang. When it sounded a second time she fumbled for it, but there was no phone on the table on her side of the bed. For a moment she was disoriented. Then she heard Mark saying, “Yes, thank you.” She lay still, getting her bearings, while he hung up the phone and swung out of the bed and padded across the carpet to the bathroom. A moment later she heard the shower running.

In their house on Aspen Drive the bathroom was at the opposite end of a long hallway from their bedroom, past Robin’s room and Mark’s study. In their house an alarm clock woke Mark five mornings a week, not a telephone, and more often than not she was awake before him, the baby changed and fed and breakfast on the table by the time he had finished his shower.

But she was in New York now. The baby was four hundred miles away. Mark had left a call at the desk for eight o’clock, so by now Andrea’s mother was probably parked in front of the television set giving Robin her bottle. And she, Andrea, was a lady of leisure, and it would be time to get up soon enough, but this bed was comfortable. Not as comfortable as her own bed, not as familiar, but comfortable enough.

She must have fallen back asleep, because suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder, a voice near her ear. “Better get up, honey. The kid’s crying and I can’t do a thing with her.”

“Just hold a pillow over her face. She’ll stop.”

“Jesus!” The hand left her shoulder, and she rolled over, grinning.

“I think you lose,” she said.

“What a thing to say.”

“Well, what a horrible way to wake me, I heard the phone and I tried to answer it but it was on the wrong side of the bed. So I managed to figure out where I was. It’s pretty strange not knowing where you are.”

“Listen, I heard garbage trucks a few hours ago and tried to remember if I took the cans to the curb before we turned in last night. It took me a minute. Want to get some breakfast? I’ve got time, but just barely.”

“I don’t know.” She blinked at him. “You’re all dressed already. What time is it?”

“Almost eight-thirty. I’m supposed to meet Kramer and Lieberman at nine-thirty at their offices. It’s too far to walk but it’s just a short cab ride. I figured I’d just grab a cup of coffee around the corner but if you feel like breakfast—”

“Let me think,” she said, and yawned. “I think you’re in a hurry,” she said, “and I think I am feeling very lazy. Why don’t you just grab your cup of coffee? But have a roll or an English muffin or something with it.”

“Maybe.”

“A toasted bagel, a piece of Danish. Something in your stomach.”

“Well, I probably shouldn’t face those sharks on an empty stomach. You’ve got a point there.”

“You’ll run rings around them. They won’t be able to take their eyes off your tie.”

“Is it too loud? I wasn’t sure.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“I could change it.”

“No, don’t. As a matter of fact it’s perfect with that suit. I was just teasing you a little.” She sat up in bed. The sheet dropped away from her and she saw that his eyes were drawn to her breasts. Her body still thrilled him, and not merely in intimate moments. Frequently she would turn while performing some routine chore, loading the dishwasher or putting away groceries, to catch him studying the curves of her flesh.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said.

“You could always skip breakfast.”

“You’re tempting me.”

“Of course you would probably want to take another shower. And Kramer and — I forget the other one.”

“Joel Lieberman.”

“They might wonder why you kept smiling all the time. But if you’re willing to chance it—”

“Maybe I better take a rain check.”

She nodded. “It’s important today, huh?”

“It could be. It’s hard to say.” He picked up his briefcase. “Well,” he said.

“You’ll be fine.”

“Hope so. Will you find enough things to do today? I guess you can kill a whole day shopping without much trouble.”

“And I might go to some of the museums.”

“Want to get back here about five, five-thirty? If I’m late I’ll call, but I don’t think I should be late. We’ve got Fiddler tonight, and think about some place for dinner.”

“Right now I can’t even think about breakfast. But you can. You’d better get going.”

He bent over to kiss her, and his hand found her breast and cupped it. Her body responded automatically, the nipple stiffening against his palm. “If you don’t go now,” she said, “I won’t let you go at all.”

“Threat or promise?”

“Go on. And good luck, darling.”

When the door closed behind him she settled her head on her pillow and closed her eyes. Almost at once she realized that she would not be able to get back to sleep. At first she resented this; it was one of her rare chances to sleep late and she was unable to take advantage of it. But at the same time it was an even rarer opportunity; she was in New York and she had a whole day to spend however she saw fit. It seemed almost sinful to spend such a day, or even a part of it, lying in bed.

Robin was fifteen months old, and this was only the second time Andrea had been away from her overnight. The first time had been in June; they had driven up to Stratford with Barb and Jerry Singer for the Shakespeare festival, seeing a play Friday night, staying overnight at a motel, then attending a matinee before driving on back to Buffalo.

That had been a delight — it bothered her a little how readily she had put her daughter out of mind as soon as she was out of sight — but it had been categorically different. On that trip she had been with Mark throughout, with no time at all to herself. Now she had a whole day, and she was in New York, and she wondered how she would go about spending it.

She sat up in bed and smoked a cigarette. That sensation, waking up in a strange bed and not at first knowing where she was. For some reason or other it was bothering her after the fact and she wondered why. Had she become that thoroughly settled, so much a creature whose life revolved around her physical home? They had been living in the house on Aspen Drive for almost a year now, and she’d slept in the same bed for longer than that, ever since they returned from their honeymoon and set up housekeeping on Kenmore Avenue. In Stratford she’d known at once where she was, perhaps because of the way she had awakened. That morning she had been conscious of Mark’s body beside her before she was conscious of anything else, and she had pressed against his warmth and found him with her hands, stroking and exciting him while he slept, so that they had drifted into gentle languorous lovemaking before either of them was genuinely awake.

When had she last lost her bearings this way? She couldn’t remember.

After her shower she had a difficult time deciding what to wear. She had brought only a small suitcase, so her choice was limited, which should have made the selection process a simple one. But everything seemed too dressy or too dowdy. She had not yet defined how she would spend her day, yet she was able to sense that none of the clothes she had brought were quite right. She settled finally on a green plaid skirt and a gold Shetland sweater. She had bought both in Stratford and had not had a chance to wear them.

She ate breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, signed the check, left the room key at the desk in case Mark returned before she did. Outside, she walked over to Fifth Avenue. It was cool out, and although she knew the air was polluted it tasted crisp and clean to her. She stood for a few moments on the corner in front of the Plaza Hotel and looked at the row of horse-drawn carriages. There had been a time in her life when she had wanted nothing more than to be taken for a moonlight ride through the park in one of those carriages. She had had quite a few dates in New York while at Bryn Mawr, and one or two boys had suggested that a hansom ride was something they ought to try sooner or later, but somehow they had never gotten around to it. Later, when she lived in New York, it wasn’t the sort of thing she and her friends did. It was a tourist thing, like visiting the Statue of Liberty or taking the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. When you lived in New York you didn’t do tourist things.

After a moment she approached one of the drivers. He was a pug-faced man around forty, wearing a black top hat and an ancient cutaway morning coat. His horse was also wearing a hat, a straw with holes cut for its ears, and with a nosegay of flowers tucked into the hatband.

“Pardon me,” she said. “Could you tell me how much a ride costs?”

He smiled. One of his lower front teeth was missing and she tried not to stare at it. “Give you a nice long ride around the park for twenty dollars, ma’am.”

“Do you just go through the park?”

“Anywhere you like. Just like a regular cab except there’s no meter ticking away at you. And we don’t pollute the air. Horses smell a whole lot better than cars, don’t they?” He smiled again, and she returned the smile. “We’re licensed to operate throughout the five boroughs, just like any other taxi. ‘Course in practical terms we don’t go outside of Manhattan. Imagine old Gypsy here clip-cloppin’ through the tunnel! But we got the right, according to the law. Where do you want to go?”

She considered it, but only briefly. “Maybe later,” she said. “If my husband’s interested.”

