In the late spring old 1973 during my last semester at Bettner College an old boy friend showed up to visit my lover, Linda, and for three days I didn't see her at all. I was nearly frantic with anxiety, unable to sleep or eat. On the afternoon of the third day I ran into Linda's best friend Melissa who sensed what was the matter and invited me up to her dorm room. She listened to me for an hour as I spilled out my frustration and fear that I might lose Linda and then she said. "I'll tell you the truth but you won't believe me. They're just sitting around smoking dope and listening to music. She'll come back to you. What you need to do is listen to some music and just let it pass."

She put on a record of some piano variations by Bach. It was very unlike the rock music everyone was playing in those days and between the sound of the music and the relief I felt in voicing my emotions my fear was replaced by a bone deep fatigue and I fell asleep on her couch.

A year, later, with Linda truly gone, just as Melissa and I were about to become lovers she asked me, "Do you remember that afternoon? I came so close to giving myself to you. That was what you wanted, wasn't it?"

I am sure of my memory of the first incident but some times I wonder if I have misremembered the second. It seems just a little too good to be true.

Earlier, before I met Linda, I had asked Melissa if I could paint her portrait. It had been just after I decided that I was going to make myself into an artist but before I had acquired any of the necessary skills and the painting had been a disappointment. The finished portrait was like a cartoon. It presented some sort of blending of Theda Bara and Betty Boop and captured none of the things I had hoped to discover about her.

My first years after college were disappointing. I was living in a tiny studio apartment on the north side of Chicago and working as clerk for the national brokerage firm of Winston Stone. My romantic life was a mess - a long list of missed opportunities and misunderstandings.

Then in the fall of 1977, the company decided to bring me to the home office in New York City for a month of training and evaluation. It was a long awaited chance to make something out of my nascent career. I also hoped that some time in New York might help me recover my love of painting.

In the four years since my brief affair with Melissa I had lost track of her but other of our friends had not. Two days after I mentioned to Tony that I was being sent to New York, he told me that Melissa was there working as the manager of a small restaurant in Greenwich Village called the Walrus and Crane. He gave me her address and phone number. I sent her a short note saying when I would be in New York and asking if we could get together. Three days later she called and we talked for a half-hour or so. She offered to let me stay with her and she said she was delighted that she had a month of my time to plan. As I hung up the phone I was exhilarated. Damn, I thought, an odd life is about to get a good deal odder.

The flight in from Chicago had a direct mid-afternoon approach into La Guardia. It was a brilliant, clear, early fall day and we flew in low over Manhattan. It was intoxicating to see so many landmarks, so many familiar sights below, real and accessible. The tall buildings cast long shadows. The rivers were bright blue and the rectangle of Central Park glowed with bright autumnal colors. On the many other times I flew into New York in the years that followed I always felt that I had been deprived of something if the plane's last approach didn't offer me some spectacular view of the city.

That was my first real experience with traveling on an expense account and there seemed to be a refreshing freedom in simply hailing a cab for the trip into midtown. I tried to review my schedules for the first few days on the ride in but my attention kept wandering to the drab neighborhoods of Queens, the twisting cracked surface of the expressway and the long, spiny silhouette of Manhattan ahead.

My hotel turned out to be a nondescript, thirteen-story building with a small lobby and a pair of painfully slow elevators. It sat on 40th Street just off Park Avenue. When I got my things unpacked and stored I found myself restless and eager to see the city with a long Sunday afternoon still ahead of me. My first appointment wasn't until nine that night and so, although I had originally planned to be very discreet and distant at first in my relations to Melissa, I decided to call her right away. She sounded pleased to hear from me and suggested I come down to the Village immediately.

"How do you get there?" I asked.

"I take cabs," she said.

"Hypothetically," I said, "if someone wanted to take the subway, could they?"

I had known Melissa on and off for eight years. I met her during my sophomore year in college at a party soon after she came to school and as an aspiring editor and writer she seemed to be often on the fringe of the group of young artists of which I stood near the center. But it wasn't till three years later, when I fell in love with her best friend, Linda that I really began to know Melissa. The year after I graduated, Linda fell in love with someone else and as was her habit at the time she never mentioned it to me until the new affair was simply too advanced to be kept secret. As people do when they feel wronged I daydreamed about revenge, but as rarely happens, I was given a chance to have it. I moved to Chicago after Linda and I separated. Melissa was living then in the north suburbs with her parents and gradually we began to see more and more of each other till at last we spent a night together. The act itself was not particularly memorable but its repercussions were. Linda came back to Chicago soon after that. Perhaps she was intent on repairing the bad feelings between us. She saw Melissa before she saw me though and by the time she met me she was so angry that she was barely able to speak to me. It seemed that she was madder still because by her own standards she had no real claim to press against me. That one night which should have gone on as no more than a small secret between Melissa and I suddenly became a rift, a watershed, a point from which there was no easy return for any of us to the innocence that preceded it. For months neither Melissa nor Linda would speak to me.

So with a chance again to spend some time with Melissa I knew that there was much for us to say to each other, but what exactly those things were, I couldn't say.

On the rocking, noisy subway I realized that finally after nearly three years I was about to see Melissa again and despite the casualness of our recent conversation my relationship with this woman was nothing if not complicated. I closed my eyes and retreated from the intoxication I had found in the city long enough to try to remember again my encounters with Melissa. The act itself was tender yet brief and unsatisfying and to my mind it was as yet unfinished, unequal to the weight of what had happened to our lives because of it. It was barely a full night, a confused memory but what was undeniably real was the delicious dance, that mutual seduction with which the two of us, both a bit perverse and fond of the dramatic had sought and found a forbidden partner. She had long had a place in my imagination. In our college years even before I met Linda I had badgered her to let me paint her portrait and there had been times when making love to Linda I had imagined myself with Melissa to hurry myself along.

But who was Melissa? Two memories came to me. The lazy acceptant opulence of her body that summer night and the speed with which she covered herself afterwards, pulling on her bra to cover her breasts before she pulled on her panties. I remembered another day, a marvelous spring day in Indiana, a memory of my college days. I was walking on a path after a class, Linda grasping one arm and Melissa the other, savoring the light pressure of a breast against each arm, infatuated with the idea that I might enjoy the attention of two such intelligent and pretty women.

The rattling sway of the 7th Avenue local was numbing and the conductor's mumbled call of 14th Street startled me from my daydreams. I jumped out onto the platform, barely avoiding the closing doors as the garish cars rumbled off towards Brooklyn.

There was a tiny flower shop in the subway station and I thought to myself. Well, this is a good sign. I bought a bouquet of chrysanthemums from a young Latin woman. She seemed a little annoyed at being disturbed but I suppose I would have been too if I had to work on a Sunday. I walked up the street, bouquet in hand, imagining myself as something out of Norman Rockwell, the poignant boy suitor perhaps, the charming rube.

The Village is really a different place and as I walked up from the subway I felt the difference immediately. The buildings were low and older than in midtown and the street was lined with shops and stands and while in midtown the people seemed frantic and stiff here there was the air of the bazaar and of the small town. People chatted and browsed. There was little sense of haste here.

Melissa's building was a couple of blocks from the subway; a four story brick building that fell somewhere between fully derelict and slightly renovated. I rang the buzzer and moments later, a voice badly garbled by static told me to come up. There was a long buzz, signaling me that I could push open the heavy scarred wood door. The hallway and stair were narrow and dark. The floors were covered with tiny squares of ceramic tiles that seemed to have been beige once but had acquired a definite yellow tinge with time. The landing of each floor was marked with square deco numerals, laid out in light green tiles against the white. Melissa lived on the fourth floor facing the street. The door to her apartment was wide open.

Melissa seemed a bit taken back by the flowers in my hand. "Flowers for me?" she said. "How thoughtful. Next time you come bring me a vase," but she took them and set them on the table in what appeared to be an old mayonnaise jar.

Some people can touch and kiss their friends easily but to do that has always been difficult for me. I'm inclined to attach importance to these gestures and hate to share them without meaning. There was a brief hug. She turned her head to the side, offering me her cheek to kiss as if she were my great aunt. I wondered if she was remembering that we had once, briefly, been lovers. She gave the clear impression that she did not. There was some small talk. She asked about my flight as I looked around her apartment. It was made up of three rooms nearly equal in size and a bathroom off the narrow entryway. The first room served many purposes. Against the east wall there was a low couch with a gray nylon cover. It was the sort of thing you could easily imagine coming from the Salvation Army store. Against the opposite wall, half hidden by a folding screen were the rudiments of a kitchen, a tiny enameled stove, a narrow refrigerator and a small white metal cabinet that held a sink and a small drain board. Three wooden shelves had been attached with brackets to the wall above the sink. They held a frying pan, two unmatched pots and four plastic plates. The center of the room was filled with a battered leatherette recliner and a glass topped table with two folding chairs. A bulletin board on the east wall was covered with a collection of posters announcing poetry readings at nearby clubs and churches. A pair of children’s crayon drawings of flowers was taped to the walls above the table.

A door near the stove led to a small room that faced onto the street. It was empty except for a wide couch with foam cushions that doubled as a bed. A card table served as a desk. Taped to the bare wall was a crudely realized version of the sacred heart.

"I had a girl staying here for a while. One of the kids from work. I had to ask her to leave. She bought home somebody different each night." Melissa stared reflectively at the print on the wall. "I think that helped her get off," she said.

A second slightly larger room opened off a door next to the couch and it alone of all the rooms had distinctive furniture, a wide brass bed covered with a fine old quilt, a beautiful rosewood dresser and a tall antique, glass-doored book shelf that held a half-dozen books of poetry, a three year old copy of The Writer's Market, and two large stacks of recent copies of Vogue.

The design of the apartment was so irregular that I assumed that it had been fashioned from a larger apartment but I couldn't imagine what the original plan had been.

Melissa was wearing a pair of loose white shorts and a baggy sweater. She wore a jangling collection of bright plastic bracelets about her wrist. She wore no make-up and I noticed that the smooth skin of her thigh was ash white. In college, Melissa had always been casually unfashionable but she had an uncertainty about her looks that had to be accommodated. She had always used make-up, which was not really that common a habit in those hippie days.

"It's so nice to have you here," she said. "It's been too long."

"It has."

"Did you decide to stay at the hotel then?"

"Yes, I did." It seemed like a very foolish move just then. "The company is paying for it and I suppose that it makes them comfortable to know where I am."

She offered me a beer and as she got it for me I noticed that her refrigerator was empty except for a head of lettuce, three pints of yogurt and three Heinekens.

"So, what is it that you're doing here?" she asked.

"I'm in training," I said.

"Training to be what?" she asked.

"A manager."

"Oh," she said. She was not impressed but then she was a manager herself. "Enjoy your beer," she said. "I've got to change clothes. We're going to visit a friend of mine."

