A Week as Andrea Benstock

Friday December 15, 1972

The morning started badly. She had wanted a shower and had planned on washing her hair before going to work. Toward that end she’d gotten up a half hour early to give her hair ample time to dry. But there was no hot water. While she stood sponging herself at the sink, a pale brown cockroach walked rather nonchalantly up the wall and scuttled into the medicine chest. A shudder went through her and she gritted her teeth, annoyed as much with her own reaction as with the insect itself. Roaches were a fact of life in New York. You couldn’t escape them, certainly not on her salary, and even the expensive new high-rises became infested sooner or later. She had been seeing more than usual lately, probably because a neighbor had had the exterminator come around with his chemicals and sprays. When she got around to it she would call the exterminator herself, and for a few days her apartment would smell of insect killer, and the little bastards would slip through the walls or tunnel through the plumbing and bother someone else. Just a fact of life, a drop of urban local color, like muggers and stalled subway cars and high rentals, and it was true that you could live in a suburb and ride in your own car and never see a mugger or a cockroach, but a couple of months ago she had decided finally and forever that she for one could not live that way, that sharing an apartment in Manhattan with transient insects was a better bargain than sharing a house in Tonawanda with a man she never should have married in the first place.

It was hard to say precisely when she had made the decision. But it had been October when she’d acted upon it, and now it was mid-December and she still couldn’t look at the little bastards without shivering. She could accept them well enough intellectually. Certainly there were enough things about them that could have been worse. They didn’t bite, for example, and they didn’t seem to eat much of anything, and she’d fallen in love with archy and mehitabel in high school, and none of this prepared her for the sight of the creature walking up her wall and into her medicine cabinet as if he owned the place.

Half of her English muffin got stuck in the toaster and she mutilated it getting it out. And she just missed one subway train and waited an unusually long time for the next one. When it came it was crowded. She had to stand all the way from Eighty-sixth Street to Times Square. Normally she would have taken the shuttle across town to Fifth Avenue but she was tired of being crowded, so she left the station and walked across Forty-second Street. After she had gone a block it began raining.

“Well, that just fucking figures,” she said aloud. “Shit!”

No one paid any attention to her.

This was her fifth week at the store. It was a foreign language bookshop at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, and Andrea had managed to get the job because she was more nearly fluent at French than the store manager. That her French was actually quite tentative turned out to be unimportant. The store carried a large stock of titles in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, plus scattered titles in a dozen other languages. No one could be expected to converse in all of those tongues, nor was it often necessary to speak anything but English. While the store’s customers might prefer to read in their native languages, virtually all of them spoke English quite competently.

“The odd merci or danke doesn’t hurt a bit,” Cal had told her, “but appearance and manner is the whole thing. That’s why old Hubbell hired you. It’s all image. You look slightly intellectual but not severe, you don’t talk through your nose, you don’t pop chewing gum, and you don’t dress like a hippie. Considering that you’re overworked and underpaid, how much more can they expect of you? He was lucky to get you.”

“Well, I’m lucky to have the job.”

“Oh, please. How could anyone be lucky to work here? Either the store’s empty or there are sixteen harpies yammering at you in as many languages, none of them one’s own. And when someone dishy does walk in, which happens once every third blue moon, he speaks either Swedish or Urdu and all the English he knows is I goink now and meet my wifes.” She laughed, Cal always made her laugh, and then he’d said, “I don’t know why I stay. I’ve been here almost two years now. I don’t know why I started in the first place. Yes I do. I’d had a little disagreement across the street with that pig at Doubleday. He’s not even there any more. And most of the stores in the neighborhood seemed to be full up, and I thought I’d get on the list and live on unemployment for a month or three, and then I was on that unemployment line once and I couldn’t believe what they put you through. It’s so incredibly tacky, the whole process, and when you think it’s not charity at all, they take it out of your check every week and when you come to get some of your own back they make you feel like you’re on a bread line. Well, my dear, I cashed my first check because I’d waited so long for it, and then I took this job just until something better came up.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am, lucky me. The months go by and here am I, and I can’t quit now, not until Christmas comes and brings my merry little bonus check with it. Not that it’s going to be enough to retire, but why save them the cost? If my bonus covers my own Christmas tips to the doormen and super and all the other seasonally smiling faces, I’ll be glad to break even. But I don’t think I’ll stick it out much after that. My goodness, I’ve been in bookstores since I came to this town.

That’s — well, it doesn’t matter how many years that comes to. Enough years, let us say. I can walk in anywhere and get a job just like that. I don’t have to stay here with the Urdu speakers. You know, I started working in bookstores in the first place because I always loved to read and I welcomed the chance to associate with literate people. Well, presumably literate people, anyway. So here I find myself surrounded by books I can’t read and people who don’t talk too good the English.”

“You could get a manager’s job, couldn’t you? With your experience.”

“Oh, who would want the responsibility, Andrea? If I were to have anything so crass as ambition I’d want to be ambitious for something more worthwhile than managing a bookstore. No, I’m far happier being a flighty little faggot clerk, and there’s a great security in being paid less than your worth, you know. If makes the bastards quite reluctant to see the last of you. I suppose I could earn more money but all that would mean is I’d pay more taxes and take more cabs. The walking’s good for my waistline. I have simple tastes, you know. And my apartment’s rent-controlled, and I’ve never cultivated a palate for caviar or cocaine. Now what sort of palate would you want for cocaine, do you suppose? Cleft, I daresay. Oh, Andrea, don’t stare, but get a load of what just waltzed in. Isn’t he divine?”

“Not my type, I’m afraid.”

“Well, he’s certainly my type. But am I his? I just know it’s going to be another of I goink now and meet my wifes. Ah, once more into the breach, dear friends.”

At the beginning she had decided she could get along well enough with Calvin Burleigh, but she hadn’t expected that they would become at all close. She had never been friendly with a homosexual, not to her knowledge, and while Cal was not at all effeminate he was obviously gay and quite candid about it. Indeed, it was his openness more than his manner that made her uneasy at first. The homosexuals she’d dealt with in Buffalo — a hairdresser, a florist, a photographer who’d taken some unremarkable pictures of Robin — had been at least as patently homosexual as Cal, but would never have alluded to their homosexuality in front of Andrea.

Ultimately, of course, it was his openness that made it possible for them to be friends. And in the short time she’d known him she’d come to the conclusion that a male homosexual was an ideal sort of friend for her to have just then. She was at a very difficult and demanding stage in her life, and it was fortunate that she was able to realize as much. Her life was exciting for the first time in more years than she wanted to think about. She was constantly meeting new people, constantly going places and doing things, finding out over and over again the extraordinary extent of her new freedom. She could go anywhere, do anything, take any route she wished to become her own real self. That was wonderful, thrilling freedom, but it was also hazardous.

The people whose lives touched hers were among the hazards. Friends were essential because you needed them because living alone after almost ten years was very nearly impossible to begin with, and the city, cold and grim in the late fall, tended to magnify solitude immeasurably. That solitude constituted a kind of personal space which she very much needed, but at the same time it could become in itself a negative presence.

Friendships with heterosexual men did not seem to be genuinely attainable. Either they were founded upon sex or they withered away for lack of it. And friendships with women were also difficult. For women without men Andrea was competition; for women with men she was a threat.