“You bring him around. Little ride through the park turns a man romantic all over again.” And he winked broadly at her, like a low character from Elizabethan comedy.

She walked down Fifth Avenue toward Bergdorf’s. Twenty dollars — had it always been that expensive? No wonder none of her dates had made good on that particular promise.

Would Mark take her? Certainly the expense wouldn’t bother him. Twenty dollars now was a far less significant amount to her than it had been when she had lived alone in the city. Their room at the Essex House cost almost twice that per night, and dinner last night must have run around thirty dollars with the tip. Of course the bulk of their expenses would be charged to Mark’s firm and ultimately paid by the client on whose behalf he was making the trip. But he was prepared for her to spend a few hundred dollars of real money on clothes today, and he certainly wouldn’t balk at indulging a twenty-dollar whim if she wanted to ride around for half an hour in a carriage.

Maybe that night. Maybe after dinner and after the show. They could afford the twenty dollars, and they could afford to do tourist things. Because she did not live in this city now. She was a tourist. She could go to the Statue of Liberty, she could look down at the city from the top of the Empire State Building. These were not necessarily things she wanted to do, but she could do them if she wished.

It was strange, the realization that she was indeed a tourist. She didn’t know whether she liked it or not.

There was nothing at Bergdorf’s. She kept trying things on and couldn’t find anything she liked at all. She didn’t really need anything, but for some reason or other she felt determined to buy something, if only she could find something to buy. As if she needed something tangible in hand to justify how she was spending this particular day.

She gave up finally and was almost out of the store when she thought to pick up something for Mark’s mother. She selected a box of monogrammed handkerchiefs. She wasn’t sure that it was necessary to bring a gift home for her mother-in-law but she guessed that it would be good family politics. Although they got along well enough, she was fairly certain that Adele Benstock did not like her very much. That was fine with Andrea, who did not like Mrs. Benstock at all. There was no need for them to like one another, but there was every reason why they ought to get along well together, and she found it effortless to get on with her mother-in-law. Mrs. Benstock might never like her, but she would nonetheless feel that Andrea was an excellent wife for Mark, a superb mother for Robin, and, all in all, an eminently satisfactory daughter-in-law.

Why didn’t she like Mark’s mother? Not because the woman was narrow-minded and stupid and uncultured. She was all of these things, but that didn’t explain Andrea’s feeling toward her. Harry Benstock was at least as objectionable in all those areas; if he was not precisely stupid, the lout animal cunning he possessed was no more endearing than his wife’s stupidity. Harry Benstock was, in almost every respect, a genuinely despicable man. And yet, although Andrea did despise him to an extent, she could not help somehow liking him in spite of himself. There was a toughness, a feisty quality to him, and she responded to it, even admired it.

Of course now that she had bought the handkerchiefs for her mother-in-law she was locked; she would have to buy presents for her own parents, and for her father in-law. Perhaps it would be simpler all around to throw the handkerchiefs away. For that matter, she could keep them herself; there was that to be said for having the same initial as one’s mother-in-law.

She wandered on down Fifth as far as Saks, taking her time along the way, examining store windows and passersby. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, and she realized that she herself was walking quite slowly.

How long had it been since she had done any real walking? She drove almost everywhere these days. She occasionally took Robin for walks in the neighborhood, but walking as a means of getting from one place to another was no longer a part of her life. No one walked in the suburbs. Everything was too far away, with nothing to look at en route but other people’s houses. It was much easier to pop the baby into his car seat and drive wherever she was going. She hardly ever went downtown, and all the stores in her area were either situated on shopping plazas or had their own parking lots.

People in the suburbs only walked behind things, she thought. She walked behind a carriage or stroller, or behind a shopping cart. Mark walked behind a lawnmower during the warm months and a snow thrower in the winter.

She tried on three dresses at Saks and found one that would do. It was a navy sheath, cut low in front but not too low. She could have found the same dress in Buffalo but decided to buy it anyway. She told the salesgirl she would take it with her, then changed her mind. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just something extra to carry. Would you mind sending it? And—” handing her the hankies — “could you possibly tuck this into the package? Thanks.”

She stopped for lunch at a delicatessen on Forty-ninth between Fifth and Sixth. She ate a corned-beef sandwich and drank a bottle of celery tonic. The corned beef was no better than what she bought regularly at Mastman’s, but the celery tonic was a beverage she had had only in New York. Was it available in Buffalo? She didn’t know, had never looked for it, had never heard of anybody buying it.

After lunch she signed a petition. She had returned to Fifth Avenue and was heading uptown toward the Museum of Modern Art. At the corner of Fifty-first street a boy with an embryonic beard was exhorting people to help stop the war. She had passed him before without a second thought. Now, for some reason, she stopped.

“LBJ’s sending fifty thousand more,” the boy was chanting. “Help us tell him how we feel. LBJ’s sending fifty thousand more. Help us tell him—”

Two girls about the same age as the boy sat on folding chairs behind a card table cluttered with clipboards and leaflets. Both had long straight hair and both wore jeans and loose sweaters. They looked impossibly young. She wanted to talk to them but could think of nothing whatsoever to say.

“I don’t have a pen,” she said.

One of the girls handed her a pen and passed a clipboard to her. The piece of paper on the clipboard had spaces for a couple of dozen signatures with nothing at its top to indicate precisely what she was signing. She decided it didn’t much matter.

“Andrea Beth Kleinman,” she wrote. “47 Jane Street, N.Y.C.”

“I wonder what she really looked like.”

The voice startled her. She turned, and a man smiled at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Were you talking to me?”

“Thinking aloud, actually. But don’t you wonder what she looked like? Modigliani obviously distorted faces. He couldn’t have encountered an endless parade of long-necked women, could he?”

“I suppose not.”

“I often think it would be interesting to have photographs of the subjects of portraits. So that one could know to what extent the artist pays homage to reality. And what he finds with a brush that the camera couldn’t capture.”

“I never thought of that.”

She turned toward the picture, imagining what Modigliani’s model might have looked like, trying to recall the Modigliani at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo. The man moved alongside of her and they looked at the picture together.

“I’d love to know what Rembrandt’s models looked like. Or Hals’s. Of course they didn’t have cameras at the time, did they? But do you know Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein? I’ve seen photographs of the woman taken at about the same time, and Picasso’s portrait is surprisingly authentic. And yet he invests the woman with so much more character than the camera lens picks up.”

They moved on together to the next picture. She generally preferred to be alone in museums and art galleries, but now she found this man’s company engaging. He was about thirty-five, she judged, with a not unattractive wedge-shaped face. His hair was dark brown and shaggy, his moustache a fighter brown with red highlights. He wore a tan corduroy jacket over a dark blue shirt open at the neck.

In front of a cubist Picasso he said, “You know, I never understood cubism until quite recently. I knew intellectually what it was about but I didn’t really comprehend it on a gut level. Do you ever smoke marijuana? I swear by all that’s holy I’m not an undercover policeman.”

She laughed. “I have smoked,” she said. “Not in years.”

“I don’t often, but once in a while. Usually when I’m alone listening to some music that I really want to absorb. But the point is that a couple of months ago I got high, you see, and I came here, and for the first time I looked at cubist things, at this particular painting as a matter of fact, and I was able to dig it. To understand just what was going on. It’s as if I learned a new way of seeing things, and I can still do it now without being high.”

“That’s interesting.”

“On the other hand, I still don’t like cubism much. But now I have a better idea why I don’t like it.”

She laughed. “You almost had me ready to try it. But if I’m not going to enjoy the paintings any more I guess I’ll pass it up.”

“Oh, I think it’s worth knowing why one doesn’t like something, don’t you? You really ought to try it some time. Do you get a chance to come here often?”

“I’m afraid not. I’m from out of town.”