She stepped into the room, closed the door and a moment later opened it again. She had changed into some baggy, linen pants that managed to seem both casual and fashionable. I took my beer and stood in the doorway. I was disappointed that we were going to leave her apartment so soon. It had taken me too long to get this far.

Melissa stood in front of a large, oval, wood framed mirror that hung against the wall across from her brass bed. She primped as I leaned against the doorway. She rubbed her little finger against her cheek and lips to adjust her make-up. As she tied a brightly colored scarf around her head, she caught my eyes watching her in the reflection of the mirror. She said nothing and her expression did not change. Some people appeal because of some attractive trait or habit and some because they trouble your imagination. Melissa did both. She had always been a puzzle for me.

Her body was full and her thighs and arms were round and soft. A pleasant peasant's body on a well-bred woman. Her clothes were carefully chosen but designed to seem casual. The pants were elegantly draped and her white sweater clung softly to the underside of her full breasts. Her body was full and earthy but there was something decidedly ephemeral about her face. Her skin was almost transparent. Her hair was reddish and very fine, more aura than hair. Her mouth and nose were too small and delicate for the shape of her face. But it was her eyes that were the most striking. They were a rich green color that seemed uniquely hers. Sometimes Melissa could be literally stunning. I remember being with her once in a restaurant where the maitre de had mistaken her for a famous model, and yet she could often seem very plain and this contrast had made her very insecure about her appearance.

At last she seemed satisfied with what she saw in the mirror and turned her attention to other things.

"Do you hear from Linda now?" she asked.

"Sometimes," I said. "She keeps her hand in."

I knew that we would eventually get around to talking about Linda but I was surprised to see it come up so soon.

"Is she still fucking women?" Melissa asked. She got straight to point.

"Last I heard she was," I said. "She and Skyler still get it on occasionally for old times sake, I gather, but Beth is her true love. Don't you hear from her anymore?"

"We're not totally estranged. We communicate about every six months. The last letter I got from her was around Memorial Day. She and Beth were going to be in Staten Island for some feminist witches' celebration of the solstice and she wanted me to join them. That was one I couldn't deal with. I told her I had a gallery opening that night. She wrote back to say she couldn't believe I was so insensitive and backward."

She looked back towards the mirror. I couldn't tell if she was considering her appearance or thinking of Linda.

"Do you really think she's serious about being a lesbian?" Melissa continued. "She always seemed to need a man around. She wasn't complete without one."

Linda had told me that she and Melissa had been close to having an affair while they were in college, but one or the other always seemed to be with a man. According to Linda they just hadn't gotten around to it. When I had lived with Linda, she would tease me by kissing Melissa in front of me. "She's a better kisser than you," Linda would say. "Kiss her so you can learn how." Melissa was a great kisser.

"Linda told me that she and Beth tried to live together for a while," I said, "but with all the political things they were into it didn't work out. It did seem awfully political to me, as if it were the only thing possible once you became aware of men's oppression of women. Kind of like it was political lesbianism."

"Oh," Melissa said. "And that political number she is doing! If she wants to be political she's going to have to get out of Reading, Pennsylvania. I mean what an incredible cop out, I’ve never known anyone who sold out so quickly."

It seemed that I was a little more sympathetic to Linda then Melissa was. "It does seem to be an awfully small pond," I said, "but I guess it suits her."

"She's so false. When I told her I was fucking you she hated it, but that's just garbage. She was off with Skyler and you ought to have been fair game."

"Yeah, she really was pretty upset. I was a little surprised too. I guess I made the mistake of taking her at her word."

"She's so false."

I had hoped of course to talk to her about she and I and Linda. I had practiced ways of steering the conversation slowly to the subject. Perhaps in bed, a forbidden subject coaxed out into the open by passion. I was stunned to be dealing with it so soon, so bluntly. I should have been prepared of course, for Melissa had always surprised me. Our conversations had always been memorable.

"Ready?" she asked.

I wasn't sure.

Out on the street she moved quickly forcing me to follow after her. She was creating a bit of drama by controlling the situation with speed. I had screwed up my knee playing football in college and it's mildly arthritic and it wasn't easy for me to keep up with her pace. We walked rapidly across the narrow street and I followed her into a narrow brick storefront that turned out to be literally packed to the ceiling with cases of shampoo, hair sprays and cigarettes. There were immense stacks of toilet paper and paper towels. Everything seemed to be part of an unrepeatable sale. Melissa needed a pack of cigarettes. Carltons. This place was a bit of a shock. At the time I didn't think Manhattan could contain anything as mundane as a discount store. The man behind the counter was gruff and efficient. I had a feeling that he imagined himself to be running a cattle drive. Money changed hands here with incredible precision and speed. Then we were back on the sidewalk walking rapidly to the west with me lagging a step behind, trying to keep up with her fast pace. After coming so quickly to the heart of things while we were talking in her apartment, Melissa was now retreating again, she had become distant, as was her custom when she felt the need to control a situation. I was treated to a standard tourist's commentary about the Village. "Kerouac lived there for a time," "O'Hara used to drink a lot in this bar." "This restaurant gets written up a lot but I think it's overrated. As we say, just another Village eatery."

There was no way to fight through this pose of distance. I would just have to wait it out and be sure I didn't miss the next chance to bring back the intimacy.

"How are your friends in publishing?" I asked as we walked. It was an indirect way of asking if she was still writing. When I had last seen her, she was carrying an envelope full of plans for writing a novel and was eager to make connections in the world of publishing. Rumor had it that she had made progress in the second venture.

"They're terrible," she said. "Those people all left the business or they turned out to be boring."

"You're not writing then?"

She didn't respond directly to my question.

"I went over to Conde Nast," she said. "They publish Vogue."

"I know."

"I asked them for a job and they offered me one as a receptionist. It was for practically no money."

"Pity."

"I thought about it before I said no."

As we walked block after block to the north, the nature of the neighborhood gradually changed. The lovely, narrow rowhouses that had at first lined the streets soon became randomly scattered among open lots and three and four story warehouses and then there were only the grim dirty warehouses. At last Melissa turned left onto a narrow street and I followed. The pavement was high near the curbs and gently sloped down towards the center as if it were a drain. Ahead there was a view of the Hudson River, several blocks to the west. I thought for a moment that I was the victim of some bizarre joke, but Melissa was heading straight towards a large, three story building on the north side of the street. There was a long concrete loading dock at the front of the building and a large metal sign that read, 'Domini and Domini, Purveyors of Fresh Meat'. There was a wide metal canopy above the loading dock and the top of the canopy was crowned with a thick swirl of barbed wire. It was hard to imagine people living here.

"Oh, don't look so skeptical," Melissa said. "My friend has the loft on the second floor."

"Is she in the meat business?" I asked.

"Of course not. She works with me. Or at least she did."

We climbed up onto the loading dock and stopped in front of a narrow, painted steel door that was unadorned except for a small peephole. Melissa pushed a buzzer and we waited. There was no nameplate or numbers by the door but there was a narrow slot in the doorframe, which I gradually realized was a mailbox.

"I hate to do this but I just have to. It has to be done today. Andy, the osteopath, who owns the Walrus and Crane has finally gotten tired of her bitchiness and some other things and he fired her as co-owner, which made my position as manager a little strange since I am friends with both of them."

This style of business struck me as very odd. The world of Winston Stone almost seemed very sensible. You would have to be insane to make a friend there. And how exactly did someone fire a co-owner?

"Now she's trying to get me to sign this thing which says that I resign too, which of course I won't do. I'm not sure she's right. I'm not for him, really. It's just that she's as nuts as he is. So we pick one and I do need the job."

Patricia opened the triple locked door. She was a thin woman in her early thirties, with high cheekbones and pretty blond hair cut short, but there was something about her eyes that made her seem much older, something that hinted at trauma or perhaps too many drugs. She and Melissa embraced and then she led us up the dark narrow stair to her loft. A second locked door opened into a large bright kitchen with heavy, restaurant style pans suspended from an overhead rack and a huge gray institutional stove that was surrounded by acres of butcher-block counter top. It must have taken a crane to get that huge stove up to the second floor. Once the door was relocked and Melissa had completed the introductions, Patricia looked me over very carefully and then adopted a cheery hostess smile. "And where is Benjamin these days?" she asked Melissa.

"He's in Connecticut, trimming trees."

"Of course. I should have known. With those Italian guys. I would think that the season would nearly be over."

"Perhaps," Melissa said. "I wouldn't know."

"Well," Patricia said, "why don't we go into the living room?"

As Patricia led us down a narrow corridor, I whispered to Melissa, "Who's Benjamin?"

"My ex-lover."

"Oh."

The rest of the loft was a single open space about fifty feet square. At one corner a raised, railed platform held a wide bed with a heavy brass frame and a large oak armoire. The rest of the space easily held two white cotton covered couches, an antique desk with an electric typewriter, a large teak dining table and a coffee table. The walls were all bare red brick, decorated at regular intervals with bright, familiar posters from exhibitions at the Met or the Modern.

"Let me show you my letter," Patricia said. "I left a place for you to sign."

Melissa followed her to the desk while I sat on the couch to let them finish their business. As Melissa read the letter, Patricia stood close beside her, first letting her head rest on Melissa's shoulder and then she moved to put her arm around Melissa's waist and let her hand rest on her shoulder as they focused on the letter. Between a man and a woman the stance would have shown great intimacy between two women I wasn't sure what it meant. Melissa neither moved toward the touch nor shrank away from it.

There was something in the idea of a loft that appealed to me. It was a matter of taking things over, of creating your own space. My own apartment in Chicago was like my job, a small but pleasant niche in a nice area to which I had comfortably accommodated myself. Patricia seemed to be taking space and accommodating the space to her needs, a greater accomplishment certainly.

On the low table in front of the long sofa there was an impressive pile of books and magazines. It was an interesting selection, current copies of MS and New Times but also Business Week and Forbes. There was a colorful large paperback copy of photographs of Angkor Wat and another larger book of portraits. I picked it up and began to flip casually through it. The book was a series of black and white portraits of women who where for the most part artists and actresses. Each was simply labeled with their name and occupation. Some of the women were famous and some were completely unknown to me. I began to notice a certain continuity in the faces. Each seemed serious. The eyes stood out as if trying to meet the viewer's eyes, to involve us with them to make us see. There was also in the way the picture had been taken a respect for what experience and age had done to the faces. No make up disguised the small lines at the mouth and eyes. Some of these pictures showed young actresses naked, but my interest was so strongly held by the expressiveness of the faces that I did not see the young bodies as erotic and I kept turning back to the more evocative portraits of the older women. It occurred to me that this book could easily become the current equivalent of the piles of Playboys that I had stacked in the closet in prep school. Not that I lusted after these women but this seemed to hold a clue to what I was coming to want from women, a hint of the sort of things that you might be able to expect from a liberated woman, of what changes liberation had actually brought to these women. The book was the sort of thing I had expected to find at Melissa's in place of the collection of fashion magazines I had seen. I wondered if this affection for Vogue was a recent affectation. I tried to remember what her interests had been in college. I remembered her writing and some of the things Linda had told me but really I knew very little.