So her friendship with Cal had arisen in response to this situation. At the onset she began to think of him as the closest thing she had to a friend. Now she dropped the qualification. He was a friend, and a good one.

This morning he was already in the shop when she arrived. She managed a smile in response to his greeting, then hurried into the back room and hung her coat on a hanger. In the rest room she did a quick job of drying her hair.

“Oh, poor thing,” Cal said. “You really got caught in that mess, didn’t you?”

“It started just after I left the subway.”

“Well, it seems to have ended now that you’re safely inside. All for your benefit, lucky you.”

At least her hair was short and would dry with no difficulty. She’d had it cropped close to her head on her third day in New York. She had been letting it grow for some time and the transformation had been startling. The symbolism of the gesture had not eluded her at the time. She had just cut off all her ties, and now she was cutting off her hair, and rendering herself just a shade butch in the course of this liberation. Well, she had decided, to hell with symbolism. Short hair was easier and made her look and feel younger. And the air was filthy in Manhattan. You had to wash your hair several times a week and with long hair that was just too much trouble.

She got a carton of books from in back and busied herself making room for them on the shelves. They had arrived the day before from Gallimard, and they were an assortment of suspense novels in French. All of the books were by American authors. They had been originally published in English and had subsequently been translated laboriously into French, printed in France, and now this carton had made the trip back across the ocean, its contents waiting to serve as bedtime reading for chefs and waiters and Senegalese diplomats.

The morning passed with little incident and less strain. She waited on a handful of customers, checking their credit cards and making out the sales slips, listing each title sold on the inventory-control sheet. An American woman — Midwestern, by her accent — wasted fifteen minutes of her time comparing French dictionaries without finding one she liked well enough to buy. The manager, Mr. Hubbell, arrived a little after eleven and went into the back room to go over the day’s mail. He was a plump, owlish little man, always polite but quite reserved, who lived somewhere on Long Island with his wife and mother-in-law. His name was J. R. Hubbell, and neither Andrea nor Cal had learned what the initials stood for.

It wasn’t a bad morning, all things considered, in light of the awful way it had begun. It was dull, but in a way that was not uncomfortable, and the hours passed quickly enough. The worst mornings were those which followed nights of heavy drinking, and it had been quite a while now since she’d had a morning like that. A month ago she had found herself slipping all too easily into a pattern of fairly constant drinking (and the old fear from last time started to creep back). It was so easy to do when you lived alone. Since then she’d kept an eye on herself. She would drink socially, she would have a glass of wine with her dinner, and on weekend nights she would sometimes let herself get drunk, alone or with company. But when she had work the following morning she had taught herself to go to bed sober. It would have been worth doing if only to avoid those breathless hungover mornings when the hours from nine to noon took days of subjective time to pass, when every customer was a challenge and every word that she had to speak an effort. But it was also a good discipline, and she needed to discipline herself and keep herself operating within some sort of orbit.

It was all too easy to lack discipline in this city. All too easy to spin haywire, to shake loose of one’s moorings. And then you looked beneath your feet one day and couldn’t see the ground, and that could be a very terrifying sensation indeed.

At noon Cal went off to lunch and Mr. Hubbell joined Andrea in the front of the store. As usual they worked efficiently enough together but without the special harmony she enjoyed with Cal. At one o’clock Cal returned and she went around the corner to the crowded little luncheonette where she usually had lunch. She sat at the counter and ordered a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich and a cup of coffee.

The counterman had curly black hair and prominent eyebrows. He smiled a lot, revealing badly aligned teeth, and he refilled her coffee cup without her having to ask.

He said, “How about some dessert, angel? We got some lemon chiffon pie’s really good today.”

“Sounds good, but I don’t think so.”

“Aw, you don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive, doll.”

“Got to watch my figure.”

“Aw, c’mon. Not while I’m around to watch it for you.”

“You’re a dirty old man, Louie.”

“Just what I am and proud of it, doll.”

The flirting was automatic for both of them, easy and meaningless. In all probability she and Louie could pass on the street without recognizing each other. But in the few weeks she’d been a customer of his he had grown familiar with her in a pleasant way, and it helped to have people who recognized you. It gave you a sense of identity in a city that could easily become overpoweringly impersonal.

Already she was beginning to know people, a handful in the blocks around the store, a larger number in the immediate neighborhood of her apartment. In most cases she did not know the names of these people, or if she did her knowledge was limited to a first name. She knew Louie’s name because she had heard other regulars at the lunch counter call him by it. She knew the names of a couple of the checkout girls at the Red Apple at Eighty-ninth and Broadway because their uniforms had their names embroidered just above the pocket. She didn’t know the name of the stoop-shouldered man at the liquor store, but he knew hers and would cash small checks for her. The pharmacist knew her name because her prescription for birth control pills was in his file. His clerk at the front counter did not know her name, but did know her brand of cigarettes. She was, in sum, already becoming a part of the neighborhood she lived in. When she walked the handful of blocks to the subway in the morning, or from the subway to her apartment at night, there was almost always someone who gave her a wave or a hello, and sometimes she’d exchange greetings with half a dozen people or more.

All of this had happened in two months. It pleased her that she could have put down roots to such an extent in so short a period of time.

Of course there was another side to it. If she were to move to Australia tomorrow, would any of them notice she was gone?

All spring and summer things had been bad between them. She would alternate, sometimes blaming him, sometimes putting the blame on herself. There were times when it seemed to her that he really had nothing to do with the way she felt, that no one had much to do with what was happening inside her. She felt so cut off from everyone and everything that bordered on her life.

She began having orgasms infrequently, then not at all. Before long she came to dread his approaches. She could bear intercourse but found herself loathing the preliminaries. Foreplay became repugnant to her, and the less specifically sexual it was, the more offensive it became. Kissing and touching were awful. Sometimes she thought it was him, and she tried to figure out why his touch should repel her. She thought it might be a reaction, long after the fact, to his affair — perhaps she felt his body had been soiled by contact with another woman. But she could not really believe this was the case, and eventually she decided that she was simply rejecting intimacy with anyone.

Gradually she established a pattern of sitting up late after he went to sleep. It was evident that this bothered him but he did not attempt to talk about it, as they both avoided discussing any aspects of what was going wrong between them. That winter she had begun reading a great deal. She had always been a reader, but now it became the chief thing that she did. She would go to the library on Brighton and take out half a dozen novels at a time. She read during the day, when he was at work and Robin at school, and she read for an hour or two after dinner, and then she would read far into the night while he slept. It didn’t seem to matter very much what she read, as long as it was fiction and not terribly demanding, as long as it gave her the opportunity to lose herself between its pages. Mystery stories were good, and the library seemed to have an infinite stock of them. She would latch onto a writer and read her way through his work, then move on to another. Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen — she never bothered to puzzle out who had committed the murder, just let herself float along on the crest of the narrative.

Sometimes, when she didn’t feel like reading, or when there was nothing around to read, she would sit in the living room with a bottle and a glass and spend an hour or two sipping straight whiskey.

At two or three in the morning she would put her book away and rinse out her glass, and then she would slip into their bedroom and undress quietly in the darkness. She would always be very careful not to wake him.