“Oh? Whereabouts?”

“Upstate. Buffalo.”

“I’ve never been there. Do you like it?”

“It’s not a bad city. Do I like it? Well, it’s home, you see. I was born there.”

“I would have thought you were a New Yorker. You’ve lived here, haven’t you?”

She nodded. “For a few years. After college.”

“Radcliffe? Smith?”

“Bryn Mawr.”

“That would have been my third guess.” He smiled. He had a very easy smile. He looked at his watch, then at her. “I have twenty after two. Are you planning to go to the movie?”

“I hadn’t even thought about it.”

“It’s Citizen Kane again.”

Did she want to sit through a movie? It seemed silly to squander part of a free day in New York at the movies, even to see Citizen Kane, even in the Modern. She told him she didn’t think she would go.

“I’m not going either,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have time for a cup of coffee? Or a drink, if you’d prefer.”

“Oh, I don’t—”

“You don’t want to spend too much time on your feet, you know. It’s very easy to do that in New York. We could have coffee downstairs, or there’s a decent sort of pub just around the corner.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Which shall it be? Coffee or cocktails?”

He was trying to pick her up. He was very obviously trying to pick her up, and how had she managed to be quite so stupid about it? The Modern during the afternoon was a standard meeting place, as established as Bloomingdale’s on Saturdays. And he had been trying to pick her up all along, and doing a rather good job of it, and it was only now dawning on her what had been going on.

She felt herself blushing and couldn’t seem to do anything about it.

“I have to go,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I have to meet my husband. I’m late, I have to meet him—”

“Oh, really.”

“I—”

“You don’t have to meet him for a few hours, do you? Or you wouldn’t have weighed the prospect of seeing Citizen Kane. Is that your way of telling me you’re married? I’d already noticed the ring, you know.”

Involuntarily her eyes went to his hand. He was not wearing a wedding ring. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Not all men wore them.

“Divorced,” he said. “Almost three years now.”

“I’m not divorced,” she said. “I’m very happily married. I have a fifteen-month-old child.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Why? A girl.”

“I have two girls. Eight and five.”

“I’m sorry, but I—”

“Rachel and Melissa.”

“Pardon me?”

“My daughters. Their names are Rachel and Melissa. What’s your girl’s name?”

“I don’t see that it concerns you.”

“It doesn’t. How long have you been married?”

“That’s none of your business either.”

He raised his eyebrows. “The hell of it is,” he said, “that we were having a perfectly enjoyable conversation. At least I was enjoying it, and I had the feeling you were enjoying it, too. Was I wrong?”

She didn’t say anything.

“I don’t think I was wrong. Then you suddenly decided that having a cup of coffee with me was tantamount to violating your marriage vows. I don’t recall making an immoral proposition. Or even a moral one. I didn’t expose myself or use bad language or anything of the sort. Did I?”

“Please,” she said.

“Is your husband wildly jealous? Would he object to my buying you a drink?”

“I would object.”

“Would you happen to have any idea why?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. It was a hell of a thing, she thought, when a woman couldn’t go to a museum alone without some idiot making a pest of himself. But he was not an idiot. And it was her fault as much as his; she had stupidly played a particular role in a particular scene without knowing what was going on.

Speaking very deliberately, she said, “Look, it’s my fault. I’m just a dumb little housewife from the sticks. I thought you were being friendly.”

“I was being friendly.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, but do you know what I mean? You’re all uptight because you’ve suddenly discovered that I’m attracted to you sexually. I won’t deny it. You’re a very attractive woman.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Let me finish. Because I find you interesting and attractive you assume I want to have sex with you. Well, there’s no time for that even if we were both so inclined. I’m not terribly casual about sex. It’s not something I have with strangers. I’m not good at that sort of thing. I asked you to have coffee or a drink on the chance that we might get to know each other and might discover that we liked each other. I think I might have liked getting to know you. I think we both might have liked it.”

“Please leave me alone.”

“I’m making you uncomfortable. I don’t mean to, but I want to say this.” He looked, she realized suddenly, as if on the verge of tears. “I don’t want to have coffee with you now. It’s a shame but we would both just make each other increasingly uncomfortable. But I want to ask you something. You used to live in New York. Were you always like this?”

“I never let strangers pick me up, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s not. Were you always this opaque? This closed off.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Really?” He smiled suddenly. “Then we’ll both have something to think about, won’t we?” He glanced at his watch. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I think I’ll see that movie after all.”

There was a bar around the corner. A few tables were occupied toward the rear, and at one end of the bar two men in suits were involved in a conversation that evidently required a lot of manual gestures. She took a seat at the opposite end of the bar from them and ordered a dry bourbon Manhattan.

Was this the decent sort of pub he had alluded to? Would he have brought her here if she’d permitted him to?

She swallowed half her drink, lit a cigarette. She thought of the man and the conversation they had had and could not imagine a way she could have handled things more ineptly. She held her hand out and looked at it. Her fingers were trembling perceptibly.

There were so many better ways open to her. Would it have been so terrible to have had a drink with him? Hardly. She had enjoyed his conversation, and as long as he knew in advance that a drink was not prelude to anything, she might legitimately have accepted his offer. “A drink? I’d like that, but it would have to be a quick one. I’m meeting my husband in an hour.” That would have done the job neatly enough, and it would have been fair and aboveboard. If he was honestly willing to settle for her company he could have it; if he was looking for a bed partner he would know to look elsewhere.

I’m sorry, she thought. But I really am just a dumb Jewish housewife from Buffalo.

How would her friends have handled the matter? It was instantly tempting to say that they never would have walked into the Modern in the first place, but that was not really altogether fair. Barbara Singer would have moved mountains to get to the museum if only someone had told her it was a cultural must. And Eileen Fradin would have gone if a good friend — Andrea, for instance — told her she was likely to enjoy it. And some of her other friends—

But concentrate on those two, Barb and Eileen. How would they have handled the Post-Impressionist Romeo?

Barb would have flirted, she decided. She would have kept it entirely in hand, but she would have taken unbridled delight in it, perhaps accepting the drink, or else refusing it in such a manner as to convince the man that it broke her heart to leave him. Yes, she would have flirted, and she would have been damned good at it, and yet there would have been something curiously innocent about the entire performance, perhaps because its resolution was predestined from the onset; Barb would go home to her husband virtue intact, and Jerry Singer would reap the benefit that night of passion inspired by another man.

And Eileen? Andrea narrowed her eyes in concentration. She knew Eileen better than she knew anyone else, certainly better than she knew Barb Singer, yet it was more difficult for her to predict Eileen’s reaction. The girl was a curious mix of naiveté and intuitive shrewdness. There were, she decided, any number of ways Eileen might have handled the man. She might have chopped off the conversation at the beginning, never giving him the opportunity to make the overtures to a pass. She might have mentioned her husband and children eight times in the first two minutes, so stressing her marital status as to put the man utterly off stride. Or she might have managed, with perhaps unconscious subtlety, to drain the entire incident of its sexual implications.

And could either of the two have followed through? Could Barb or Eileen, in some fantasy whirl, have accepted the drink and then taken a further drink at the man’s apartment?

A hard image for Andrea to entertain, even in fantasy. Barb had evidently had some experience before she married Jerry Singer, and she was so flirtatious as to become occasionally aggravating, but it was quite inconceivable that she might spend an afternoon in amorous dalliance with a stranger. And Eileen had slept with no one before she met Roger Fradin, and surely no one but him since, and was quite likely to go through life never knowing the touch of any man but her husband.

Yet if she had to pick one of the two for a casual encounter, it would be Eileen. Why, for heaven’s sake? Simply because she knew her better?

“Another of those?”

She looked up, startled. Had she suddenly become herself a magnet for lecherous males? But it was only the bartender, doing his job. She shook her head and asked him for the check.