I could hear their voices from across the large room but only occasionally could I make out what was said. Patricia was growing more animate and though I was trying to be discreet I couldn't help overhearing them.

"You've said you were with me. You said you would back me up."

"I never meant this," Melissa said. "I meant while you were there. I can't leave them. They're family to me."

"How can you do this? How?" Patricia asked angrily. She seemed to be taking it all very personally. I lost track of the rest of their talk but then Patricia walked into the kitchen. Melissa sat in the chair across the coffee table from me and began to tell me about the pleasures of running a small restaurant and how happy she was in the Village. Soon Patricia returned. She looked more composed. She began with a formal politeness that did not quite suit her.

"Melissa tells me you are in the brokerage business."

I prepared myself for some kind of attack. Artistic people of my age seemed to take offense at my interest in business but she seemed to be honestly interested. "I was at a financial conference for women last week," she said. "Your company was represented. I think I might become a broker. They said that there was a lot of openings for women there now."

"Yes," I said. "I suppose there is if you are willing to make the changes they are looking for. It's a struggle to make a career there on your own terms."

"Oh well, I'm sure you'll do well," Patricia said.

"I hope to," I said

A stack of snapshots sat on the coffee table among the magazines. They were lying next to an open developer's envelope that suggested that they had been part of one or two rolls that had been developed at the same time. If that were true though Patricia had taken a very long time to finish a roll of film. The pictures spanned many years.

"Do you mind if I look?" I said.

"Oh, of course not," Patricia said. "Let me show you?"

She sat down on the coach beside me with her thigh pressed closely against mine. It was an obvious come-on but I was not above responding. I returned the pressure. She was an attractive enough woman and it occurred to me that I might be able to gain leverage enough to force Melissa out of her den if there was a suggestion of the possibility of some involvement between Patricia and I. It might bring the complexity and questions of our involvement back into the present. There was a problem, of course, in that I could expect no excuse for a chance meeting with her. I did not know her phone number or indeed even her last name. I consoled myself with the thought that I had come to tie-up loose ends and not to create more.

I love to sort through people's snapshots. There are always so many little things to see. There was a few which caught my attention. In one, a very young Patricia with straight blond hair hanging down to the middle of her back was wearing the black cap and gown of a graduation ceremony. In the background there was an ivy covered Edwardian brick building that could have been at any New England university. In the center of the picture was a shiny white Datsun 280-Z. To the left of the picture stood a smiling man in a nicely tailored suit who was so patrician looking that he might have been a U.S. Senator. This guy could have been a Roman senator. He was handing the keys of the car to Patricia and beaming broadly. The next picture was taken by a campfire in the woods at night. Patricia still had her long hair and was wearing blue jeans and a tee shirt through which her nipples were visible. She was sitting next to a gaunt, longhaired man. The flash had turned their large pupils bright red. They were obviously stoned. The next showed a slightly older, now shorthaired Patricia standing next to a pudgy, soft featured man in front of a store window with Walrus And Crane painted on the glass. Between them they held a banner that said, Grand Opening. There were two or three shots of the interior of the restaurant with Patricia looking elegant in a white blouse and black silk pants posing with various young chefs and waiters. The last showed Patricia and Melissa standing together on the patio of a beach house with the ocean behind them. They were holding wineglasses and looked very happy. When we finished with the snap shots I realized that Melissa had been watching me the whole time with a sly smile as if to say, Okay, Turner, now what are you going to do?

"You have a very lovely place here," I said politely. It was not a brilliant comment, but safe.

"Oh, it is nice," Patricia said. "Quite expensive, I'm afraid. And too isolated. I do find that I worry a lot about security. I come home in the early morning and the meat men are out. They are very protective. They seem to like it that I live here. They feel they can protect me like I was their daughter. And I take precautions."

"I noticed some of them," I said, pointing back over my shoulder towards the front window.

"The wire? Well, my friend Arnold, who designs sets for Off Broadway, has a loft too, and he came over one day and right away he spotted that the roof over the street would be a problem and he said to me, 'Patricia, what you really need here is barbed wire'. So Arnold and I got in the car and went over to the hardware store on 14th Street. When we got there it turns out that there are four different kinds of barbed wire. So Arnold and I are puzzling over what kind to get when Maurice comes over. Maurice is this giant black guy who works there. He's gay but gay in kind of hardware sort of way and he comes up and asks what we need and when we tell him, he says to me, 'What's your problem, lady? Rustlers?'"

I laughed when I heard that, laughed deeply and Patricia smiled and put her hand lightly on my thigh. "I'm glad you like that story" she said. "Some people don't think that it's funny. You have a very real laugh, you know."

I looked at Patricia. She was an attractive woman. But then I thought in life as in painting or business the easiest way to ruin a good idea is to complicate it.

"Melissa says you're a painter," Patricia said.

"He's dormant," Melissa offered.

"I think inert would describe it better," I said.

"That's a pity. Do you do portraits?" Patricia asked.

"I did once," I said.

"Well, perhaps with the proper inspiration," Patricia flirted. The pressure of her leg against mine was steady. Melissa noticed.

"Perhaps," I said.

"Why did you stop?" Patricia asked.

"It was too demanding to be constantly trying to see to the truth of things, to be constantly trying to see in a new way each time. I just wasn't up to it." That wasn't quite the whole story of course but it would do.

"That's a very strange thought," Patricia said. "You ought to talk to my friend, Vernon. He paints but I don't think that he ever sees anything except other people's shows."

"Vernon is currently imitating Morris," Melissa explained.

Patricia was puzzled. "Morris?" she asked. It annoyed her that Melissa and I shared something she did not.

"In college, Larry apprenticed for a semester with Morris Ackerman," Melissa explained.

I could see that I had been raised a few levels in Patricia's estimation.

"It was a while ago," I said humbly.

"Still. He's very big time. Very big time."

Patricia got up to make us some drinks and Melissa moved to the place on the sofa to my left, I could feel her breast lightly against my arm. She leaned close to my ear. "Larry," she said, "You are such a tease. I don't believe it."

"Melissa," I said, "I only have eyes for you." Which was more or less true.

When I suggested that it was time for us to leave, Patricia insisted that we should go to dinner together. Melissa apparently was not much good at saying no and soon we were all heading back towards the Village. We took Patricia's car, a new green Volvo with blue Connecticut plates.

We ate in a noisy, cedar paneled restaurant and as we talked I got a good view of the pleasures of Melissa's life. The young restaurant workers apparently formed a tight circle and many people stopped by our table. Melissa admired a pretty young woman's new boots and tried to give her some advice on how to find an apartment. A sad, teenage cook received some sympathy about a spat he had had with his gay lover. A tall, finely featured black woman who moved and looked like a dancer and had just recently left the Walrus and Crane stopped by to try to get the details of Patricia's quarrel with Andy.

It was a pleasant place. It seemed as if I had come into the midst of a large warm family and it was jarring when I looked at my watch and realized that I had only forty five minutes to get to Midtown and change for the Winston Stone reception that evening. I tried to excuse myself but Patricia said, "Relax, I'll drive you. Fifteen minutes later, Melissa said to me, "Oh, please stop looking at your watch. No one even owns a watch around here."

When at last we got the bill paid and were back on the street, Patricia was apologetic and promised to fix things by driving fast.

Her driving reminded me of someone who was just learning to ride a horse. She had all the principles firmly in hand but there was something frighteningly tentative about her application of them. On Fourteenth Street (?) we got behind a wide Chevy Impala with New Jersey plates and a driver that seemed too frightened to negotiate the narrow crowded street. I sat back against the seat and stared at the dark old stone town houses. They seemed dusty and heavy as if they had not changed in years. The broad bay windows were heavy with beveled glass; the doorways all seemed to be guarded with carved stone lions. These places reminded me of a picture I had once seen of the home in which Theodore Roosevelt was born. This narrow island was revealing itself to be stuffed full of familiar references.

When we turned onto Park Avenue we began to make much better time and I reached the hotel little more than ten minutes late.

On Monday night Tony Sarceti, second in command of the Operations Planning Section at Winston Stone took me to dinner and we finished with a long drunken night of talk about music and the firm at a jazz club in the West Village. He was surprised that I knew so much about the Village area. I was surprised that he knew so much about jazz and Winston Stone. On Tuesday, Melissa had other plans so I used the evening for a hurried solo tour of the Metropolitan and the Whitney Museum. I had a late dinner at a pizza place on Lexington and I felt that I had reached a frantic sort of Garden of Eden. So it was Wednesday before I saw Melissa again. When I called she seemed very glad to hear from me and she said that I should meet her at her apartment around six-thirty. When I got back to the hotel that evening, I changed quickly into jeans and a sweater and took the subway across from Grand Central to Times Square and then south to the Village. The subway trip was growing familiar. In my eagerness I found myself in the Village before six and to pass the time I walked the streets, trying to familiarize myself with Melissa's world. I walked past the Walrus and Crane. It was pleasant looking, a single storefront with white drapes obscuring its glass front and a wood sign hanging out over the street.

Off to the north, the tall crown of the Empire State Building loomed over the comparatively low buildings of the Village like some benevolent, medieval giant overlooking the business of some other older sort of village. In the late afternoon the streets were crowded with a rich variety of people. The true non-conformists, dressed in radical costumes, gaudy silks and shawls, walked along slowly letting themselves be seen. A thin black woman in a sari with a child whose hair was tightly braided and decorated with ribbons, politely told a gawking, white tourist where he could have his hair done like her daughter's. There were people in business suits returning from their days in other parts of the city like commuters returning to a suburb. There was something in my energy or my clothes that seemed to mark me as an outsider there. I stopped to buy an apple from a leather-aproned grocer who kept a stack of fruit boxes on a table in front of his store beside a large scale. The grocer refused to make change for a dollar in order to sell me an apple that cost a quarter and he was angry when a friend of his who stood nearby discussing the weather offered me change. "But, Leon, he really didn't have change," the friend said. I think that perhaps he must have seen in me changes that he didn't like. The Village is really very village-like.

At twenty till seven I rang the door to Melissa's apartment and was buzzed up. She met me at the door to her apartment. I kissed her lightly and for an instant I thought our kiss would proceed into passion but not quite yet. She broke away with a vague smile and got me one of the Heinekens from the refrigerator.

"How was your day?" she asked.

"Boring. We had a handful of guest speakers and the rest of the day was a scared tourist's guide to survival in New York City. Did you and Patricia get things worked out?"

"Oh, she's nuts. She has got some of the restaurant's blank checks and she is waving them around like they are her salvation. She was so angry that I wouldn't sign that silly letter."

Thinking like a manager, I said, "Just put stop payments on the ones she has. Stress to the bank that she's no longer authorized to sign."