Some mornings he would desire her upon awakening. He might touch her briefly while she slept, and then would roll his body on top of hers and take her. At first it usually seemed to be happening in a dream, but then she would awaken to feel his weight on her and his hips pumping rhythmically into her.

It did not bother her. She didn’t mind being fucked. She would keep her eyes closed and her body relaxed, and although she might meet his thrusts with little pelvic movements of her own, she did not really participate very much, nor did he seem to desire her participation. He was using her, of course, masturbating himself with her body, and it seemed to her that he had the right. He was getting little else from her, after all.

She wondered occasionally if he had anyone else. She didn’t think he did, but realized that she didn’t seem to care much one way or the other. When he had been seeing someone — and she-never did learn the identity of the woman he’d had an affair with, they never discussed it at all, never came closer to discussing it than they had done on that night when she told him about her father’s infidelity — when he had been having his affair, it had mattered enormously to her. And when she had known for certain that it was over the relief she’d felt had been monumental.

But that was then. Now it was hard for her to imagine what she’d been so upset about. She just didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem to care about anything. She went to parties with Mark, spent evenings with one or two other couples. She went shopping with her mother, took Robin to her music lesson, drove her to Sunday school and picked her up afterward. She did all the things she had always done and walked through all the scenes of her life as if in a dream, as if sleepwalking.

In July he took her to New York for five days, a long weekend. They’d gotten into the habit of coming to New York once a year, and they had last driven down over Christmas vacation, taking Robin with them for the first time. So another trip just six months later was atypical, and although they didn’t discuss it she knew the motivation for it. He was concerned, and thought he would treat her to a trip as a peace offering of some sort. And perhaps he thought that being alone together would give them a chance to recapture the intimacy that had lately drained from their lives.

It was in New York, really, that she knew she would have to leave him.

They stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, ate in expensive restaurants, saw several shows. He would suggest things and she would agree, or he would ask her for suggestions and she would offer something she knew he would enjoy. They were together a great deal of the time and she was careful always to be pleasant company, cheerful and alert and seemingly involved. She went to bed when he did, and most of the nights they made love. She gave every sign of participating with enthusiasm and enjoyment, but she did not enjoy the lovemaking, nor did she enjoy the meals or the shows or the city itself.

On the last night after they made love she got out of bed and went to the window. Their room faced the park and the view, by day or by night, was quite magnificent. For just a moment she visualized herself raising the window and climbing over the sill. But she did not seriously entertain the thought of suicide. Rather she stood looking out at the city, her city, and wanted to reach out and take hold of it. She belonged here, she had always belonged here, this time she would know how to handle it, and it was high time she did something about it before it was too late.

But she didn’t say anything, not for weeks. She went back to her life in Buffalo and it was like being in a black-and-white movie. There was no color. Everything and everyone bored her. Robin bored her, and it horrified her to realize this because she loved her child. And Robin was not and had not ever been a boring child.

She knew she was going to leave, although she did not know when, and she found herself walking through her days with a secret smile on her lips. Because she would be leaving all of this, she would lose all this monotony and go looking for herself again.

Her plan took shape gradually in her mind. At night she would sit up reading Perry Mason stories, but periodically she would set the book aside and look off into the middle distance, filling in some more of the plan’s details. She would go to New York. She would take an inexpensive apartment, probably on the Upper West Side. Something temporary, because she would need more space later on when Robin joined her. She would have enough cash to get settled, but as soon as possible she would find a job. The job, too, could be construed as temporary. It hardly mattered what the job was, just so it paid her enough to live on. She couldn’t expect anything terribly glamorous, wasn’t qualified for much, but she was bright and personable enough to get something.

Sometimes she thought of taking Robin. But she had to rule that out for several reasons. If she took Robin, Mark was sure to come after her. And it would probably mean pulling Robin out of school in the middle of the term, because school would start before she would be ready to leave. And she had to be settled before she could have Robin with her. It would be awful to be separated from Robin, but it would be worse to stay here, impossible to stay here.

She kept wanting to discuss it with them, to give them some clue. Her husband, her mother, her daughter. But there was never a right time, never a way to put the words together and utter them.

Her mother, she was certain, would think she was crazy. Literally crazy. Mark would want to talk things out, work things out, settle things in bed. And Robin — no, no matter how many times she tried to imagine herself telling Robin, she couldn’t make herself believe for one moment that the child would understand. It was not something a child could possibly understand, and not something she herself could properly explain.

It would be hard enough to leave. It would be impossible to stay, but still it would be hard enough to leave, and talking about it first would only make it harder.

One day in October she was ready. Robin was in school and Mark was at work. Andrea packed a large suitcase and a small suitcase. She drove to the bank and withdrew precisely half of the money from the joint savings account. She drove from there to a used car dealer on Delaware and Hertel and sold her car, accepting what he offered her. From the dealer’s office she called a taxi which drove her to the airport.

By two-thirty she was in a phone booth in La Guardia with a few dollars in change on the shelf in front of her. They could fail to understand her. They could hate her. Mark could make it difficult for her to get Robin.

But they couldn’t make her go back there. Nobody could make her go back. Nobody.

At four o’clock Cal gave the mail orders to the boy from the messenger service and sent him on his way to the Post Office. Then he looked at his watch and sighed. “Extraordinary,” he said.

“What is?”

“We’re all of a week away from the shortest day of the year. And today, paradoxically, is shaping up as one of the longest days of the year.”

“It hasn’t been so bad, has it?”

“Well, when they dwindle down to a precious few, as old Walter Huston used to sing. And Friday’s always a long day. Are you staying in town this weekend?”

“Where would I go?”

“Where indeed. I’m staying here and I wish I weren’t. I was hoping someone would invite me somewhere. On Friday I always get itchy feet. Speaking of which, Thank God it’s Friday, and let’s have a drink to that effect when we get out of here, what say?”

“I have a date for dinner.”

“Lucky you. I wish I did. Find out if he’s got a friend, why don’t you.”

“Oh, fun-nee.”

“But you’ve got time for a quick drink, don’t you? Of course you do.”

They went to a place on Forty-seventh and Madison. The bar was already mobbed with advertising types when they got there. Cal led her through the crowd to a small table in the back. They ordered drinks. She took out a cigarette and he had a match burning just as the cigarette reached her mouth.

When their drinks arrived he raised his glass. “To Friday,” he said, “and everything it represents. Namely the liberation of the human spirit from the shackles of voluntary servitude. To freedom, Andrea pet, even if only for a weekend.”

Her drink was a vodka martini, very cold and very dry and very large. “One of these is going to be plenty,” she said.

“Two will be magical.”

“Two would take the top of my head off and I might need it later tonight. Plus I don’t really have the time.”

“Heavy date?”

“Well, a date.”

“Somebody who promises to play an important role in the life of Our Girl Andrea?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I met him at a party a couple of weeks ago. No, wait a minute. It was just last weekend.”

“The photographer?”

“It was the photographer’s party. How did you remember that? I hardly remember.”

“I may take more of an interest in your life than you do, pet. Who’s this one? Not another camera pest.”

“No, he’s a school teacher. High school. I think he teaches history. Something like that, anyway.”

“What else is like history?”

“I don’t know. Social studies, civics, whatever.”

“He single?”

“Divorced. Well, separated.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s with the knowing uh-huh?”