She rode the bus all the way down Fifth Avenue and got off at Washington Square. She stood at the arch for a moment, smoking a cigarette. Then she walked diagonally through the park, still pretending with at least a portion of her mind that she was bound for no specific destination. It was, certainly, a pleasant day for a walk, with Millay’s April babbling and strewing flowers.

The Village, certainly, was as good a place to walk as any.

The park had a different air to it, and she wondered if it had actually changed or if she was simply viewing it through altered eyes, older eyes. She was undeniably older than when she had been here last, but even allowing for the few years which had passed, it still seemed to her that the people sitting on benches or lying loose-limbed on the ground were impossibly young.

They were certainly shabbier, and the boys had longer hair. And the girls — was it just her impression, or were they all nothing but echoes of the same girl, identical impressions stamped out interminably with a cookie cutter? They all had the same absolutely straight long hair. They all wore granny glasses over utterly empty eyes. They all beamed with vacant smiles of inner peace, a peace no doubt chemically induced. They were also all quite beautiful, but it hardly seemed to matter.

And there were far more blacks in the park. More in number, and more willing to make their presence felt. Or was that, too, a change in her own vision? Was she more aware of blacks now that she lived in a clean white suburb?

She quickened her step, walked past the old men playing chess and checkers. She crossed the street and headed west. She knew where she was going and it really was not possible to pretend otherwise.

It was hard to determine at what point the Lion’s Head had become her bar. There was a period first when it had been one of several bars she might or might not go to in the course of an evening, depending upon whom she was with or what sort of mood she was in. She had not been much of a drinker at that stage, but the fact remained that she had spent a considerable proportion of her time in places where liquor was sold. The White Horse on Hudson, the Remo and sometimes the Kettle on Macdougal, the Riviera, Julius’s (before it turned gay), the Back Door (before it closed down). And the Lion’s Head.

And then at some point the Lion’s Head became her particular place. She would tend to end her evenings there. Friends might call her there, and would leave a message if she was not there at the moment. And one evening Don smiled over the bar at her and said, “Missed you last night. I was gettin’ worried about you.”

“Well, it’s not as though I’m here every damn night,” she had said. And he smiled and shrugged and moved down the bar, and she realized that it was as though she was in there every night. Every damned night.

Now she hesitated at the entrance. It looked the same, unobtrusive enough. You almost had to know it was there in order to find it. She descended the half flight of steps, opened the door.

It seemed to be the same. It was unremarkable enough in appearance, a dark old New York saloon, one long room with a bar running the length of it, another room around the back with tables. But it was the same, the same as she remembered it, and she took a considerable degree of satisfaction in discovering this.

The bar was not crowded. Three men were at its far end, another man alone with a beer in the middle of the bar. The bartender had high Slavic cheekbones and a ragged Zapata moustache. His hair was as black as shoe polish. She had never seen him before.

But she did recognize one of the other drinkers. A man about forty, jowly, wearing a bulky sweater and corduroy trousers. She did not know his name or anything about him but she did know that she had seen him before, that he had spent time at this bar when it was her bar.

It surprised her that this pleased her quite so much, this recognition.

She took a stool at the near end of the bar and got her cigarettes out of her bag. She lit one and sat for a while, smoking, watching the smoke rise to the stamped tin ceiling. After a moment or two she became aware that the bartender was standing in front of her, waiting for her order.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was lost in thought.”

“Sure. It’s that kind of day. Get you something?”

“A light beer, I think.”

“Sure.”

The beer tasted good. The bartender took her dollar, brought back her change, and left her alone. In the next twenty minutes the outside door opened three times, and each time she turned her head at the sound. But the people who walked in were all strangers to her.

When she had finished her beer she caught the bartender’s eye. He brought her another beer. She had learned his name from another conversation, and she used it now.

She said, “Frank, does John Riordan still come here?”

“Sure. Haven’t seen him yet today. You a friend of his?”

“Old-time friend.”

“Usually he’ll come in around this time. Little sooner or a little later. You couldn’t set your watch by him”

“You never could,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“His book over there on the wall. The cover.”

“Oh?” Over beside the jukebox the wall was a montage of book jackets and photographs.

“The jacket, what they call it. You read it?”

“No.”

“Me neither. I don’t know how it’s doing. Selling, I mean.”

She hadn’t even known he’d had a book published. One had come out about a year after she was married and she’d read a review of it. It had been a collection of magazine and newspaper pieces. She’d stopped at Ulbrich’s to see if they had it in stock but they hadn’t. She could have had them order it, but hadn’t bothered.

She looked down at the beer glass. There was an expression her mother used frequently. Perhaps the phrase was not peculiar to her mother. It seemed to her that many of her mother’s friends used it. “He was beside himself.” It indicated that the subject of the sentence was enraged, taken aback, disconcerted, or any of a number of superlatives. It was a very useful expression, covering one’s reaction to all manner of outrages.

I am beside myself, she thought. And saw that the expression was a literal one, and that she’d had indeed been beside herself all day. One Andrea Kleinman was sitting there on that bar stool gazing down into that glass of beer and planning God knows what while another Andrea Kleinman, quite another Andrea Kleinman, was hovering somewhere in the middle distance, beside herself, watching and wondering, perhaps taking notes.

Andrea Benstock, idiot. You’re married, you have a house and a baby and two cars. Don’t you remember?

One or both of the Andreas saw a signature on an unread petition. “Andrea Beth Kleinman. 47 Jane Street. N.Y.C.”

She still had a third of a glass of beer in front of her when he came into the bar. She turned her head at the sound of the door, as she had been doing all along, but this time she really did know it would be him. She just knew it. She had been playing little doltish games with herself, giving herself two or three more door openings before she left, setting up little fail-safe devices either to permit their meeting or to foil it. But this time she knew it would be him, and she turned her head, and it was.

He looked very much as she remembered him. A tall man with a lumbering gait, broad in the shoulders, thick at the waist. Thicker indeed at the waist than when she’d seen him last.

His rust-brown hair was about the same length as it had been then. Before he’d worn it a little longer than was fashionable, and now it was a little shorter than fashion called for. And his beard, a little lighter than his hair, was a small and neatly trimmed affair confined to his chin and upper lip. It had been just like that when she’d first met him — at a party? at the White Horse? — and then shortly thereafter he’d let it grow in full. But now it was as it had been at that first meeting.

He had not noticed her. Someone had greeted him, and he was at the bar now, talking to someone she did not know. She was glad for a moment or two to observe him without being herself observed.

She recognized his jacket, a bulky tweed of no particular color. Had the elbows always been patched? And had he always worn glasses? He wore a little wire-rimmed pair now and they did not really suit him at all. They sat on his broad nose and looked like a pair of spectacles placed upon a statue in an attempt at humor.

She watched him, and sipped her beer, and then Frank went over to take a drink order, and leaned forward and evidently mentioned her, because a moment later John Riordan turned to glance very casually her way. His eyes brushed over her, stopped to take her measure, then widened.

“Well, I’m damned.”

“You always were, Jack.”

“It’s Andrea,” he said. He thumped his companion. “Do you know this lady?” he demanded. “No, you wouldn’t. Before your time. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised to see you here, should I?” Frank poured his drink, whiskey and soda, no ice, and John Riordan wrapped a large hand around the glass and carried it over to where Andrea was sitting. “Shouldn’t be surprised. Everything operates in cycles. Things go in and out of fashion and all things come to him who waits. Charlie Marx knew the whole story. Thesis and antithesis. His only mistake was hoping things would get better.” His eyes fixed thoughtfully upon her face. “You look well,” he said. He put meaning into the automatic phrase, and the words warmed her.

“Thank you. So do you.”