Melissa seemed shocked. "Oh, there's no reason for that. She's just making gestures. No more than that. She's just making gestures."

Melissa was distracted and very fidgety. She wouldn't meet my eyes. There is a school of thought advanced in male locker rooms that a fidgety woman is just waiting for you to take her. I decided not to take a chance.

"So what do you want to do this evening?" I asked. I had decided to pursue a rather conventional seduction. A fine meal, drinks afterwards, intimate conversation.

"Oh," she said, "why do we always have to be doing something? Enjoy your beer."

We talked about my reasons for pursuing a career at Winston Stone and she showed me a crudely printed anthology of feminist poetry that included a couple of impressionistic things that had been done by a friend of hers. "This harbor here," one began.

Finally I began to get some idea of why she was in no hurry to leave. The bell rang and Patricia came in. She seemed frantic and conspiratorial and she and Melissa headed to the back room to talk business. They closed the door.

I tried to entertain myself with the anthology of poetry but after a few minutes the bell rang and Melissa yelled out that I should get it. It took me a little time to locate the buzzer but I finally found it attached to the bathroom wall next to the mirror. A few minutes later, a man in his mid-twenties was standing in the doorway, carrying a small nylon bag. He was tall and attractive; standing about 6' 3" with the solid body of a man who makes his living with physical labor. His features were boyish with a handsomeness that bordered on beauty. His light curly hair was cut short. He moved carefully with his elbows close against the side of his body as if he were afraid of doing damage as he moved. He wore new blue jeans and a freshly pressed, plaid, flannel shirt. You must be Nelson Eddy, I thought.

"I'm Benjamin," he said, extending his large hand carefully.

"Larry," I said.

"Larry Turner. Melissa mentioned you were coming."

He took note of the closed bedroom door and my empty beer bottle.

"Can I get you something?" he asked and then he got me another beer from the refrigerator, taking nothing for himself.

We made a polite attempt at conversation and I found him to be very congenial. In response to my questions he supplied brief, self-deprecating answers. I learned that surprisingly New York made better sense professionally for a tree trimmer than Chicago, the first had grown in the midst of natural forest while the latter had grown up on nearly bare prairie. Benjamin took a rather long view of things. He questioned me about my work and my stay in Manhattan and though I tried to find the guile within his questions I found only a simple and open man.

I discovered that he had grown up in Lake Forest, Illinois along with Melissa, had known her casually in high school, though he was two years younger than she, because he had been a teammate and a friend of her younger brother. He had spent two years at a fashionable but undemanding Midwestern college, taking introduction to practically everything. But he had encountered nothing that interested him as much as Melissa and so when she graduated he had followed her, first back to Lake Forest and then to New York City. Earning a living presented no particular problem to him as he brought no psychic or ego needs to the question and so it was simply a matter of earning enough money to live on. His good looks and gentle manner ingratiated him to people and I suspect a subsidy from his wealthy parents made things easier for him. He had worked in a restaurant and a record store and over the summer had a job with a landscaping firm. He liked the last the best because it gave him a chance to be out of doors. Altogether, he seemed to be a remarkably healthy man. I wondered how I would be able to deal with him. At Winston Stone, everything was a game of masks and deceit and hidden motive. Judo is of no use if your opponent refused to attack.

At last the door to the bedroom opened and Patricia and Melissa emerged looking disturbed. Patricia seemed frantic, nearly hyperactive. Melissa seemed withdrawn. In the moment that the ladies stepped out of the bedroom I saw a look of distaste appear on Benjamin's face when he saw Patricia. It was the only time I was ever to see anything of the sort from him.

"How's Connecticut?" Melissa asked. She smiled but didn't move towards him.

"Gorgeous. It's beautiful," Benjamin replied.

"Is there any more work there?"

"I'll know in a week."

We arranged ourselves uneasily about the room. Melissa sat on the couch next to me, Patricia in the battered recliner and Benjamin on top of the radiator beneath the window by the stove. Patricia seemed on the verge of hysteria and that unnerved Melissa and I. I am something of a therapeutic listener but to focus on her would have upset the group's delicate balance.

It was obvious that the four of us did not constitute a comfortable group, though I thought that any two of us might be able to get along quite well. The small talk was tortured and almost painful. I struggled to try to think of a way to resolve the awkwardness. My favored solution - that Benjamin and Patricia would just sort of disappear seemed very unlikely. Finally after a particularly long silence in which we all sat smiling, like painted dolls, and all but Benjamin smoked cigarette after cigarette, Patricia suggested that we go to a movie. Suddenly we were all action. Patricia and Melissa got a copy of the Times and after much debate it was decided that we should go see Julia, which was then playing at a theater on Second Avenue in the fifties. The movie started in only thirty-five minutes and so suddenly we were a flurry of motion, rushing to get somewhere.

Patricia, Benjamin and I walked down the stairs and out onto the street but excusing herself to apply some make-up; Melissa lingered in the apartment. We waited for her till it was clear that something was wrong and after five minutes or so, Benjamin went back upstairs to bring her down. I took her hesitancy as a sign that she was struggling with the complications on my presence here and I took that as a good sign. But as soon as Benjamin had reentered the apartment, I realized that I had surrendered something by not going up myself or at least accompanying him. Finally she arrived looking pale and a bit ill. There was a bit of awkwardness in forming ourselves into couples once we got to the car but at last I sat down in the front seat next to Patricia, while Benjamin, consolidating his gains, moved closer to Melissa who seemed almost comatose. The drive north was another rapid and nerve wracking affair but soon we were on Park Avenue in the fifties. I couldn't imagine how we could park here but Patricia spotted a free parking spot in front of the Waldorf Astoria. The doorman approached the car and I cringed at the thought of another urban unpleasantness but Benjamin got out to display his Midwestern supra friendliness. "Oh, I hope he doesn't try to tip him," Melissa said. It turned out that the doorman was only interested in helping us to get the Volvo precisely into the small place.

There was a bit more awkwardness in the theater about who sat next to whom. Finally Melissa sat between Benjamin and myself with Patricia to my left. Before the film began, Melissa managed to get she and I to go back to the lobby alone to get some popcorn. Once we were in the brightness of the lobby, she grabbed my arm and pulled it so that it rested on her shoulders and she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.

"Oh, do you believe those two. They're hot as hell for each other and they won't admit it. They won't admit that they can even stand each other. It's so transparent. They were attracted to each other long before I ever entered the picture. Curiouser and curiouser."

She seemed almost manic but at least briefly we were alone again.

"Why did you stay with Benjamin?" I said.

"He's nice. He's thoughtful."

"He's too nice."

"I know."

"So?"

"It just wasn't enough."

I wanted to ask her something else but the movie was beginning and it was time to join our friends.

The movie was fine but as we were leaving, walking back into the night air and tingling reality of New York, my attempts to discuss the movie were met with a cold silence, they all seemed to have something else on their minds and it seemed that I alone had paid any attention to the film. I was not yet privy to the nuances here.

It was decided that they would drop me off at the hotel before going downtown to the Village. They left me off at Lexington and 40th with great politeness. Patricia and Benjamin both said that it had been a pleasure to meet me.

"I'm sure we'll meet again," I said. "I'll be here for the rest of the month."

"The month?" Patricia said. "I thought a week."

She and Benjamin were clearly displeased. Melissa was distant. She didn't even say good-by.

The evening left me bewildered and excited and I walked over to Hennessey's on Lexington to have a few beers and watch the end of an early season basketball game before I returned to the hotel and went to sleep.

The next afternoon I called Melissa's apartment. Benjamin answered the phone. A pity, I thought.

"I'm glad you called," he said pleasantly. "We decided that we were much too short with you last night. We tried to call you to see if you wanted to come back down to the Village but you were out."

I winced at his casual use of the pronoun we. It seemed that he considered them to still be a couple. Later it seemed to me that I had a real chance with Melissa until the movie, when Benjamin had simply reappeared and had quietly and confidently moved in, had taken his place by her side, too innocent to be hurt without unacceptable damage. With his gentle way nothing else was possible. And when it was clear that I had lost and that Benjamin had won, he was glad to welcome me back into their company.

"Is Melissa there?"

"She's working but she said you should come to the restaurant if you like."

Kindly giving me permission.

The Walrus and Crane was a storefront restaurant on 7th Avenue just south of Fourteenth Street. It was a long narrow room that curved slightly as it passed through the width of a triangular building before reaching its rear entrance on Greenwich. The kitchen sat in the center of the room protected by a high counter. It was a pleasant but unspectacular place, crowded with small tables that were adorned with white linen table clothes and silver vases holding fresh flowers. The menu was mainly comprised of salads, soups, and omelets and since they had no liquor license the customers had to bring their own wine. It had had a few good reviews in the papers and it was frequented by several celebrities who found it comfortable and out of the way enough to offer privacy. Business was good. Melissa's main contribution to the place had been to replace the tapes of popular music which had been played over the stereo with a wonderful collection of little known classical pieces, concertos for odd instruments and the minor works of half forgotten composers. The waiters and cooks were all in their early twenties and had the flamboyant look of would be actors. All the people there seemed to be on their way to some place else. It was a successful business, I suppose, but it seemed to be missing something. I didn't think that it was serious enough. The business itself seemed secondary with the staff to other concerns, talk of friends, talk of the theater, talk of movies and fashion. Compared to Winston Stone it seemed a naive place but it was a warm and pleasant place and that certainly could not be said of Winston Stone.

A brisk, young waiter left me standing in the entry while he got Melissa. From the middle of the room, she motioned for me to sit at a small table in the back. She was talking intently with two of her waitresses and looked like a very determined and efficient manager. I was pleased to see that after the passivity she had shown following the movie.

"I'll be with you in a minute," she said and then she went down into the basement office, leaving me sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room. She had left a few papers there and I picked up one, curious about the things that made up her day. One was a price list from a supplier of various relishes, mustards, teas and spices from Europe. Each entry was accompanied by a long discussion of the taste and ingredients in the products. It came as a mild surprise to me that there were people who spent their time with such nuances. The tapes were playing rich baroque music. The room smelled pleasant. My own day was taken up with a preoccupation with numbers, real enough in terms of what they represent but as sterile and intangible as the rapid binary clicks with in a computer. It was pleasant to be confronted with a list that detailed nine different mustards.

She returned to the table after she finished talking to the waitress and sat down, choosing the chair next to me rather than the one across the table.

"I must apologize for last night," she said. "We must have been awful to you. When we got home we realized it and Benjamin tried to call you."

"I know. I talked to him before I came over," I said, "He said 'We decided.'" I stressed the word we.

"Did he? Yes, I suppose he did."

"What do you see in him?"

"What did I see in him? He's a nice guy. Almost too nice to be human. He's warm. He sleeps like a rock. Never disturbs me with his dreams."

"But is that enough?"

"No fair. You've already asked that."