“Just that the official definition of separated is that his wife wasn’t at the party.”

“Well, he said he was separated. I didn’t ask if he had a legal separation. I don’t, anyway. And I don’t care if he does, or if he’s cheating on his wifie-poo, or much of anything. The last thing I want right now is a relationship with a future, Cal.”

“Everybody says that. Constantly.”

“I happen to mean it. I’m serious.”

“Oh, I know. I’m just making maternal noises, that’s all. It’s a tendency of mine. You’ve remarked on it in the past, you know.”

“True. And I suppose I’m glad you care. I know I’m glad you care. But I’m a big girl now, baby.”

“Oh, I know you are.” His hand covered hers. “And I’m proud of you, if you care to know. The number I do on you, part of it is just teasing, you know.”

“I know.”

“And the part that isn’t, well, you do inspire concern, Andrea. You just seem so fucking vulnerable.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a thing.”

“Andrea, what’s the matter? Baby, sit down, please sit down. What’s wrong?”

“Just because I’m standing on my own two feet—”

“Well, don’t stand on them now. Sit on your charmingly boyish behind, won’t you? That’s better. Darling, are we being terribly touchy this evening or did I say something awful? Because I certainly didn’t mean to.”

She picked up her glass, took a long drink of the clear cold liquid. She felt a little steadier now. It was funny how his words had rocked her, how abruptly and dramatically she had reacted. Oh, she understood what had prompted her reaction, but it still was surprising.

“What did I say, Andrea?”

“Something just went down the wrong way, okay? Let’s just forget it.”

“All right.”

“If we could just change the subject.”

“Excellent. Let’s talk about shoplifting.”

“Oh?”

“Shoplifting,” he said. “I was thinking about it just this afternoon. It’s one thing I’ve been missing at the store. Now every bookstore I’ve ever worked for is positively plagued by boosters. That’s the underworld term for them, you know. Boosters. Some of them are devout lovers of literature who can’t afford to buy as many books as they’d care to own, while others are frankly in it for the money. I remember I was working at the Bookmasters store on Eighth Street and this one dude the size of the Flatiron Building came in with one of those canvas airlines bags, opened it up and began filling it with copies of the number-one bestseller, whichever it happened to be at the time. I think it was Death of a President. A big expensive book, anyway, and he took eight or ten copies easily, and do you know no one even considered stopping him? An intimidating presence. Junkies’ll steal the current books, you see, and then they can sell them to one of the used book stores as review copies for a fourth of the cover price. Now I would always tend to distinguish between the lovers of literature and the professional rip-off artists, you know, and I’d let the student types get away with murder. I didn’t own the store, after all, but I tended to come down a little hard on the junkies just to discourage their custom, because they were not at all the sort of people one cared to pal around with.

“But at our sweatshop I haven’t seen a book thief yet, and it’s the damnedest thing. The professionals won’t steal what they can’t sell, so that keeps them out, and I guess the various wogs who amble in looking for a good read just weren’t raised in a culture where books were made to be stolen. It makes me a little anxious, to tell you the truth. Maybe I’ve lost my old sharpness working here. Maybe I’ll find myself letting shoplifters walk all over me.”

How sweet he was, she thought. Breezing along with his monologue, not even pausing for her reactions to save her having to react. But it was all right now. She was all right now. What he’d said had echoed a conversation she’d had a week and a half ago, and it had caught her by surprise.

It had been a night in the middle of the week. She’d returned to her apartment late the night before to find the phone ringing as she entered. It had been Cass Drozdowski. He was coming to New York the following day on business and would be staying over. Would she have dinner with him?

“Just pick out a restaurant,” he told her. “Someplace decent. The client’s paying for it.”

She had named a restaurant and set a time, and the following night she was careful to arrive at the restaurant precisely ten minutes late. He was already at the table, a drink in front of him, and he got lazily to his feet when the headwaiter led her to the table. “You’re looking good,” he said, reaching out both hands to take hold of her hands. She leaned forward and accepted a kiss on the cheek.

The conversation through dinner was deliberately casual. It had undertones, of course, and now and then their eyes would meet accidentally, then shy away from each other.

Over coffee she said, “Does he know you’re seeing me?”

“He asked me to.”

“Oh?”

“I think Mark would have liked to come to New York himself but he felt it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“It would be a terrible idea.”

“Probably. He suggested in a very offhand way that maybe I could give you a call. He’s a little worried about you.”

“Nobody has to worry about me, Cass.”

He acted as though she had not spoken. “So I said I’d give you a call. I’d been planning on seeing you in any case, as a matter of fact.”

“I wondered what you had in mind.”

“Pardon me?”

“When you called. I still don’t know exactly what you’ve got in mind but I’ll say this to get it out of the way. I don’t want to go to bed with you, Cass.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Well, it’s traditional, isn’t it? Right after a woman splits with her husband everybody wants to take a shot at her. Just because you’ve already been there doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not looking for a return engagement.” She glanced up at him and was sorry she’d spoken that bluntly. She said, “I shouldn’t have put it so strongly, Cass. I just wanted to clear the air.”

“We’ve always kept the air pretty clear between us, Andrea.”

“And sometimes there wasn’t much air between us in the first place. I don’t regret that little interlude, incidentally. In case you were wondering.”

“I’m glad.”

“And I hope you don’t regret it either.”

His face relaxed in a smile. “There aren’t all that many things I regret. You’re certainly not one of them. As a matter of fact, most of the things I regret are the things I didn’t do, not the things I did. Not that I haven’t done a few stupid things in my life, but somehow it doesn’t seem awfully productive to regret them. Want a brandy?”

“If you’re having one.”

“I think I’ll have a little scotch, myself.”

“I’ll have a brandy.”

He caught the waiter’s eye, ordered drinks. “You’ve got him in a bind, you know,” he said. “He doesn’t really know what to do.”

“Mark? I’ve been perfectly open with him.”

“He thinks you’ll change your mind.”

“Well, he’s wrong.”

“Maybe. It’s a kind of a double bind. He’s trying to decide whether you’re going to want to come back and at the same time he’s trying to figure out whether or not he wants you back. It’s a confusing situation for him.”

“I just told you—”

“I know what you told me. The kid’s a big element in all of this. Robin. He doesn’t want to use her as a weapon but he’s damned if he’s going to let you bring her up in New York City. He says he’ll fight you on that, Andrea.”

“Oh, the hell with that.” She had already thought of all of this, but she could nonetheless not help reacting. “He can’t keep me from taking her. I’m Robin’s mother.”

She went on, trying to keep herself from getting hysterical, and when she paused he said, “What I’ve been telling Mark is the same thing I’ll tell you. This is all premature speculation. You’ve already said you don’t want to pull her out of school in the middle of the term. That means she’s set until June. He hired a housekeeper, you know.”

“So I understand.”

“Robin gets along with her well enough. She misses you, though. She can’t really understand why you’re not home with her.”

“Watch it, Cass.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, Andrea.”

“I mean the role of fucking moral authority and wise old family counselor doesn’t sit that well with me.

Does Mark know you were fucking his wife once upon a time?”

“Not unless he learned it from you.”

“From me! Why would I tell him?”