“You’re kind, but the hell I do. I’m getting just like my old man. The one thing on earth I fucking swore would never happen, and here I’m getting the same red nose and the same pot belly.” He slapped rhythmically at his abdomen. “He used to call it an alderman,” he said. “Did you ever hear that expression?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Wait a minute, I’m a goddamned liar. The old man never called it an alderman. Why should he? They don’t have aldermen in New York, for Jesus’ sake. I got that out of a book. Studs Lonigan, James Farrell. Old Studs was getting himself a pot belly and called it an alderman.” He drained his glass in a swallow and tapped it on the bar top. “Hell of a note when you steal things from old books and slip ’em into your own life. Another of the same, Frank, and bring the lady what she’s drinking. I knew you’d be back, Andrea. It’s always a question of time. This jacket is back in style again. I knew it would be sooner or later. Just keep things long enough and they’re all the rage again.”

“I’m just here on a visit.”

“You’re not moving back?”

She shook her head. “I’m an old married lady now.”

“That time you phoned me—”

“I got married that afternoon. It’ll be three years next month.”

“Kids?”

“A little girl. She was a year old in January.”

“God in heaven. You’re making me feel older than time. What else have you got? House in the suburbs? White picket fence?”

“Yes to the house, but there’s no fence around it.”

“And a car, of course.”

“Two cars.”

“Of course, God forgive me, two cars, his and hers. And any number of labor-saving devices, and a great deal of heavy furniture, and a recreation room in the basement paneled in knotty pine.”

“Knotty cedar. Pine is tacky.”

“God save us all.” He had been smiling throughout, his blue eyes glinting, so that she knew to take his words in good humor. “A suburban matron. The word sticks in my throat. It conjures up visions of a stout woman with bulldog jaw being summoned to search female prisoners. Scarcely an image that fits you.”

“Scarcely one I aspire to.”

“Let me look at you. You do look well, dammit. The life evidently agrees with you.”

“It does.” Their eyes met, and she gave a quick nod. “It really does,” she said.

“And your husband’s good to you.”

“He is.”

“Never takes a whip to you.”

“Not unless I deserve it.”

“Oh, I suspect you deserve it now and again, but he keeps you on a loose leash. I don’t believe I know your married name. You may have told me but I was in a bit of a fog that morning.”

“It’s Benstock.”

“And your husband is—”

“Mark.”

“Mark Benstock. A professional man?”

“A lawyer.”

“A lawyer.” He was not mocking, and he was not exactly judging, and there was really nothing in his words or tone to which she could object.

“You like it there, Andrea? Up in Buffalo?”

“It’s my home, Jack.”

“That’s a damned good answer. It says more than yes or no, doesn’t it? A damned good answer. I’ll tell you a secret. I fucking well envy you.”

“You envy me?”

“That surprises you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it does.”

He started to say something, then changed his mind. He took a pack of Camels from the breast pocket of the tweed jacket and offered her one. She reached for her own, then left her pack on the bar and accepted one of his Camels. The taste was much stronger than what she was used to, but not in an unpleasant way. He waved to the bartender for another round. She still had most of her beer left, and covered her glass with her hand, and the bartender replenished Riordan’s drink.

She said, “Straight whiskey and unfiltered cigarettes. You haven’t changed.”

“At this hour I’ll take soda in the whiskey, I’m afraid. I don’t know if I’ve changed or not. I’m fatter, we established that much. I used to wear these—” he touched his glasses — “just for reading. Now I only need them for seeing.”

“Shure an’ it’s ould age creepin’ up on you.”

“Didn’t I ever tell you not to do a brogue if you can’t do it convincingly? And as a matter of fact it’s middle age creeping up on me, and it’s doing just that, and it scares the crap out of me.”

“Does it really?”

“Sometimes.” He picked up his glass and looked into it as if reading tea leaves. “I said I envied you. I’m surprised that you’re surprised, Andrea. Seems to me you’re fairly enviable.”

“Well, I’m happy, Jack.”

“You’ve found yourself. You’ve got a stable life, you’ve got a good situation.”

“I know it.”

“Ever miss it?”

“What?”

He made a circle with his hand. “This.”

“I think of it sometimes.”

“And?”

“It’s hard believing it was me here. It wasn’t so long ago but it seems forever. Did you know a friend of mine? Winifred Welles, we called her Winkie?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“No, I guess she didn’t come downtown much. I don’t think you ever met her.”

“What about her.”

“Oh, nothing.” She took a small careful sip of beer. “How’ve you been, Jack? I don’t suppose you got married or did anything silly like that.”

“No, not yet.”

“Do you have anybody special?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, “I did for a while. It fell in the shit a month or so ago. No, it was longer than that. Around Christmas. That’s the best time to pack it in, you don’t have to buy presents. Otherwise I’d have been stuck with presents for her and her whole goddamned family, so I got off cheap. Luck of the Irish and all that.”

She looked at him and didn’t say anything.

“She was too young or I was too old, something like that. We got a couple of good months out of it. You can’t ask for a hell of a lot more than that.”

“I suppose not.”

“Unless you sign on for the whole trip. The kid and the two cars and the house in the country. I mean the suburbs. Does your suburb have a name?”

“Tonawanda.”

“Jesus, that’s beautiful. Tonawanda.”

“It was the name of an Indian tribe.”

“I’m sure it was. You wouldn’t make up something like that. Jesus God, I know someone who lives in something called Tonawanda.” He put his hand on her wrist. “I’m not making fun of you, Andrea. I swear to God I’m not.”

“Damn you, anyway.”

“Hey, easy, easy.”

“What I want to know is why can you do this to me? Tell me that.”

“Easy,” he said. His hand was on her shoulder, squeezing hard but not too hard. She felt tears welling up and couldn’t understand what had prompted them.

“Easy,” he said, gentling her as a man in a Marlboro commercial might gentle a skittish mare.

“I’m all right now.”

“Certainly you are. Finish that beer and let me buy you another. Or something else with more authority to it.”

“No, I don’t want another drink.”

“Whatever you say.”

She took one of his cigarettes without waiting for an invitation. He gave her a light and she gripped his wrist as she accepted the flame. Perhaps her fingers pressed his skin more than was necessary. Their eyes met for an instant and then she drew hers away.

“I’ve got a new book out,” he said.

“The bartender told me. The cover’s on the wall, he said.”

“Yeah. I don’t suppose you read the last one.”

“I saw ads for it. I tried to get it at the library but they didn’t have it.” She hadn’t, really. “It was a collection of essays?”

“Well, pieces for the Voice, mostly. And a few odds and ends.”

“Did it sell well?”

“Not too. What’s called a decent enough sale for a first book, which means it didn’t earn out the advance.”

“And the new book is—”

“A novel.”

“What’s it about?”

“People.”

“Always a good subject.”

“So they tell me.”

But they weren’t talking about his book any more. They hadn’t really ever begun talking about it. They were just taking turns uttering words like a pair of boxers shifting their weight from foot to foot in an early round, sizing each other up, feeling each other out.

“I’d give you a copy, you know, if I had one with me.”

“I’d like that. I’d buy a copy but it would be nice to have an autographed one.”

“Just lowers the value. The unautographed ones are the rare ones.”

“I don’t — oh, I get it.”

“If you wanted to walk over to my place I’ve probably got a copy lying around I could spare.”

“I don’t have very much time. I have to meet Mark fairly soon.”

“Whatever you say.”

She glanced elaborately at her watch, took a last drag on her unfiltered cigarette, leaned forward to stub it out in the ashtray. “You still live in the same place?”

“Same as ever.”

“Well, I guess I have time.”

One day that past August she had wheeled Robin two blocks in her carriage to Eileen’s house. Eileen had been extravagantly pregnant then, six weeks from her due date, carrying high and proud. The two of them sat in the yard on lounge chairs while Robin slept in her carriage and Eileen’s Jason dug with a trowel in the garden, either for worms or to get to China.