We hadn't been talking for very long before we were joined by one of the young waitresses, a young girl with round wire rim glasses and long straight reddish hair. She seemed to want to talk and a knowing glance passed between Melissa and I as if we were bemused parents listening to an enthusiastic child. The girl had spent the afternoon at a special dress rehearsal of Boris Gudunov at the Met. "I fell asleep after ten minutes," she said, "and now I've got a terribly stiff neck."

"How could you fall asleep?" I asked. "It's all gutturals and Slavic passion."

She turned her attention to Melissa and if not exactly annoyed at my presence she certainly seemed annoyed at my interruption.

"Oh, that's just why," she said. "You know I hurt myself the other day doing leaps in ballet class. I've been thinking about taking tap dancing instead. Can you imagine it, some interview later, when I'm famous. 'Oh I got my start tap dancing.' Wouldn't that be something?"

She had finished her story but when there was a short amicable silence she decided to start on something else.

"My mother was here last week, in from Cincinnati to find out exactly what sort of scandalous life I was leading."

"I'm sure you disappointed her," Melissa said.

'Well, it's funny. I knew that she would go though my dresser drawers. I just knew she would find an excuse to do that. So I hid everything. I cleared everything out of my third drawer. Everything, I thought, but . . . "

"A box of Ramses," Melissa said with a laugh.

"A handful actually." The women both laughed. "She found them under my underwear."

"Really!"

"Anyway, it took me forever to get her calmed down after that. She was finding fault with everything. She kept saying that people dressed funny here. She hated everything. I'm sure she was very glad to get back to Cincinnati."

"With her dreadful secret," Melissa suggested.

"Yes."

The girl seemed uncomfortable with the silence and when another occurred she was soon off on another subject.

"I read this tremendous play for my acting class," she said. "It's by Somerset Maugham. It's really very much ahead of its time. It's a play about this woman whose husband is having an affair with her best friend and when she finds out about it she gets a job and pays him back every cent of his she has ever used and then she leaves him and has an affair with his best friend."

"What kind of guy is the friend?" I asked blandly.

"What?"

"Well," I said, "it makes a difference doesn't it? If he's an asshole then it is a considerably different play than if he's a desirable guy."

I don't think the girl understood what I was saying and she seemed to get an idea that I was ridiculing her which I was not and so I didn't have the chance I would have liked to discuss the situation. A few minutes later, she left us alone to rush off to see a play on the upper West Side. I was beginning to wonder if most of the fabled tremendous energy of New York City wasn't being expended simply in a great mass hurrying from one place to another. Rushing to make yet another meaningless connection.

"They call me Mom," Melissa said after a while. "My little village family."

I didn't say anything but thoughtfully savored my cup of tea and listened to the intriguing interplay in the taped music, a sonata for guitar. Melissa went off to the kitchen and when she returned a few minutes later she took my hand and gave it a friendly squeeze.

"Do you remember my first afternoon here?" I asked.

"Of course."

"When we were at Patricia's, did you think there was something odd about her selection of snapshots?"

She smiled and thought for a few moments. She wasn't thinking about whether there was anything odd about the photos. She was deciding whether or not to talk to me about it.

"There was," she said. "I think she left them out for me to see. She didn't know you were coming. I think she was trying to influence me." Do you mean she was trying to seduce you? I wondered. "I was wondering if you would think about that," she said. "You're pretty sharp. Maybe you ought to move here and be a Struggling Village Artist. It's practically a job description here." When I looked like I was really considering it, she laughed and said, "I'm teasing." She put her hand on my forearm and continued. "Do you know, I've often thought about you. I mean about your paintings. You remember that portrait you did of Linda?"

"The nude?"

"No, the other. With her standing in your studio."

"Forlorn? In a minor key?"

It had been a lovely work, but inexplicably sad. I attempted to capture something of Linda's melancholy seriousness but I found something quite different. I had sold the painting to an accountant for $600 just after Linda had left me for the first time. The time before Skyler.

"Do you remember the window behind her?"

"Streaked with rain? A gray light? Yeah." It had been the best part of the picture.

"I had a lovely apartment over by Washington Square. It was an old building with these lovely, old leaded glass windows. Streaked and kind of bowed in the middle and not exactly transparent. They must have been a hundred years old. Whenever it rained I used to lie in bed and look at those windows and think of your painting. Do you still think of painting?"

"Rarely."

"Play a game with me," she said. "If you were to paint your masterpiece now what would it be like?"

I was still full of the images of my Tuesday night visit to the Met. "David's The Death of Socrates, with the faces of Winston Stone executives painted onto the watchers."

"No"

"All right then. That Vermeer. The prefect blue light."

"Yes," she said. "I think that would do for you. And if I were to write my masterpiece? Guess what it would be like."

"I have no idea." I truly did not.

"It would be a wild and lovely French farce. Brimming with cuckolds and deceit and half-hearted lust that turned in the end into a hum of gay, sociable laughter."

It was a pretty picture, Moliere or Cosi Fan Tutte, but I had trouble imagining Melissa's acid remark, "Is she still fucking women?" lilting from the mouth of a Mozart soprano. Still, we had enjoyed our game.

"Do you and Benjamin talk this way?" I asked.

"Good lord, no," she said. "We hardly talk. No, that's not right, we do talk. We gossip about our friends. We talk about the weather. We talk about what kind of tea we like. It's very comfortable."

That was encouraging.

"Your ex-lover?"

"Yes."

As if on cue, Benjamin came through the door carrying a brown paper bag. As her benign and perfect lumberjack approached, a look of irritation flashed across Melissa's face but she was smiling by the time he reached our table. He kissed her lightly and set the bag in front of me. "I thought you might be here," he said to me. "I brought you some beer."

"That's very thoughtful," I said and despite my better judgment I was actually grateful.

Benjamin seemed comfortable allowing Melissa and I to continue our talk. After a brief talk about how their days had been there was a silence that Melissa broke by saying to me.

"Do you remember that sketch that you did for our magazine? The thing from Sherlock Holmes."

Melissa and Linda had been co-editors of the campus literary magazine and once they had been puzzled about how to illustrate a clumsy but harrowing story about a student's troubles with heroin and his girl friend. I had done a quick sketch with a ball point pen on typing paper of a hand as spiny as Nosferatu's reaching for a vial and captioned it with a line from The Sign of Four, in which, Holmes hearing the happy news of Watson's upcoming marriage had said, "And for me, there still remains the cocaine bottle." It had been an easy sophomoric thing but they had used it and it had gotten a lot of comment on the campus.

"It was wonderful then, Benjamin," Melissa said. "Things seemed so easy then. We had so much fun then."

"Was it better than the Village?" he asked.

Melissa looked at him closely and then shook her head. "Not better," she said. "Just different."

There was a silence then and Benjamin seemed encouraged by it to take his turn to talk.

"You know, Mel," he said, "this job we were working on the last couple of weeks was on this giant estate up in Greenwich. You could believe that the King of France lived there. A million trees. Mostly oaks and exotics. Hardwoods. But the thing is that even the cheapest hotel up there was a Marriott so Antonio can't find any place where the crew could afford to stay. But he managed to rent this old Aerostream trailer for us to stay in and he talked the guy who owned the place into letting us park it at the edge of his estate. We were way off on the edge so that it is hidden by the trees. The odd thing is, it is painted all these bright colors like it was a circus wagon or a gypsy cart. One of the guys on the crew figured it was a prop from a movie. So all the tree trimmers are bunked out under the trees in this metal gypsy thing. On the second night we were there about midnight and there is this knock on the door and we open it up and in walks this sixteen year old girl. She is the daughter of the man who owns the castle and she is just wearing her nightgown and slippers. It turns out that her boyfriend told her he would meet her in this thing. The jerk was just playing a joke on her."

"Some joke," Melissa said. "What did you do?"

"We shared our Pepsi and Fritos with her and talked for a while. It turned out that she is a second cousin to the MacMeisters who had that big place on Bannockburn Road back home. Her big sister is going to marry a Harvard Law guy from Tuxedo Park."

So much for being stolen away by gypsies, I thought.

"Doesn't your Uncle Butch have a place up there," Melissa asked. "He probably has a cot you could use."

"Mel, if my buddies even knew I had a uncle with a place up there they would probably drop a branch on me."

"You're just one of the guys, right?" Melissa teased.

"Yeah, right, Mel," Benjamin said with an embarrassed laugh. He reached across the table to light Melissa's cigarette before he continued with his story. That was the sort of guy he was, he would never even think of smoking himself but he was careful never to leave the house without a book of matches to light other people's cigarettes. I wasn't too sure how I was going to deal with this guy. He was literally too good to be true. It seemed impossible to separate him from Melissa without being rude and being rude clearly violated the vague unwritten rules of this place.

"It's strange living the Village," he said. "Everyone here just assumes that you are gay. I played on a gay softball team this summer. I just kind of wandered over and they let me play."

"He's really marvelous," Melissa said. "He is a great athlete. He played football with my brother."

"It was really kind of fun," he continued. "You wouldn't think that they were gay. They all played very well. It was a great team. We won our league and the rest of them all went off to a tournament in Los Angeles, but I couldn't go along."

"Because you're not gay?" I asked.

"Right."

"I bet the meeting of the rules committee was really something," I said. "How could they tell?"

"Sealed affidavits?" Melissa suggested.

"These could be difficult choices," I continued. "Heated arguments to determine if bi- was enough to qualify. The shortstop trying to turn the right fielder so he could make the trip."

That caught Melissa's fancy and she laughed. Our college years had been a time of irreverent and incessant wit. I missed those days and I had lately come to the conclusion that of all my traits, my repressed sense of humor was the one most likely to cause me trouble at Winston Stone. The seriousness, the pretension of the business world had long seemed to me its least desirable characteristic.

"I had forgotten what a smart ass you were," Melissa said. She thought a bit and then added. "You know I was completely in awe of you when we first met. I could hardly talk to you."

"I suppose that is progress for one of us," I said. "I've been trying to get back in stride ever since I left Bettner."

"Why don't you ever paint?" she said. "I remember you as being quite marvelous."

"I've put aside childish things."

"Oh, nonsense," she said. "The Village is full of people who work hard all day and then come back to create the most remarkable things. You are just defeating yourself."

"Perhaps," I said. "Maybe if I worked in a restaurant."

"The restaurant is perfect," Melissa said. "I could never take a job where you have to work in the morning. Mornings are completely impossible. Benjamin is so good to me in the morning. He makes me tea and brings these warm compresses and rubs my neck. Mornings are horrible."

I laughed and they turned to me, puzzled.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but that struck a note with me. I remember it used to seem to me that Linda would never wake up. She slept as if she were in coma."

"Oh, it used to be awful," Melissa said with a laugh. "When she and I were roommates it was always a big joke with us that if either of us ever saw noon we would describe it to the other."

She smiled and seemed to slip into reminiscence. One of those intimacies she could offer with such suddenness.