He shrugged. “It’s not exactly unheard of, you know. Husbands and wives can hurl a lot of shit at each other when they fight. In a good knock-down-drag-out battle they don’t care who it lands on, themselves included. I thought you might have said something to him.”

“Why? Has he acted differently?”

“No. But I don’t know that he would. He can be very open, but he’s also good at keeping things to himself.”

“Well, I still don’t know him.”

“Did you ever really try?”

“Oh, please,” she said.

They had two more rounds of drinks before he called for the check and signed it. Outside she said, “You can just put me in a cab, Cass. It’s silly for you to run all the way uptown when your hotel’s three blocks from here.”

“I’ll ride up with you. They tell me this town’s full of muggers and perverts.”

“No passes, though, huh?”

“Oh, hell.”

She clutched his arm. “I’m sorry. But I understand men think they can have any woman they’ve had in the past.”

“You understand that, do you?”

“It’s what I’ve read. Isn’t it true?”

“Probably. Aren’t women the same way?”

“I hadn’t even thought of it that way.”

“No passes, Andrea. Your virtue’s safe with me.”

“I know I’m being silly. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it.”

When the cab got to her apartment she felt she had to invite him in. He was hesitant but she repeated the invitation and he paid for the cab and followed her to her door, and into the small apartment. One drink and he could go track down another cab and be on his way, she thought. And what, really, had she ever seen in him? In Buffalo he’d had a certain kind of dash, an irreverence that had been refreshing, but in Manhattan he was just an upstate lawyer gawking at tall buildings. One drink and she’d yawn and talk about having to get up early for work, and he’d take the hint and get out of her apartment, and out of her life.

But when he had his one drink and rose to go without her having to yawn a hint at him, she said, “Oh, it’s early, Cass. You don’t want to go back to your hotel now, do you? Unless you’ve got something more exciting to look forward to than an empty room.”

“No, but don’t you have to get up early?”

“I’ve become a night person. Let me freshen that for you.” She made new drinks for both of them, put on the radio and found the FM jazz station. She sat on the couch with her shoes off and her legs crossed. “Aren’t you warm? The valves in the radiator don’t work and there’s no way to regulate the heat. Take your tie and jacket off if you want.”

“I’m comfortable,” he said.

It seemed to her that he finished his drink rather quickly. He stood up, yawning unconvincingly. “Maybe you’re a night person,” he said, “but I’ve got to be in court tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you stay here.”

“Where did you put my coat? Is this the closet?”

“I said why don’t you stay here.” She came up behind him, leaned her body against his. “Don’t leave me.”

“Andrea—”

“I don’t want to be alone.” Her hand moved to his groin. His fingers took hold of her wrist.

“No,” he said.

“Oh, shit.”

He drew away from her, turned to face her. “Come on, now. I guess that last round of drinks wasn’t a very good idea.”

“I want you to come to bed with me.”

“No you don’t. You’re a little tired and a little worn out emotionally, that’s all.”

“Cass.”

“Things are complicated enough, don’t you think?”

She had a little more control over herself now. She was just beginning to shake inside, just beginning to realize that she had done all of this involuntarily. It was an upsetting realization and she didn’t want to dwell on it just yet.

She said, “Cass, what happened to us?”

“What happened to you and me? Nothing tragic. We turned into one of the all-time great brother and sister acts. You always said that’s what would happen to us. Why be surprised that it did?”

“I really wanted you to go to bed with me. I didn’t plan this. I swear to God I didn’t.”

“I believe you.”

“I hope you do. I’m glad you had more sense than I did. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“You’re just so damned vulnerable, that’s all.”

“No! Don’t say that!”

“Andrea, don’t cry.”

“You mustn’t say that,” she said. “It’s not true. It isn’t, it isn’t true at all.”

The hot water was restored when she returned to her apartment, and she was back in plenty of time to shower and wash her hair. By six-thirty she was dressed and waiting for her date. Her history teacher, David Kolodny. He would come by for her at seven, so she had ample time to call Buffalo. She had sort of planned to call. It had been almost a week since she had spoken to Robin.

She never made the conscious decision not to call. Instead she kept finding things to do. She straightened the apartment, wiped out a couple of ashtrays. She started to fix herself a drink, then changed her mind and made a cup of instant coffee instead. By then it was ten minutes to seven and she couldn’t very well place the call because he might arrive while she was talking. She sat down and had a cigarette.

He was on time almost to the minute. She took his coat and showed him to a chair. “There’s scotch and vodka,” she said. “Orange juice and tomato juice to mix with the vodka.”

“Tomato juice, if it’s no trouble.”

How much trouble was tomato juice? She mixed a pair of Bloody Marys and sat down on the couch. She looked him over while he was saying something not terribly memorable about his day at school. He was not unattractive, a loose-limbed bearish man with an abundant moustache that drooped a little more than was absolutely necessary. He had large brown eyes that someone must have told him were soulful and dark brown hair going thin on top. His clothes were West Side casual — an old tweed jacket of no particular color, a plaid flannel shirt, loose-fitting brown slacks, ankle-length western-style boots. His clothing suited the rest of him, and all in all he went well with her apartment.

“Nice apartment,” he said. “You have just the one room?”

“What you see is what you get.”

“Well, that’s enough space, really. I must have about the same square footage but I’ve got two small rooms instead of one large one. At the time I took it I thought I’d want a separate bedroom but now I think I made a mistake. I’m on Ninety-eighth and West End.”

“How long have you been there?”

“Five, six months. You?”

“About two months. The furniture’s what the landlord had in the basement plus some choice pieces from the Salvation Army. I didn’t want to run up the costs because this is only temporary. I’ll need more room when I have my daughter with me.”

“When will that be?”

“After the school year ends. In June, I suppose.”

“You must have told me you had a daughter but it slipped my mind. How old is she?”

So they talked about her daughter and his two sons until they had finished the Bloody Marys. His boys were thirteen and eleven and lived with their mother in Park Slope. “So they’re just a subway ride away,” he said. “It makes things a lot easier.”

“It must.”

“I’d show you pictures of them but I decided to stop carrying them. I felt I was doing too good a job of living up to the divorced-father stereotype.” He put his glass on the coffee table. “Getting hungry? If you like Chinese, there’s a fairly decent Szechuan place a few blocks uptown.”

“That sounds fine.”

It wasn’t terribly hard to meet men. She had wondered about that, speculating on the chances that her age and her lack of contacts might make things difficult for her. Not that she had cared all that much originally. Her fantasies before she left Buffalo had been ones of liberation rather than ones of involvement with someone new and exciting. And even after she had come to New York, she found that she wanted men in her life primarily to avoid being upset over their absence. She wanted to meet men and talk with them and spend time with them and sleep with them not for the pleasure of their company but because such activity was part of a full life.

But God, she did not want to be involved. At the beginning she had even tended to resist Cal’s friendship because it might constitute a demand on her, a limitation of her freedom. That was silly and she quickly realized as much, but it showed her just how great a premium she was inclined to place upon her independence.

On Cal’s first visit to her apartment, she’d indicated the cast-off and mismatched furniture with a wave of her hand. “All garbage, but the price was right. And the place is temporary anyway until I get my kid back from her daddy.”

“But that’s months and months,” he said. “You could replace some of this, and a little paint would eliminate some of the clashing, tie the color scheme together. Just in the interest of making it more livable, you know.”