They sipped iced tea and talked about the heat and the Vietnam war and then about breast-feeding. Andrea had nursed Robin for the first three months.

“So she went straight to whole milk and you didn’t have to fuss with formula,” Eileen said. “I guess that’s simpler on top of being healthier and more natural. It’s supposed to be healthier, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know if it really makes a difference. It depends who you listen to.”

“But you wanted to do it.”

“Well, Mark wanted me to. He wouldn’t have been terribly disappointed but he preferred it that way and it didn’t bother me. If anything I think it’s more convenient.”

“I suppose his mother nursed him so he wanted the same for his daughter.”

“No, as a matter of fact, she didn’t.”

“Really? That’s interesting.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, Andrea. Just that it seems interesting. I’d like to nurse the new baby but the only thing is I don’t know if it’s fair.”

“To whom?”

“Well, I didn’t nurse Jason. I mean it never occurred to me to nurse him. Nobody was nursing babies that year. Oh, this will kill you. I told Rita next door I was thinking about nursing the new baby and you know what she said? She said, ‘Oh, that’s so unnatural!’”

“You’re kidding.”

“I swear to God. She’s the ultimate Polish joke, Andrea. She really is.” Then, leaning forward, “The thing is, would it be fair to nurse the new baby if I didn’t nurse Jason?”

“Well, how would he know the difference?”

“Listen, there’s plenty that they know. Or he could find out years from now and have a complex about it. What do you think?”

“I think you should do whatever you feel like doing.”

“I suppose so... I know.”

“What?”

“If it’s a girl I’ll nurse her but not if it’s a boy. Is that crazy?”

“It sounds it.”

“Well, I don’t want Jason to have a complex. That’s all.”

A dingy narrow building on Perry west of Seventh, five floors, two apartments to the floor, the stairwell full of cooking smells. His apartment was three flights up. They climbed the old stairs without speaking, he leading the way, and he opened the door with his key and stood aside to let her enter.

There was a police lock, a heavy steel bar that fitted into a steel plate on the floor and braced against the door. “That’s new,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“Got it a couple of years ago. I got sick of having junkies coming around and kicking the door in. They never found anything much to take but I resented the intrusion. A man likes his privacy, don’t you know.”

“You always did like your privacy.”

“Saloons exist to serve the needs of private people. There’s an eternal truth for you, Andrea. Hurry and write it down.”

“Won’t you use it in a book sometime?”

“If I remember, and if it still sounds good to me when the time comes. Drink?”

“No thanks.”

While he poured Glenfiddich scotch into a glass she took the measure of the apartment. It seemed to be more or less as she remembered it. She had not been to his place that many times. Half a dozen? And how many times had he come to her place on Jane Street? Eight, ten times?

Hardly a grand passion.

She lit a cigarette. The apartment did seem the same, and yet she was conscious now as she had not been previously that it was small — a single long narrow room with a tiny stove and refrigerator in one corner, a long wall of jerrybuilt bookshelves, a fireplace the flue of which was permanently stopped up, a threadbare maroon rug, third- and fourth- and fifth-hand upholstered chairs, a convertible sofa, its arms scarred by neglected cigarettes, which he opened into a bed if he had overnight company but slept on unopened if he was alone.

She was aware of the smallness now, and of the shabbiness, as she had been aware of the sour odors of the building while they climbed the stairs.

And yet—

“Here it is.”

She took the book from him, held it in both hands, turned it over to regard his photograph on the back cover. “It’s a good picture, Jack.”

“Considering what they had to work with.”

“Where was it taken? The Head?”

He nodded. “Leaning on the bar with a glass in my hand. The consensus was that my friends wouldn’t recognize me in any other surroundings. You sure I can’t get you a drink? There’s beer in the icebox.”

“I’m positive. ‘In Love with Crazy Jane.’ Where’d you get the title?”

“It’s a reference to Yeats.”

“Oh, the Crazy Jane poems. Right.”

“It’s the usual kind of crap. It asks the age-old question — can a Mick from Bay Ridge possibly contend with the human condition if some bastard makes the mistake of teaching him to read and write? And it comes back with the usual answer.”

“Which is?”

“You have to read the book to find out.”

She sat down on the couch, the book in her hands. She read the cover blurb without really paying attention to what she was reading, letting her eyes scan the column without their registering what they saw. After a moment or two he sat down beside her, reading over her shoulder.

“Autobiographical, Jack?”

“A little. Be better if it was. More honest. But you know me, I can’t tell a story without trying to improve it, so I turned the truth around and put in things that happened to friends of mine, or things I heard about, or things I made up altogether. There’s a lot of Catholic bullshit and a lot of Village bullshit and a certain amount of political bullshit, but not too much of the last because I got sick of it.”

“Aren’t you active in politics these days?”

“I go through the motions now and then but it takes a lot of effort. Dallas took all the fun out of it.” He emptied his glass and set it down heavily on the steamer trunk that served as a coffee table. Other glasses had bleached white rings on the lid of the trunk, and cigarettes had left scars. “The hell of it is that I never really thought that much of the son of a bitch. But you have to give him one thing. The deader he is, he better he looks. And the war goes on.”

“I signed a petition today.”

“Well, that should end the war in a hurry. It’s good to see the suburban middle class putting its ass on the line for the cause of peace and freedom.”

“I signed my maiden name.”

“Andrea Kleinman.”

“Andrea Beth Kleinman. And for my address I put my old apartment on Jane Street.”

He took her chin in his hand and studied her face as if to decipher a secret message. “Is that the truth? Really?”

“Yes. What’s so remarkable about it?”

“Christ, kid. You can’t go home again. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that?”

“Which home can’t you go to, Jack? That’s the part they didn’t tell me.”

Before Dallas, Harry Benstock had hated John Kennedy. It was a sly hatred, not like the open enmity the rich had shown for Roosevelt a generation earlier. It exemplified itself by little jokes and slurs. Andrea’s father-in-law had owned The First Family, Vaughan Meader’s comedy album. And he had delighted in a rather mindless record on which the singer took the part of the President’s daughter Caroline.

Now there was an unutterably tasteless portrait of JFK, with Jackie at his side, hanging in Harry Benstock’s den. And Harry Benstock was voluble on the subject of the martyred president, and how the best hope of the generation had died with him.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Andrea had heard him say often. “There’s no way Little Brother is ever gonna measure up to him. He’ll never fill those shoes.”

He had taken the book from her. He uncapped a pen, opened the book to the flyleaf.

“Hell,” he said. “You’re going to have tell me again. I keep thinking Beanstalk and that’s not it.”

“Just Andrea is fine.”

“C’mon, what’s your last name? Just so I’ll know.”

She told him, and spelled it for him. He wrote rapidly for a moment, then closed the book and capped the pen and put them both on the trunk top.

“You can’t read it now.”

“The whole book? I didn’t intend to.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh.”

She leaned back and closed her eyes. She was waiting, and she did not have to wait long before he insinuated his arm between her shoulders and the back of the couch. She did not move. Her eyes remained closed and she waited.

She felt his breath on her cheek, breathed it in, registered the aromas of whiskey and tobacco. After a moment his lips just touched her cheek. Then she felt him draw away from her.

She did not say anything. She heard him strike a match and draw on a cigarette.

“It’s good seeing you, Andrea.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what I just said. It’s good to see you. People lose touch.”

“Why is that, do you suppose?”

“They swim in different rivers. Something like that.”

“We’re in the same river now. Don’t you feel like spawning?”

“Well, that’s pretty direct.”

“I’ve always been pretty direct, haven’t I?”

“Yeah, I guess you have.”