"I remember how Linda used to come back to room to pick up clothes when she was living with you. She would collapse down on the bed and throw her hands up in the air. 'How can I be in love with this guy,' she would say, 'He's so incredibly jealous. He keeps saying he'll leave me if I find someone else.'" Melissa had a good touch for imitation, she'd been an actress in our college productions and she managed to catch something I had forgotten in Linda's earnest speech.

"I think my phrase was if she slept with someone else."

"She really couldn't figure you out."

Even after all those years this remembered betrayal hurt me. But it went without saying that Linda would have shared things with her best friend that she hadn't shared with me. I had known it at the time but I certainly hadn't accepted it then.

"I remember the day you drew up that card for her. With that lovely drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge on the face of it. And the poem written out on the inside. She showed it to me like it was the most precious thing in the world."

"My attempt at an intellectual valentine. I wonder if they could be marketed these days."

I had met Melissa long before I had known Linda. She called me one day to ask my permission to write a poem for a college composition contest about a small painting that had hung in a campus art show. It had been very flattering and I remembered that for a time I had considered trying to have an affair with her, but nothing had come of it.

Melissa had a tendency to mix a neat barb in with her compliments. I didn't know then and I still don't know if it was intentional or unintentional.

"Do you remember that card?" she asked. "I remember that she thought that you had written the poem too and when I told her you hadn't she seemed heart-broken. Do you remember?"

"I remember the card."

"Do you remember the poem?"

"I'm not sure. Something from Yeats?"

"No."

"Hart Crane, wasn't it? That section from The Bridge? The Harbor Dawn? There was one particular world in it."

"Murmurously."

"Yeah."

"You know, I still remember that. I think about it in the morning a lot, particularly when I had the place on Washington Square, I still know it word for word.

"And you beside me, blessed now, while sirens

""Wasn't there another part to it, something from later in the poem."

"Yes, I think so," Melissa said. "Something about hands."

"I remember now, I think," I said and I recited it.

Arms close."

I remembered when I had first heard of Hart Crane. I was a freshman sitting at lunch in the dormitory dining room. John Anderson was doing a tutorial that required him to study one American poet a week for the whole semester. That week was Hart Crane and over sloppy joes, John said, "It's amazing story. He wrote one good poem and he is universally considered to be great." A couple of years later John's remark led me to study The Bridge. I guess I figured if some guy could get by with one poem, I might be able to get by with just one good painting. It was one of those many moments that constitute an education in the arts.

"You were such a prefect romantic then, Larry," Melissa said.

"Well, at least a well-read one," I said. "You know it was a very odd moment for me when someone told me Hart Crane was gay."

"He play softball?" Benjamin asked.

It was very pleasant to find that I could still recite a bit of poetry now and then and that there was still a place beyond the rigid ambition and materialism of my business day where that could be appreciated.

I loved the changes in Melissa. I had always loved the changes in Melissa. She often seemed theatrical and distant but there were moments. Moments of startling intimacy. With deft patience and intellect you could draw her out, bring a special closeness, even if it was very tenuous. It may be that Melissa had shared those moments with many men, but I doubt it, and I knew that I had shared them it with few other women.

Although Benjamin's main impulse remained the refining of his extreme likableness, I could see that the animation of my conversation with Melissa was troubling him. He had little to say and he really looked plainly unhappy. Worst of all for him, he was not the sort who allowed himself to rise to fight. There was a pause and we all seemed to realize together that it was beginning to grow late and that we had made no suggestion as to what should follow. I noticed for the first time that the restaurant was emptying. Two of the young waiters stood together outside the kitchen arguing about the quality of a wine. Benjamin reminded me of a patient husband trying to extract his wife from a party she was enjoying. His attractive face was so open that I thought for a moment that if I could capture the essence of his expression in a drawing I would have a full story - one of those refractive, revealing moments. There was a threat in lingering here for him, that this man who had been so kind to this woman because of his complete assurance that she would in the end return to him, might soon have to face the startling fact that this woman might not want to follow him after all. I wondered if he had been informed that I was an ex-lover and an ex-lover of a friend. For all its openness that face still managed to hide its real secrets from me. But perhaps he had none.

"I promised to show you the Staten Island Ferry tonight," Melissa said with a quick glance at her watch.

"We could make it another night if you like," I offered.

"No. Tonight. This has been marvelous. All this reminiscing has got me excited. Benjamin?"

"Oh no, I'm not in the mood. I'll go back to the place. But enjoy yourself."

They talked for a while longer and when at last they had resolved whatever it was they had to resolve Melissa and I left him sitting solemnly sipping the last warm beer.

The night had grown cool and clear and once we were outside our pace quickened. There was a real feeling of exhilaration between us. We were like two teenagers freed from the unnatural constrictions of the polite conversation that was demanded by the presence of our parents, freed at last to get down to the real purpose of the evening. She took my hand and led me rapidly across Greenwich Avenue along a short side street, and then out onto Seventh Avenue. That broad street seemed awash with a yellow stream of available taxis but when I stepped out into the street to hail a cab, Melissa grabbed my arm and pulled it firmly down, and then waved on the battered yellow Chevy that had pulled over to the curb in response to my gesture.

"Not one of those," she said sharply. "It has got to be a Checker."

"A Checker? Why?"

"They have a larger back seat. They are the only kind I ever take."

That seemed to me to be a bit of unnecessary coquetry that I could not let pass unchallenged.

"What do you do in them?" I asked. "Dance?"

Picking the right cab, from this swarm of cabs was an art that Melissa alone had mastered and at last she hailed one that was appropriate. I opened the door for her and while she gave the driver instructions I lit another cigarette. There are certain situations which make a pair of people seem a couple - arriving or leaving together from a party, sharing a small table in a restaurant, walking together up a narrow stair, and perhaps sharing a cab. There are intimacies.

The driver was a balding, bull necked man with a sour expression and a professionally disinterested stare. He was one of those solid, simple types who come in daily from the other boroughs to keep the madness of Manhattan functioning smoothly. As he moved the cab easily back into the heavy traffic, I said softly to Melissa that I was having a wonderful evening.

Melissa suddenly looked serious. Again she was playing the coquette. "I noticed that you and Benjamin seemed a little uncomfortable with each other," she said. "Why do you suppose that is?" Melissa is a grand master of the leading question, the sort of question that draws out secrets while exposing nothing of herself. I was in no mood for that now. I wanted her to play by my rules for a time at least.

"Because I want you," I said.

There was a pause then. She seemed a bit frightened. Later it seemed to me that the words, which were accompanied by no caress, no soft compliment, by no physical approach were the true core of the seduction, the intimacy which I imagined between she and I had never been physical despite the real pleasures of the one distant night. The intimacy between she and I had been one of words, of plot and consequence. This simple distillation of my goal was too open for her. She slipped into silence and clung against the far door of the wide back seat staring out into the street. The driver seemed to nod a bit but gave no sign of overhearing. A few minutes later, at the edge of Battery Park, I paid the fare, tipping generously, and Melissa followed me silently into the brightly-lit terminal building.

The main waiting room of the ferry station was large and empty. An attendant was locking the heavy metal doors. We had just missed the ferry and a glance at the schedule that was painted onto the wall above the doors told us that we had a half hour wait till the next one departed. I suggested that we go into a small bar that adjoined the concourse. Melissa followed me, blankly, as it she was in shock. After the hospital brightness of the waiting room it took a while for our eyes to adjust to the darkness of the bar but as they did we saw a small room with a square bar filling its center. The room was lined with narrow, vinyl covered booths. The walls were completely covered with framed cartoons of New York sports figures. Many of them seemed to be autographed. Three men sat together at the corner of the bar and a crowd of teenagers was playing some noisy video games. We sat down at the bar and when I ordered a Schaeffers, Melissa did the same. Shock. A color television suspended above the bar was showing the Ranger game with the sound off.

I wanted her, of course. Our brief time together had been little more than a taste of something I wanted badly. But there was more. What had happened with her and I had been seminal, pivotal to me. There was no return to the platitudes I had lived by until then. Everything was changed. I had to believe that it had been important to her as well. I could have sex with many women, that was my liberation, but I could not accept the idea of sex without consequence.

"Look," I said. "About what I said in the cab. I mean it but if it's a problem we can let it stop at that. I'm not going to rape you."

She said nothing. I felt in a typical Manhattan manner that time was precious. This time alone with her had been very hard won and I could not waste it. Tempi.

"Were you and Linda lovers?" I asked. I knew from Linda that they were not though Linda claimed that they had discussed it.

"Why do you say these things to me?"

"Because I want you." I said. "Did you want to be her lover?"

"Larry, please."

I sat quietly for a minute. I rapidly drank half the Schaffers and ordered another. My energy was so fierce that I could drink gallons and not be slowed.

"Why, do I ask?" I said. "Because there is something that happened between us that is unfinished and I want to fill it out."

"Something? That night? I hardly remember it."

"That wasn't all of it," I said. "There was something and you know it."

"Larry!"

The bartender was watching the hockey game as he washed the glasses. The only sound in the room came from the video games.

"If you wanted someone," she said, "why waste time with me? The city is full of women who. . ."

"Because I wanted you."

Our conversation continued with Melissa trying to carry it off into some gentle abstraction while I countered each attempt with a comment that brought us quickly, brutally back to the fact of she and I. This was maddening. In my entire life, I had probably never said anything as simple and as true as "Because I want you." and yet when I said it the world had seemed to explode.

At last we heard the chug and the echoing diesel horn of the next boat coming into the pier. I paid the bill and Melissa and I and the rest of the patrons rushed out into the concourse to catch the next ferry to Staten Island.

The heavy metal ramp dropped and latched onto the wide prow of the boat. The air was cool and smelled of the sea. It was now late and the crowd was small but we took purpose from them and walked quickly down the wide ramp. While most of the crowd moved into the shelter of the enclosure, Melissa moved to the rail at the stern. The wind tossed her thin hair. I stood beside her, close enough to her that the sides of our legs touched. She did not move away. A husky, uniformed man stepped up and detached the ramp, which soon began to rise gently into the air. The deep rumble of the engines grew. The boatman carefully secured the chains, which closed off the entry and retreated into the enclosure. The boat pulled slowly but surely away from the dock, the water of the bay swirled and sucked beneath the stern.

"I used to date one of those guys," Melissa said. "A boat man."

"How was he?"

"Fair."

The beers were beginning to make me a little drunk and as they did they cut into my mania I realized suddenly why Melissa was intensely pursuing these tangential questions. For once she was out of control. My proposition had been so direct, so off hand it had cut through so many levels of our little game that she was beaten. I had changed the rules. And there was something I desired in this. I wanted to pin Melissa down, hold her long enough that we could resolve what I saw as our unfinished business.