“I don’t want to bother.”

“It wouldn’t even be that much bother, and God knows the expense wouldn’t be much. You could just—”

“No, you don’t understand. I’d just as soon keep it as tacky and anonymous as a hotel room. Oh, Cal, I thought about getting a kitten. I’ve always liked cats. But I won’t get one and I won’t even get a fucking philodendron because I don’t want anything that has to be fed and watered. I don’t want to be some cat’s mommy.”

“What has that got to do with painting that table? I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I’m sure you don’t. Maybe there’s nothing to follow. Oh — I don’t want to define myself in terms of externals. I’ve always defined myself in terms of other people, her daughter and her mother and his wife. I don’t want that. Right now I’m overreacting and I know it but it suits me for the time being. I have a dull job. Well, that’s fine, because I don’t want to be labeled by what I do. Or by how I live or dress or who I’m with or — does this make any sense?”

He scratched his head, studied her for a moment before replying. “I don’t know if it makes sense,” he said. “I’m a poor judge of what’s sensible and what isn’t. But I think I know what you mean.”

“And?”

“Well, we’re all defined by these things, aren’t we? By ourselves and by the rest of the world, to a greater or lesser extent. You’re probably more inner-directed than I am—”

“I’m not sure of that.”

“—but even so you can hardly help trying to see yourself as others see you, and that all has something to do with how you live and what work you do and everything else.”

“Maybe I just want some time first. And some space.”

“Well, I can understand that.”

“Last time I scared myself to death and left out of fear. This time, whatever I do, I hope it will be because I’ve got a clearer idea who I am. Then maybe I’ll let the rest of the world know.”

“Please let me be one of the first.”

Over hot-sour soup and spicy chicken with peanuts and fried preserved pork with vegetables, over a great many small cups of rather insipid tea, she found out a bit more about David Kolodny than she cared to.

Not that she learned anything that put her off. He had seemed like a pleasant and basically decent guy on first meeting, and that impression was not contradicted but reinforced. He was in his early forties. He had been in the army in Korea and had married within a year or two after his discharge.

His marriage had broken up almost two years ago. He’d lived at the YMCA for a short time to get his bearings, then shared an apartment with a girl friend until six months ago, when that relationship had dissolved and he’d found his apartment on Ninety-eighth Street. Reading between the lines, she guessed that the relationship with the girl friend had failed because he was still hung up on his wife.

Or perhaps he was more hung up on their house. Several years earlier they had purchased a brownstone in Park Slope, which she knew was somewhere in Brooklyn, and they’d spent all their spare time reconditioning it. Evidently the wife had waited until the house was in fairly good shape before deciding she didn’t want David to live in it any more.

He told her quite a bit about the house. Their conversation was deliberately anecdotal, because they had already established that they didn’t have an enormous amount in common. She knew next to nothing about Brooklyn, where he had lived all his life, or Brooklyn College, where he had gone to school. He knew that Buffalo was near Niagara Falls and they got a hell of a lot of snow there, and he knew that Bryn Mawr was in the general vicinity of Philadelphia. So they got that out of the way and he talked about his house in Park Slope and his classes full of juvenile delinquents in Washington Heights and she talked about her customers at the bookstore and they both talked about shops and restaurants they had discovered in the neighborhood.

After dinner he suggested a movie. There was an Ingmar Bergman double bill at Loew’s 83rd, he said, or they could walk up Broadway and see what was playing at the Riviera, if she’d rather.

“What I’d rather is not go to a movie at all,” she told him. “I don’t think I could sit through one. What I’d like to do is go someplace and have a few drinks and unwind a little.”

“Any place in particular?”

“You know the neighborhood better than I do.”

“There’s a bar around the corner from my place that I drop into every now and then. It’s just a neighborhood ginmill but it’s quiet and comfortable.”

“That sounds fine.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a couple of beers myself.”

He paid the check, and she didn’t even make a token effort to split it with him. Well, he’d asked her out, hadn’t he? Maybe she’d buy a round at his bar, if they had more than one round.

She wondered if he’d had his heart set on a movie. Too bad about it if he did. There was no need to be self-sacrificing, no need to pretend to enthusiasms she didn’t feel. She might never see this man again, and if she didn’t they would both survive. Neither of them was anything to the other; they were together because being together would, with a little luck, be preferable to being alone.

She might sleep with him or she might not. She had not yet decided. He wanted her to, she could tell that much, but he wouldn’t be devastated if she decided otherwise, any more than she would have been crushed if he hadn’t wanted her.

A shame she hadn’t been this sensible ten years ago. But you had to learn things. You weren’t born knowing them.

The bar he took her to was dim and quiet. There was no waiter, so he got her scotch and his beer at the bar and brought them to the table.

The conversation moved at once to a more intimate level. They talked about their respective spouses. She said she’d wanted to have Robin fly down over Christmas, but that her husband had refused. “If I want to see her I can come there, that’s the position he’s taking. He says she’s too young to fly by herself but that’s bullshit. She’s old enough.”

“He just wants to make things tough for you.”

“That or he’s afraid I wouldn’t send her back.”

“Sounds pretty paranoid.”

The mutual sympathy was automatic in conversations of this sort, and she no longer found it surprising. Here she was, a woman who had left her husband on her own volition, and here he was, a man whose wife had pushed him out of his own house, and each of them was automatically assuming that the other’s absent spouse was in the wrong. In actual fact she probably had more in common with his wife than with him, as did he with Mark. Sex, she decided, and where you happened to be had an awful lot to do with the way you chose to look at things.

“You deserve a lot of credit,” he said. “It took a lot of guts to do what you did.”

“I suppose so.”

“Of course it did.”

“My mother thinks it would take more guts to stay. In a way it would have because I just couldn’t stand it.”

“There’s a difference between guts and beating your head against the wall, isn’t there?”

“That’s what I was doing. Beating my head against the wall.”

“It feels so good when you stop.”

“It certainly does. I can’t really talk to my mother any more. I call her once a week out of a sense of duty but it’s pointless. We were really extremely close, but then I went and left my husband and my child, and I might as well have fucked a zebra in Hengerer’s window. That’s a department store in Buffalo.”

“My parents both passed away. My father when I was in high school and my mother passed away five years ago. No, it’s six years.”

“It’ll be three years next month since my father died.” She hated euphemisms for death. “I think he would have understood, but maybe not.”

“It’s a generation gap thing. We were talking about this in my group just the other day.”

He was in therapy. He had established this early in the conversation, dropping it in the way some people would let you know they had gone to a good college. It seemed as though everybody in New York was in therapy in one form or another. None of the people she knew in Buffalo went to psychiatrists, and the prevailing sentiment echoed Samuel Goldwyn’s maxim that anyone who did go to one ought to have his head examined. At first she had wondered if she was simply running into a disproportionate number of mentally disturbed people, but they didn’t seem abnormal to her. Then she realized it was simply something that New Yorkers did.

Cal had been in individual therapy at various times, and for the past two years had been in group therapy. Once she asked him if he thought it helped.

“Well, you have to think it helps,” he’d said. “Don’t you? Or otherwise you stop going. But how can you tell, really? If you function better, or feel that you’re functioning better, it might be the effect of group or it might have happened anyway. And if things go badly they might have been worse without group, so you can’t tell. I usually feel better after I’ve been to a session.”