“Well?”

He only hesitated for a moment. Then he kissed her and she surrendered immediately to the kiss, welcoming his arms around her, his mouth on hers. She did not hold anything back, but neither did she feel anything except an unfamiliar tightness in her chest.

This afternoon belonged to her. It existed independent of all other aspects of her life, past and present and future. It might or might not turn out to have meaning, but if it did the meaning was one she would probably not know for a long time. For the time being she was in a special limbo, answerable to no one, not even to herself.

All of this came to her in the middle of a kiss. When the kiss ended he released her and took up his cigarette from the ashtray. He took a drag on it and offered it to her. She drew on it. He said, “You don’t have to do this, Andrea.”

“Don’t you think I want to?”

“I’m not sure you know what you want. I’m just telling you there’s nothing you have to finish just because you started it. We’re both of us too old for that number.”

“I know.”

He leaned forward to put out the cigarette. “You were saying you’d have to meet your husband—”

“Not for a while.”

“That was a while ago.”

“There’s time.”

“Whatever you say.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Just don’t say anything,” she said. “Just, just let me do this. Just be still.”

She changed position on the couch, curling fetally with her head in his lap. She put one hand high on his thigh and cupped his groin with the other, holding him snugly. He expelled breath in a quiet sigh. She held him and rubbed her cheek against the back of her hand, then moved to blow warm breath between her fingers.

From that point on it had its own existence. She opened his zipper, extricated his penis. He sat quite still, altogether passive. She drew his pants a little ways down over his hips. Then, without any teasing, she took him into her mouth. And closed her eyes.

Yes. Oh, yes. How very nice this was, how pleasant, how tender, how warm. Men did taste different, one from another, and why shouldn’t they? So many other things served to distinguish one man from his fellow. Why should their taste be identical? Not that she could have specifically recalled the taste of this particular man. That was a nice conceit but scarcely true.

Ah, how exciting to serve as the vehicle of his excitement! To feel him grow in her mouth. How nice.

After a time he could not sit still. After a time his hips gave thrilling little twitches. He put a hand on her cheek, tangled the fingers of his other hand in her hair. It seemed to her that this last was an impossibly tender and thoughtful gesture, to tangle his fingers in her hair.

He spoke her name then and started to lean forward. But with one hand on his chest she made him sit back again, and her hand remained there, telling him that she wanted things this way, that this was her scene to be played out as she willed it.

And he sighed heavily and relaxed.

Of course. Because this was what men wanted. To be passive. Not to do but to lean back with their eyes closed and be done to. Oh, they would always want to make the gesture. They were willing, even anxious, to throw you a gentlemanly fuck. And they wouldn’t want you to think that this was what they really craved. That they were such passive individuals, receivers rather than givers. That what they wanted could be done as well, if not better, by another male. No, they would not want you to think that, and they would not want to think it themselves, but it was true nevertheless. This was what they wanted — to be very still and very silent, to be passive, to tangle their fingers in your hair while you sucked them.

His orgasm was abrupt and unanticipated, rather like a sudden cough.

By the time Mark returned to their hotel room, she had showered and dressed for the evening. He was in an excellent mood. His meeting had gone well and he was pleased with himself.

“Well, you’re certainly in good spirits,” she said.

“The best spirits. And it’s been a beautiful day, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be a beautiful night, and I’ll have a beautiful girl on my arm. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing.”

“And Joel Lieberman recommended a French restaurant around the corner from the theater and insisted I make reservations, which I did. And which we can cancel if you don’t feel like French.”

“It sounds fine.”

“So if you’d like to call your mother and find out how our pride and joy is behaving, and then we can get the show on the road.”

She placed the call and established that Robin was doing fine. They walked to the restaurant, a small and intimate room on West Fifty-first Street called Trompe l’Oeil. He talked at length about how he had spent his day and she tried her best to pay attention. It was difficult, because she could not really follow what he was saying. But she had long since learned to keep an alert attentive expression on her face, to nod at the right time, to show interest. And it was not really hypocritical, was it? Because she was interested in anything that concerned him. She simply had trouble paying attention.

The dinner was good enough. Mark’s menu French was quite competent and he had developed an enviable facility with a wine list. They skipped dessert and had ponies of cognac with their espresso.

“We’ve got to come here more often,” he said.

“This restaurant?”

“I wouldn’t mind, but I’d hate to drive this far just for dinner. No, I meant we have to come to New York more often. It’s what, seven hours on the Thruway? We should make it a point to get here twice a year. Hit some restaurants, see a couple of shows.”

“Well, it’s fine with me.”

They lit cigarettes and he asked her how her day had gone. She covered most of it. Shopping, the museum, the Village. She avoided mentioning the man in the museum, and of course she did not mention John Riordan. She was prepared to elaborate on some Village art galleries she could claim to have visited, but it wasn’t necessary; he looked at his watch and announced it was time they headed over toward the theater. He signaled for the check and caught the waiter’s eye almost instantly. He was very good at that sort of thing.

The show, Fiddler on the Roof, was the hardest ticket on Broadway. The New York lawyers with whom Mark had had business had managed to obtain a good pair of seats in the center section of the orchestra. There were other shows Andrea would have, preferred to see had she been consulted, but by the time the house lights dimmed and the orchestra was playing the familiar music of the overture, she decided she was just as glad they were seeing Fiddler.

Because it would demand nothing of her. Mark had owned the album for months and she couldn’t begin to estimate how many times he had played it. The action on stage, while colorful enough, did not require that much attention to be paid to it. She could sit in the theater as if in a concert hall, letting the music wash over her, sending her thoughts wherever they wanted to go...

After the act in John Riordan’s apartment they had both reached out at once, she for a cigarette — one of her own this time — and he for the wedge-shaped Glenfiddich bottle. He filled his glass while she scratched a match and lit her cigarette. He took a long drink, put the glass down, and smothered a burp with the back of his hand.

She said, “I’d better be on my way, Jack.”

“Just like that.”

“Pardon me?”

“It’s the fucking American dream, isn’t it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The disposable girl. As convenient as a TV dinner and about as nourishing.” He rearranged his clothing, worked his zipper. “You fall out of my life for a few years, then fall back in for an hour. No muss, no fuss, no bother. A man doesn’t even have to take off his clothes. Just put his head back and close his eyes and get his tubes cleaned, then put the whole tab on his Diner’s Club card.”

“I thought you enjoyed what we just did.”

“What we did? I don’t remember doing anything myself. What you did, you mean.”

She looked at him.

“Of course I enjoyed it. You’ve got a definite talent there, kid. If you ever want a testimonial in writing you can have it. I could even write you up in the Voice.”

She was on her feet now, looking down at him. “I don’t understand you at all,” she said.

“No?”

“You’re acting as though I took advantage of you. You’re like a girl who just lost her virginity. I swear that’s what you’re acting like.”

He drank whiskey and looked at her over the brim of the glass. “We keep losing our virginities,” he said. “We shed our virginities like peeling onions until we find they’re all we ever had.”

“The Celtic Poet number’s wearing a little thin, don’t you think?”

“The hell of it is I’m going to get drunk tonight and I hadn’t planned to. I don’t every night, you know.”

“How would I know that?”

“How indeed.”

“Jack?” She paused until he raised his eyes to meet hers. “Jack, do we have to be cruel to each other?”

His face softened and for a moment she thought he was on the verge of tears. “No, of course we don’t,” he said, his rasp of a voice thickened now.

“I’m glad.”

“Quite the reverse. We have to be very gentle with each other.” He stood up and reached to take her hand. “I wish you the very best, Andrea. You know that.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“I’ve always wished you the best, the very best. And I’m sorry for, well, for all the things I’m sorry for.”

“Don’t be sorry for anything. And neither will I.”