As the darkness closed around us it gave a gentle air to our conversation though the conversation's shape stayed the same. Melissa kept telling me anecdotes about her life in New York and about her friends. It seemed that she dated many men and had many friends but that she had no strong feelings about any of them. She was trying to tell me something about herself but I couldn't grasp what it was. For my part, I kept trying to bring her back to thoughts of she and I, and if necessary to she and I and Linda, but I was less relentless and, in the end, unsuccessful. I finally gave up and simply encouraged her to speak. It seemed better to at least spend some time pleasantly with Melissa rather than come away with nothing.

As the ferry pulled slowly away from the city, out past the Statue of Liberty, the ubiquitous metallic light of Manhattan receded into a distant haze of soft white. I felt a peace and clear-headedness that I had not known since I had come to New York City. It was a feeling I had always associated with the country, a feeling of being free to think. The rumble of the large slow motors and the gentle wash of the ferry's wake soothed away the distracting assault of the city's constant noise. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the harbor I could see again that the sky was cluttered with stars. The sky was bright with them.

"I don't understand," Melissa said. "I really don't understand. What is it that you want?"

I thought for a moment and pointed back towards the brightly-lit buildings of south Manhattan.

"I want to be a success in this business. I want to be rewarded for what I am. I want to succeed there," I said gesturing back across the water to the glittering obelisk of the Winston Stone building, clearly visible in the retreating mass of lower Manhattan.

"If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere?" Melissa asked.

"Something like that," I said. "I want to be a big guy in the real world. It's time to leave behind the hippie dream world. I want to be part of what's really happening. No more childish dreams."

She looked at me for a moment and then looked back out over the water. "I don't suppose we were anything like real hippies," she said. "But was it really such a terrible idea? It kind of made a family for a while. I liked that."

"Well, more specifically I want to be there on the 44th floor of Winston Stone Plaza." She seemed genuinely puzzled so I continued.

"The executive floor. I want to be the center of power, of influence."

"That's insane," she said. "When I knew you before all you wanted was a big farm house by the side of some Indiana road someplace where you could read and paint in peace, and," she added, "make babies."

Yes, I thought, that had been true and once I had wanted that.

"I am tired of being a ten thousand dollar a year clerk. I want to be something."

"I could understand that," Melissa said, "but you seem to want to be anything."

"Lately," I said, "I've come to take a good deal of satisfaction in doing things that are the most unnatural to me." What was Winston Stone, if not the renunciation of some hippie dream?

"You know," she said, "when I first came to town I was such an ingenue. I had a date every night." I looked at her. She was staring straight out across the water. I waited for the rest of her thought but that was it. I heard the strains of a string quartet playing something by Mozart.

"Do I dream or is that Mozart?"

"It's Mostly Mozart," she said. "A group plays at night on the ferry. At the other end of the boat."

We rode the boat out to Staten Island and back and then as the ferry pulled back into the dock on Manhattan we both realized that somehow the evening wasn't complete and we made another round trip. The boat was nearly empty and our conversation was exhausted and so we stood lost in our own thoughts and listened to the string quartet play Mozart gently over the rumble of the ferry motors and the steady wash of the water along the sides of the boat. I took hold of her hand and she accepted it, neither encouraging nor discouraging, but simply there.

Later, the cab stopped at 14th Street to let her out before taking me the rest of the way back to Midtown. She let me kiss her as she got out of the cab.

"Just where did you think we could go tonight?" she asked.

"Your place."

"And Benjamin?"

"I just figured he would have gone home."

"The poor boy has no other home this time of the year."

"Pity. But we could work out something."

"Good-night."

I had hoped to see Melissa again over the weekend but when I called her she said that she and Benjamin would be out of town. They were going to Long Island to go sailing with some friends of Benjamin's mother. I had a strong feeling that she was avoiding me. At the last minute I flew up to Boston and spent a very pleasant weekend with some friends who were in school there. I enjoyed the trip but my thoughts were never far from Melissa.

My call to her at the Walrus and Crane on Monday was met with a young waiter's polite but disturbing statement that she was definitely too busy to talk. I managed to get through to her on Tuesday but she said she was too busy to see me that evening and she was vague about when we might get together again. As I hung up I felt that I was getting too little return for my effort there and I decided to give my attention to other things for a while and to give Melissa a chance to consider things. Not that I thought it would make much difference but I didn't seem to have a lot of other choices.

Things were going well for me on the business side. I was impressing all the people who came into contact with our group and Sarceti in particular were looking promising as a friend and mentor. He was running operations now for the Northeast region and over lunch he said that he had arranged for me to get a supervisor's position in Chicago and that after I had some experience there he would transfer me back to his region as a manager. This seemed to be a far better arrangement than I had any reason to expect. Sarceti was not all that well liked in the firm but everyone regarded him as a rising star and it couldn't hurt to find myself beneath his wing.

I had been in New York City for a gray January and February during my junior year in college, working as an apprentice to Morris Ackerman who was one of the best known and successful of the current New York City painters. I had been badly cowed by the city then and I divided my time between his studio home and my tiny room at a YMCA. I had not planned to contact Morris on this trip. That time of my life seemed so distant from my current corporate self that Morris and I would have very little in common and I certainly wasn't eager to be reminded of how intimidated I had once been by the city. But with my plans for Melissa now on hold at best and my precious month in New York winding down, I found myself with time on my hands. I called his home, had a pleasant conversation with his wife, Phyllis, and found myself invited to their home for dinner that night.

It was an inauspicious night. As I left the Winston Stone Building near Wall Street, a cold, slow rain gave the streets and sidewalks an oily sheen. On the street corners, the vendors were selling cheap umbrellas from soggy cardboard boxes. It was impossible to stand still on a subway platform or the sidewalk; the relentless crowd swept you along as if you were in a swift river. It was the first day of the year when you could see your breath in the air before you and yet I felt truly exhilarated. Alive and nearly mad with my possibilities.

Chicago is a solid sturdy town, the kind of town you build above the prairie: the kind of town you build against the weather. I often thought that if all the people were suddenly removed Chicago would stand impassively and unchanged for centuries, a wonderful mute monument to the tendency of one stone to lie firmly on top of another. New York was different. It seemed like a wild and decaying carnival. It was the energy of this rush of people which gave it life, the energy of the people formed its shape and if something should ever happen to them, this long stony island would soon look like the empty field on the day after the circus pulled up and left town, muddy, still and strewn with garbage and curious distant echoes.

I was expected at the Ackermans' at six o'clock. As soon as I got back to the hotel room I changed into casual clothes, pulled on a plastic poncho and walked rapidly up 5th Avenue and through the park to his house on the West Side.

Morris owned a large three-story town house about two blocks west of Central Park in the seventies. Four years before it had seemed an oasis in the threatening and seedy area but in the mean time the area appeared to have become as fashionable as anything east of the park. The first floor contained the three rooms that Morris used for his work. The largest ran the length of the house to the right of the entryway. It was the room where he painted and in addition to three large easels, it held the ornate rugs and antique couches he used as props and enough lights to equip a film studio. The first room on the left was a sitting room that held a bar and several comfortable chairs as well as a collection of his recent work. Morris was well represented by one of the most prestigious galleries in the city but he was not above playing up to potential buyers who happened to stop by. The last room on the first floor served as a storeroom for supplies and large canvases. As his apprentice I had spent long hours in that room stretching and preparing what must have been a year's supply of canvas for him. In the end, the proper stretching of a canvas had been my main lesson of those months.

The upper two floors provided a living space for Morris, Phyllis and their three children. These rooms had always been comfortable and cheery but in the last four years the furnishings had improved considerably. Morris had a taste for antiques and now he had many pieces that to my eye seemed to be of museum quality.

Phyllis answered the door and showed me into the studio, where Morris was finishing his work for the day. A pretty but empty eyed model was sprawled naked on an old brocade chair. Morris was painting the area of her inner thigh and knee and so the woman had twisted her head out of the normal pose and was staring at a small black and white television that was showing a rerun of Gilligan's Island. Between she and Morris, but definitely out of the picture was a small electrical space heater.

When Morris was satisfied with the way the thigh looked he turned his attention to me.

"So, Winston Stone?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"They open an art division?"

"No. I kind of took a turn away from art. I got kind of turned off when I saw how much of a business it was."

"Well, then you better stay out of New York. It's definitely Big Business here. But surely you're still drawing? Sundays in the basement or something?"

"No, not a thing. It's too frustrating not to be able to do it well."

Morris walked over to one of the racks of trays in which he stored his drawings. "I did save a few of your drawings," he said.

"I can't imagine why?" I said.

"Nor can I. Kind of a scrap book, I suppose, or more likely an option in case one of my apprentices should hit it big."

He thought for a moment and then extracted one. It was a charcoal drawing of one his favorite models posing nude in a leather chair. During my time in New York, my vision had been so unformed that I simply had copied his work. The figure and face seemed listless and I could see now that all my work truly shared with his was his mania for chopping off the heads of his models with the top of the frame.

"I did some better things after I went back," I apologized.

"So, Doherty told me."

Tom Doherty had been an instructor of mine at Bettner College. The one who had arranged for my brief apprenticeship to Morris. He had been an intense young man, full of enthusiasm for all the latest trends in the New York art world, which he followed through subscriptions to an awesome list of newsletters and magazines. He was an avid namedropper and, in the rural college atmosphere of Bettner, his constant talk of New York had made him seem as exotic as a man who kept wishing he was on Mars. I had had a secret thought at the time that his own work never approached his enthusiasms. I didn't know then that that was a common fate of instructors in the arts. Still it was flattering to find that Morris and Doherty remembered me.

"Where is he now?" I asked.

"Doherty?" he said. "I haven't heard about him in years. Absorbed into the vast Middle West I should imagine."

Morris carefully returned the drawing to its assigned place. He laughed for a moment at some private thought and returned to the task of cleaning his brushes. As his apprentice that had been one my jobs. I suppose it had helped make me tolerable then.

"Doherty said you became something of mythic character upon your return, very much the artist with a capital A. He told me you used to sit for long periods of time in high windows, just looking out into space, that people used to think you would jump but then you would wander back to your work and turn out some of the strongest things he had ever seen. He was in anguish trying to classify them for me."

We talked for a little while about his current work but I found that there was little I could say to him. The two nudes he was working on now, sitting on matching easels at the end of the large studio might easily have been among the paintings he was working on when I had been there four years before. His work had become terribly predictable. Quality control had set in with a vengeance. Whenever I was in an unfamiliar city and wandered through the American section of its museum I would see that they had one or two of Morris's paintings. To my eye they seemed interchangeable. It must be a bit boring for him, I thought, but then a house like this on the Upper West Side must cost a fortune and he did have three children to raise in Manhattan. I remembered a night in college when I had run into Doherty in a bar I rarely went to. "You're different, Larry," he had said in a voice thickened with Irish whiskey, "You want to be an artist, the rest . . . the rest they just want a job." Did he mean to tell me I was off the track? Was he off the track? He had found his job all right as an instructor at Bettner and he hated it and like me he didn't have the wit or the strength or the luck to end up an artist.