“That’s something, then.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Andrea. You can get rid of headaches by taking sugar pills if you think they’re aspirin. Maybe it’s just one big emotional placebo. One thing, though, is that you wind up dumping all your emotional garbage on a crowd of people you don’t really care spit for, and they don’t really care about you, and that way you avoid boring your friends with all that tripe. Instead you bore them with talk about your therapy and how deliciously healthy you’re getting.”

Sometimes she thought about going. Sometimes she would have a bad night and before falling asleep she would resolve to find out about a group for herself. But in the morning the whole idea would seem senseless. She was functioning well, she would tell herself, and even cut-rate group therapy was an expense she could not readily afford, and people who used therapy as a crutch wound up being unable to walk without it.

“I have booze and sex instead,” she told Cal one time. “They serve about the same purpose. They make me feel better afterward.”

David told her one insight he’d had in his group. “I’ve got to get out of the habit of looking for exclusive relationships. I went straight from a marriage into an apartment with the girl I told you about. Cheryl. I’m sure I got into that because I couldn’t face being alone. Now I know better. It’s going to be a lot of years before I want to be that seriously involved with another person.”

“I feel the same way.”

“I don’t want to live with anybody. I don’t want to feel obligated and I don’t want anyone obligated to me. I don’t want to worry about hurting someone.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Oh, hell, I don’t want to be hurt myself. I want to have a few good friends that I see occasionally and sleep with occasionally. That’s what I want.”

He delivered the last part of his speech with his eyes deliberately avoiding hers and his fingers busy twisting a paper napkin. His words, she decided, amounted to a rather artful proposition. And she had the feeling he’d delivered the line precisely that way before, complete with the bashfully diverted eyes and the gee-whiz number with the napkin. Well, she didn’t blame him. It was a good line and it was natural for him to get all the mileage out of it that he could.

She waited until his eyes came around to meet hers, and she put just a touch of a smile on her lips. “I think we both want pretty much the same thing,” she said, very levelly.

At the first party she’d gone to in New York she ran into a man who had known Winkie. She couldn’t remember how they got there conversationally, but somehow her name had come up.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Winkie Welles. What was her first name again?”

“Winifred.”

“That’s right, of course. Winkie Welles. She was at Time-Life for a while when I was there. Then I think she went over to Holiday in editorial.”

“She was with Holiday when she died.”

“That was all so long ago. She was a crazy kid, as I remember her. Beautiful and brilliant, but crazy. She took her own life, but I don’t remember how.”

“Pills.”

“If you say so. And she was your best friend at Bryn Mawr?”

She said, “Do you happen to know why she killed herself?”

“I don’t think I’d have heard, and I certainly don’t remember if I did. We were never terribly close. Just that we worked together, but I lost track of her when she switched jobs. I think she was having an affair with a married man. I could be wrong about that. But if all the researchers at Time-Life with married boyfriends killed themselves the company would have to close up shop.”

“I wonder why she did it.”

“I wouldn’t even know who to tell you to ask.”

“Oh, it’s not important. I’m sure there are people I could have written to years ago and I never bothered. What’s the point? I think I know why she did it.”

“Oh?”

“I think she was afraid she couldn’t help turning into her mother. A road company version of her mother.”

“If you say so.” The man no longer seemed vitally interested in the ghost of Winifred Welles. “Say, to change the subject—”

But she had not wanted to change the subject. “My situation was just the opposite,” she said. “I wanted to be my mother. I didn’t realize it but that was what I wanted. I thought it was what I was supposed to do.”

“Is that right.”

“But I finally found out I couldn’t do it. Or rather I could do it, because if you do something for almost ten years that proves you could do it. But then I couldn’t go on doing it, if you understand the distinction.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll be right back.”

He meant, of course, that he would not be back, but she had not cared, For the moment she was content to stand alone and apart, remembering Winkie, remembering too the several persons she herself had been in the years since she and Winkie had been close.

And she hadn’t liked that man much anyway. And there were plenty of other men at the party, and it was easy enough to go home with one if that was what you wanted.

And now she was going home with David Kolodny. His place was right around the corner, he told her, and would she like to see it? “I’d like that,” she said. Outside a stiff wind was blowing. She drew her coat together at the neck, took hold of his arm, let her body lean a little against his as they walked. Neither of them spoke. The silence was easy and comfortable, joining rather than dividing them.

His apartment was on the tenth floor of a twelve-story building. She stood at his window while he was in the bathroom. The view was unspectacular, but at least he had a view. Her single window faced a blank wall.

Not that she envied him his view. Her apartment suited her, for now, for the time being.

When he emerged from the bathroom she remained at the window. She heard him approaching but did not turn until he was at her side. There was just the briefest moment of awkwardness, that inevitable awkwardness, and then he took her in his arms and was kissing her.

And then everything was all right. It was anticipation that could rattle you, making you live in your head excessively. Liquor helped in that regard, closing off some of the doors in the brain, shutting down certain hallways and corridors. And now he was kissing her and she was learning the taste of his mouth and the feel of his body against hers and it was really quite all right.

They clung together by the window, kissing with some passion but no urgency. He put a hand on her waist, dropped it to fasten on her buttock. He drew her body hard against his and gave her a squeeze. She moaned softly and brushed the tips of her fingers over his face. They would be good together, she knew. He knew intuitively what she liked and his sense of touch was good. And she liked his smell, and the feel of his skin.

His bedroom was smaller than the living room. It contained a queen-size platform bed, a chest of drawers, and a bookshelf made up of bricks and unfinished pine boards. They kissed in the bedroom and he touched her breasts and ran a hand down over the front of her body. His fingers pressed her for a moment at the junction of her thighs, then drew away. His other hand dropped from her shoulder and she watched him unbutton his shirt. Then she began undressing.

There was no chair to put her clothes on, so she followed his example and made a little pile of her things in a corner of the floor. He finished undressing before she did and he leaned against the wall by the side of the bed and watched her. She was not at all self-conscious, enjoying the way he was looking at her and the effect it was having on him.

“Ah, you’re beautiful,” he said.

In bed he held her and kissed her and she was able to lose herself in his embrace. Then his kisses, moist and sensual, trailed down over her throat and onto her breasts. This was exciting but at the same time it detached her from the excitement, as if the imposition of passivity transformed her into a spectator. It was lovely to lie like this, loose-limbed and receptive, open to his hands and mouth, oh yes, it was lovely, but one needed a sort of mental jiu-jitsu to enable the brain to turn itself off while the body was being turned on.

“Beautiful. What a fine body.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“I want to be very nice to you.”

He crouched at the foot of the bed, coaxing her legs apart with his gentle hands. She felt the soft skin of his face against her thighs, and the tickle of his moustache. He teased her a little, blowing warm breath against her, and she liked the teasing and rolled her hips in response to it. Then he put his mouth on her and his tongue moved to taste her and she sighed.

“Darling,” he said.

“Oh, do that forever.”