“That’s fair enough.” He walked her to the door. “By God, Andrea. It has been good seeing you, you know.”

“For me, too.”

“Drop in next time you’re in the neighborhood.”

“Oh, we’ll see.”

“Or don’t, but we’ll keep on running into each other down through the years. I’m afraid we’re in the same karass.” When she looked puzzled he said, “Cat’s Cradle. Don’t you people read Vonnegut up in Buffalo?”

“I only read the Book-of-the-Month. And of course the Reader’s Digest condensed books, we never miss those.”

“Now it’s you who’s putting me on. You might enjoy Vonnegut, though. He’s got an interesting head. Have you got my book?”

“Yes, right here.”

“It’s a failure. That’s not modesty talking, just a realistic appraisal. I found out it was harder to write a novel than I thought. But I did a lot of the things I set out to do in the sense of getting things out of my guts and onto the page. And found things out about myself in the course of writing it.” He shrugged elaborately. “Maybe you’ll find it an interesting read, anyway.”

On the way back to her hotel she had stopped to read the inscription on the flyleaf.

What he had written seemed to her to be almost deliberately remote and innocent, as if written to be read by someone else and passed over as the scrawl of a casual acquaintance. The signature — not Jack but his full name.

Had he written it that way out of consideration for her? Or was there something snide about the words he’d chosen?

Or was she overanalyzing things, as she had always done in her relationship with John Riordan?

The book would pose no real problems. It could be shown to Mark easily enough. But did she really want to have that conversation? For that matter, did she really want to read his novel? How awkward if it turned out to be a staggeringly bad book. And how disconcerting if it had things to say to her that she did not want to hear.

She could always borrow a copy from the library.

If they didn’t have it at her branch they could order it from downtown.

She tore out the flyleaf and shredded it, then dropped the scraps of it and the rest of the book into a litter basket.

After the final curtain they walked a few blocks to get clear of the crowd, then took a cab to a bar on Central Park South just down the block from their hotel. The room was done in dark wood and red leather. A pianist did a competently unobtrusive job with show tunes and standards. They talked easily about the show and about people they knew.

“I suppose you got to the theater all the time when you lived here,” he said.

“Hardly at all.”

“Really?”

“I couldn’t afford it, in the first place. I was a working girl. And the crowd I ran with, we didn’t go to plays much.”

“Funny to think of you running with a crowd.”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh.” He signaled for another drink. She still had most of hers left. He said, “I think we probably take more advantage of cultural events in Buffalo than your average New Yorker does. There’s less to do but we grab everything that comes along. Gordon Kramer was telling me today that he hasn’t taken his wife to a Broadway show in almost a year. Of course they’re out on Long Island and with a baby-sitter and dinner and all it costs him a hundred dollars to spend a night on the town, but he could afford it if he wanted to. And Joel Lieberman, they live right in Manhattan and hardly ever get to a show. He says there’s no urgency, you know if you don’t go one night you can always go the next night, and so as a result you don’t go at all.”

The waiter brought his drink. He raised his glass to her, took a sip. “I might get just the least bit high tonight,” he announced.

“You might even be on your way already.”

“It’s entirely possible.”

“You had a good day today, didn’t you, darling?”

“I had a wonderful day. And I’m having a wonderful evening. Something I haven’t told you yet. They offered me a job. Kramer and Lieberman.”

“Oh?”

“Very offhand, but it was a real offer. ‘If you ever get sick of it up there in Alaska, you’re the kind of person we’d like to have with us.’ Hell, it wasn’t a job they were offering me. It was an invitation to come in with them.”

“Are you considering it?”

“Not for a minute. And I’m sure they knew I wouldn’t.”

“Then—”

“God, I wouldn’t want to move to New York! Kramer lives in a house like ours except that he paid about twice as much for it and it takes him over an hour to get to the office in the morning. And Joel pays a good deal more each month to rent a four-room apartment than I pay to own a four-bedroom house. Not to mention that he’s living in a jungle and he has to send his kid to a private school. Would you want to bring up Robin in New York City?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Neither would I, and even without kids I wouldn’t want to live here. It’s just like everyone says, a great place to visit, and that’s as far as it goes.”

“That’s how I feel.”

“But the thing is—” he was signaling the waiter again—” the thing is that I never seriously considered the job and I don’t think they expected me to. But what they’re really saying, without saying it, is that they like me and they like the way I operate.”

“Well, I don’t blame them.”

“No, there’s a point to this, honey. They like me as a person and as a lawyer and they’ll be anxious to steer their upstate business my way. And they’re well connected, you know. They’re a couple of guys not much older than me who went out on their own and are doing damned well for themselves. Their upstate business comes to a few dollars, and if you get their business you’ll get bits and pieces from other people too.”

“I don’t understand. Don’t you already get their business?”

“Ah,” he said. He winked elaborately. “Does Gordon, Weissbart & Gordon get their business? Yes. But do I, Mark Alan Benstock, get their business? No.”

“Oh.”

“Oh is right.”

“You mean if you decide to go off on your own—”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Have you been thinking about that again?”

“Uh-huh.” Her hand lay on the table, and he extended his index finger and traced designs on the back of her hand. “Thinking a lot about it.”

“For a while, it sounds like.”

“For a few months.”

“You’re doing well where you are. And they like you.”

“Oh, they love me. And I’m doing quite well. And there are too goddamned many little Gordons and Weissbarts in the wings.”

“You’d go on your own?”

“I’d go in with a partner.”

“Jeff Kaiser?”

“Why Jeff? No, nobody from the office. That wouldn’t make much sense. I’d want someone who would bring in business I wouldn’t get otherwise, somebody who would give the partnership an extra dimension. Not from my office, and not even Jewish, as far as that goes.”

“You have someone in mind.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do I know him?”

“You’ve met him a couple of times.” He sipped his drink. “As a matter of fact, he was the one who broached the idea. He wants to be on his own because he’s not getting anywhere in his present connection, and he came up with the suggestion. And it’s funny, because I was not only thinking in the same terms but I was thinking he was the man I’d ask first.”

“You’re not saying who he is.”

“Oh, I’ll say sooner or later.”

“Cass Drozdowski.”

“You must be psychic. How in the hell—”

“It just came to me. You think it would work? You know, it just might. The two of you would complement each other in a lot of ways.”

“With his roots in the Polish community—”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean in terms of personality. You’re the brilliant Jew and he’s the solid Pole. And at the same time you’re very thorough and painstaking and he’s, what’s the word I want? Mercurial.”

“You can see it, can’t you?”

“Yes, I think I can. If you decide you really want to have your own office.”

“And I think I’m very close to that decision. Closer now than I was ten minutes ago.”

“I think you probably are. Would I have to become bosom buddies with Ellie Drozdowski? Not that I could possibly compete with her in the bosom department. I don’t mind Cass but she’s a little hard to take.”

“You two wouldn’t have to see all that much of each other.”

“I remember that New Year’s party at their place “

“I was just thinking that.” He lifted his glass to his lips but it was empty. “I think I’ll have one more. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why should I mind?”

“And will you have one with me? To drink to the future?”

“I can hardly refuse that.”

They had another round of drinks. He paid the check and left a large tip, and when they were outside he turned east instead of west. “No, our hotel’s the other way, darling,” she said.

“I know.”

“But—”

He took her arm and led her down the block to where the carriages were parked. “Always wanted to do this,” he said. “Once around the block, James. Pip pip, old top. Pop, pop, old tip. I’m not a nasty drunk, anyway. You’ll have to grant me that.”

“You’re a sweet man, drunk or sober or in between.

I’ve always wanted to do this. How could you possibly have known? And it’s every bit as much fun as I hoped it would be.”

“It’s been a good day, baby.”

“It’s been a very special day,” she said.