He was very good at this, and perhaps not the least of her enjoyment came from his own pleasure in the act. Men differed most from one another in the way they ate you. There were those, of course, who didn’t do it at all, but their numbers seemed to have decreased dramatically in recent years. And there were those who managed to convey that they were doing you an enormous favor, and others who seemed to regard the ritual as a component of seduction, a necessary technique in the arousal of a woman. For others it was clearly a quid pro quo, something not terribly distasteful one did in order to get one’s cock sucked in return. Oh, it was much nicer when the man liked to do it.

She held parts of herself back, unwilling to commit herself entirely for fear that this might be a prelude for him, that he might want to switch the channel to fucking before she could get off. But he went on and she relaxed, knowing that he would bring her off this way, that he wanted to, and now her response was quicker, deeper, and she reached the point where she knew she was going to make it, and the knowledge drew away the final veil of inhibition and reserve.

“Oh, darling, yes, oh, oh, yes, oh—” it only took her a moment to recall his name — “oh, David, oh!”

In his bathroom she used the toilet, then washed her hands and face and swished some of his toothpaste around in her mouth. She wet a washcloth and cleaned up some of the traces of intercourse, then rinsed out the washcloth and replaced it on its hook. His bathroom was tiny, like her own, but she had to admit he kept it cleaner. It still surprised her to find that some men who lived alone were almost compulsively immaculate. Others were complete slobs. There seemed to be no middle ground.

Perhaps David had someone in once a week. She wondered if Mark had kept Lucinda. He had a full time housekeeper, but he might have retained Lucinda for the heavy cleaning. Lord, how many years had Lucinda been with them, anyway? And how many words had they exchanged in all that time, beyond hello and goodbye and here’s your money and I be in nex’ week, Miz Benstock?

Had she so much as thought of Lucinda since she left Buffalo, had her name even come to mind before this moment? She didn’t think so. And what did Lucinda think of her, assuming Lucinda bothered to think of her at all?

What did any of them think of her?

Not that it mattered, not that it mattered at all.

Other things mattered. It mattered that she had been eaten superbly and fucked quite competently. That she was reasonably sober now and had no particular desire for another drink. That she wanted a cigarette desperately. This last, her desire for a cigarette, mattered a good deal more to her than the opinions of people four hundred miles away.

She returned to the bedroom and looked for her purse in the pile of her clothes. “Don’t go,” he said.

“Just getting a cigarette.”

“Good. Get two.”

“I didn’t think you smoked.”

“Once in a while. If I smoke a pack in a month it’s a lot for me. On second thought just bring one cigarette. I’ll have a couple of puffs of yours.”

“Do you think we know each other well enough for that?”

He laughed, a good hearty laugh. She joined him in bed and lit a cigarette, then passed it to him. “A pack a month,” she said.

“If that.”

“I’ve tried cutting down and it just doesn’t work for me. I get terribly tense and can’t stop looking at my watch. I’ve managed to quit entirely for a month or so at a clip but I always go back to it. Maybe living alone it would be more possible to quit. Were you ever a heavy smoker?”

“Never. Just one every once in a while to be sociable.”

“That’s very unusual.”

“I guess so, but it seems perfectly natural to me.”

The cigarette passed between them until she found an ashtray beside the bed and stubbed it out. “I ought to be getting home soon,” she said.

“Stay the night.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“There’s a good place on Broadway for brunch. Great Bloody Marys, first-rate eggs benedict.”

“You’re tempting me.”

He turned on his side to face her and ran his hand over her body. She felt a wave of very lazy sensuality pass through her. She put her face against his cheek and took his penis in her hand.

“Would you like to put it in your mouth?”

“Hmmm,” she said, thoughtfully. She had both hands on him now, stroking him, feeling him grow in her hands. “That’s an idea,” she said.

“Would you like to?”

She moved lower so that her cheek touched his stomach. “Would you like it if I did?”

“Yes, very much.”

She put her tongue in his navel. His penis was very hard now.

“Would you like it a lot?”

“Andrea—”

“Say please.”

“You’re going to drive me out of my mind.”

“Well, you teased me a little before. Sauce for the goose and all that. You’ve got a positively beautiful cock. Does everybody tell you that? Now let me know if you like this, okay?”

“Oh, God.”

It would have been very easy to fall asleep. Lying there next to him, next to his warmth, muscles limp with sexual satiation, the secret taste of his semen in her mouth, it would have been the simplest thing to let herself drift off into sleep.

Except that she made it a point to sleep alone.

This surprised her. When she first moved back to New York she’d worried that sleeping alone, after so many years at Mark’s side, might be difficult. What she found was that sleeping alone was an important part of living alone. Her sex life was rich and enjoyable, but when an episode was concluded and it was time for sleep she wanted to be alone in her own narrow bed.

She got up quietly, put on her clothes in the darkness. When she was dressed except for her shoes he said, “Andrea? Going somewhere?”

“Home.”

“Oh.”

“Can’t sleep.”

“Sure. I’ll call you.”

“I’d like that,” She approached the bed, leaned over to give him a quick kiss on the forehead. “Tonight was nice.”

Back in her own apartment she poured a juice glass full of scotch and set it on the bedside table. She got undressed and sat on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette and taking birdlike sips from the glass of whiskey. She had sobered up completely at his place and this one glass of scotch would not get her drunk now. It would just help her get to sleep.

Tomorrow there was a party she would probably go to, and at parties she tended to drink a lot. But there was nothing wrong with getting drunk on a Saturday night. Half the world got drunk on Saturday night.

Then the next day was Sunday. She liked to spend her Sundays alone. A lazy afternoon with the Sunday Times, and then maybe a walk in the park if the weather was nice, and possibly a movie or a concert if there was something interesting and if she was in the mood.

And then that would be one more week off the calendar, and Monday morning she would be back at work. There was nothing to it, really. You just took it one day at a time and there was nothing to it. It was easy, really, this business of getting along.

David had been nice, reasonably interesting company, a good lover. They didn’t have all that much in common and they could never be anything much to one another, but so what? If she saw him more than once a week she would find dozens of things about him that irritated or bored her, and no doubt she would have a similar effect upon him. But they were not going to see each other more than once a week. They might not see each other again at all — although she was fairly certain he would call and almost as certain, she would want to see him again.

Oh, it had been a successful evening. For a day that started with no hot water and a brazen cockroach, it had certainly finished up well.

Another sip of scotch, and time for another cigarette. A deep drag on the cigarette and blow a cloud of smoke at the ceiling and then another sip of scotch. A sip of this and a puff of that and you got through the days, taking them one at a time, taking them as they came.

She went to the bathroom, and before she left it she opened the medicine cabinet. If any roaches were inhabiting it at the moment they kept out of sight, but she had not opened the cabinet to check for roaches. She took a small plastic vial from the second shelf and uncapped it, pouring its contents into her palm. She counted the twenty-four Seconal tablets. An even two dozen of them, precisely the number she had brought with her from Buffalo. So far she had always managed to get to sleep without taking one of them, and that was a good sign.

So she still had two dozen of them. And two dozen were enough, more than enough.

She replaced them in the plastic vial, capped it, put it back on its shelf. And closed the medicine cabinet and returned to her bed.

Oh, she had no intention of taking those pills. No intention at all.

But several times a week she would count them, and on those occasions when she miscounted she would check to make sure that they were all there. It was a comfort to know they were there, though she could not have said why.