"I don't suppose I should take it personally," Morris said, "but I do feel like I've failed you. Most of my apprentices make terrible nuisances out of themselves trying to get me to introduce them to all the critics and gallery owners, to get themselves embedded in the politics of art. All you seemed to want to do was to stretch canvas and help Phyllis with the dishes."

"Once I got done visiting the museums the rest of New York City scared the hell out of me," I confessed. "I couldn't wait to get back to the country but when I did I painted like a banshee. I really was much better. The time wasn't wasted."

"I suppose this can be a terrible place until you find some kind of family here. Once you do that it's the best place in the world." He looked at me. "You're ready to flee again. Well, I suppose I can say that thanks to me you can always make a modest living stretching canvases or washing dishes.

"Come into dinner. Phyllis will love to see you. But I'm afraid I have some more bad news. I bought Phyllis a dishwasher."

Dinner was served at an immense table in the second floor dining room, which had once served a previous owner as a small ballroom. The tall walls of the room bore large, striking canvases by eight of the most successful painters in New York. It was hard to imagine what they were worth. Millions would probably be the opening bid. A brightly colored portrait of Phyllis in a New York Yankees cap and a sweatshirt by Max Brice was particularly brilliant but any of the works could have hung in the Whitney without seeming out of place. "I traded for them," Morris had said. "Mine for theirs. It's the rich painter's benevolent society. If things go bad and I can't sell Ackermans anymore I can still probably sell a Brice to pay for bread and eggs."

Once we were all seated Phyllis and Morris's eldest daughter brought out huge bowls of tossed salad, spaghetti, and a sausage and mushroom sauce. There were two gallons of red table wine that even the children shared and two huge loaves of French bread. In addition to myself and Morris's family we were joined by the model who was now fully clothed but no more animate. She didn't say a word during the entire meal. There were three well behaved teenage friends of Morris's children, two middle aged neighbors, he was a sculptor, she was a teacher of the dance, and an eager, intelligent man in his thirties who turned out to be Morris's accountant. The conversation began with a polite recitation by the children of what they had learned in school that day, moved easily to impassioned discussion of the tragedy of the impending closing of the delicatessen on the corner of 8th and 72nd and concluded with a very long and informed seminar on where in the area you could buy the best breads and the freshest fish. The conversation might have been a disappointment to anyone looking for insights on art from a world famous painter but to a young brokerage employee who was growing very weary of hotel life it made for a great evening.

About eleven when it came time to leave, Morris saw me down to the door.

"I got the distinct impression that you were uncomfortable in my studio. Do you mind telling me why?"

"Does it matter?"

"Not in the least. But I am curious."

"It all seems the same. The same thing you were doing five years ago. How can it be a challenge to you?"

"Does it need to be a challenge? They're Ackermans. I find them pleasant. They make me money. Do they have to be a struggle? Does it have to be an unpleasant process? Do you think Mozart struggled to produce his work?" He was playing with me a bit, I imagined he had had this conversation before, probably with an endless string of art students.

"Sometimes, I imagine, when he did the very best."

The cold rain was a shock after the warmth of Morris's house but there were no cabs to be found and so I pulled up my plastic hood and set off back towards my hotel.

I knew, of course, that the image of the starving tormented artist producing great work in cold water garret he couldn't afford was at best an adolescent fantasy but I also knew that I had never wanted to become the sort of artist that Morris had become, except perhaps for the fact that he was rich. I had always imagined that that would just come naturally to me.

I had lied to Morris when I told him now I hadn't even tried to draw. A week or so before I came to New York, I had taken out a yellowing pad and sketched the potted plants which sat on the ledge of my front window. The drawings were accurate enough. They showed a bit of training but they were distressing because of their emptiness. I couldn't imagine how I could make a discovery or a statement using these peculiar skills.

One of the tenets of business dogma as taught by Winston Stone in those days seemed to be that aggressiveness was never punished. My habit of careful analysis and intricate response seemed to be out of favor. Even Sarceti, who was emerging as my godfather, had said to me at one point, "For god's sake, don't be so subtle." As I neared the end of my stay in New York, I realized that though my goals for the month as they related to my career had been more than accomplished I had not managed to see Melissa since the night on the ferry. I had called her at least once a week and each time I had received vague excuses about why it just wasn't convenient for us to get together. Finally, on the Thursday before I was to return to Chicago, I decided to force the issue. If I did not, I thought, the questions might never be resolved. At the end of the day, I returned to the hotel, packed so that I could make my early flight the next day and took the subway down to the Walrus and Crane. A young waiter noticed me as I entered (it seemed that he had been warned) and led me to a small table in a dark corner at the back of room. A moment later, Melissa came up from the basement office. She was wearing the same sweater and linen pants she had worn my first Sunday in town but she wore no makeup and she looked very plain.

"I can't see you here."

"Where then? I'm leaving tomorrow."

She thought. "A place called Deegan's. It's about three blocks south on Seventh. I'll be there about seven thirty."

She left quickly, walking out the front door after exchanging a few brief words with the chef, leaving me no more time for conversation. I stood to leave but the young waiter who had met me at the door politely informed me that I was welcome to stay for dinner on the house. I sat alone and enjoyed the cream of asparagus soup and a spiced beef salad. The waiter brought me a glass of fine dry white wine in a tall, dark water glass, compliments of the manager. I enjoyed myself and wished that I could have managed to spend more time in that very pleasant place. I made a token effort to pay the bill and a serious effort to leave a tip but the waiter politely refused them both.

It was a radiant late fall evening. In the twilight, the sidewalks were full of a rainbow of people enjoying a stroll. I found Deegan's without difficulty. It was an unaffected, masculine bar of the sort that prospers by being a comfortable neighborhood gathering place. I took a seat in the back and was enjoying my third beer when Melissa joined me at about eight o'clock.

"I can only stay a little while," she said. "I have a chess lesson with a psychiatrist on the East Side."

"All right."

She sighed and said, "Would you like to buy a lovely, little restaurant? It's well thought of. The staff is highly trained."

"It's tempting," I said. "But I have my heart set on another career. Why? Are you having troubles?"

"Perhaps. Patricia has done some very strange things."

"Gestures?" I suggested.

"Some very serious gestures."

She sat back and perhaps accurately recognizing my questions as an attempt to come inside, she countered. "So what is there for us to talk about?"

"Many things, I should think. Why, for example have you refused to see me for three weeks?"

The ingenue. "You scared me. I thought you had gone mad."

Our conversation became fascinating after that though I had to say I would have preferred something warmer to have evolved. It became apparent that we each regarded the other as seriously neurotic while we ourselves were just fine. For myself, I wasn't sure whether I was being accused of being neurotic because I wanted her or because I had stated the fact so directly. I realized that some people might find my desire for her neurotic, though I had a list of healthy reasons for wanting her if only I were asked to explain myself and as for stating it so directly, well it was my honest feeling and I couldn't be accused of repressing anything at any rate. Poor taste, perhaps, and certainly poor tactics, but not neurosis.

As we talked the conversation turned slowly to our time together - the subject I had hoped to reach the first day. We talked about the summer months that had been our courtship and she remembered many pleasant parts of it that I had forgotten. We talked about fine times we had had in college and some of the misadventures we had had since. Her expression changed as we talked and she seemed to begin to grow more beautiful. As she laughed her hand would come up lightly to touch her thin straying hair; a gesture she had once told me was her mother's. She asked me about Morris.

"He's fine. Very successful. Very settled. Happy."

"Making babies?"

"Raising children."

It was wonderful to reminisce but there was still some line between us that she would not cross. There were times when she became suddenly distant and then I would have to coax her back to a warmer subject. She interrupted our conversation three times to call the psychiatrist to say that she would be delayed. Finally at about eleven o'clock she looked at her watch and said, "I have to go home now. Alone."

Her tone told me it was not a negotiable matter.

"Your chess lesson?"

"Canceled."

"I'll walk you home," I said.

"No, I'll walk you to the subway."

Outside the air seemed sensuous with a rare firmament of stillness overlaid with the spice of smells and sounds spilling out from the clubs and restaurants. She let me hold her hand as we walked and when at last we reached the entrance to the subway we stopped and stood beside the bland hard facade of St. Michael's Hospital. We both knew that the evening was not quite complete. We needed some summation.

"Larry, why did you proposition me?"

"I wanted you. I wanted to make love to you."

"But you must have known."

"No, actually I didn't. I was thrown off a bit when you talked about Benjamin as your ex-lover. I thought he might have moved to Connecticut or something."

"And what was it you were offering me?" she asked.

"Blood, sweat, toil, and tears," I suggested.

She thought for a while.

"You know when I was in school I ended up in bed with a guy I didn't particularly want to be with. It was totally unexpected. I'm still not sure I could say why it happened. We weren't using anything. The next day I went to the infirmary and got a morning after pill. They were very popular with the staff there. That afternoon I was in bed with one guy and that night with another. It had a funny effect. It made me hot as a bunny."

"And?"

"And I just prayed that none of them would call me again."

Was she trying to tell me that the fact that we had slept together meant nothing?

"Is that why you told Linda about our time together?"

According to Linda her confession had been disarmingly casual. "Oh, by the way, I've been fucking Larry." The singular verb form, I fucked, would have been more accurate but Melissa had a taste for drama that equaled my own.

"You know that night at the ferry. I couldn't figure out what you were saying. It gradually dawned on me. He wants to fuck me. To have sex. It seemed terribly odd. Particularly here in the Village where everybody is gay. You never get propositioned here."

"Just a voice from the past," I said.

"You're a collector, you know. That's why you still know so much about Linda. That's why you've come after me. You're so much in love with your past you can't think it might be over. That nothing else will come of it. But it is over. It's time to live in the present."

"The present. You with your little village community, day dreaming of Vogue. If I'm a collector, what about you? You were eager for me to come. You asked me to stay with you. You seem to be something of a collector yourself with your ex-lover. With Benjamin."

"I've told him a dozen times that it was over between us but he just follows me. He's always there."

Linda and I used to joke about the Catholic girls then, about how they had responded to the sexual liberation of the late sixties and seventies. They would manage to make this tremendous break. They would finally get themselves to the point where they could sleep with a guy they weren't married to. It was a real liberation but they would pick some jerk to get liberated with and then they couldn't leave him. They got themselves free of one thing but then their trap was much larger than they could imagine. I remembered that Melissa was a Catholic. It was a part of Melissa's aura that the facts of her life when they became known did not seem to explain her present. Her Catholicism, the fact that her mother was a great beauty and her father a successful contractor who had once been a famous athlete seemed to have no relation to her. All these things should have been visible in Melissa but they were not. It was as if there was some greater mystery that superseded all the things that you knew about her. There was always something else that seemed to beg to be discovered. This was why I was so attracted to her. She was a mystery. I had never been able to find the simple explanation for her and for what happened between us that I so desired. That act from so long ago still haunted me because there was so much in her part of it that I could not understand. She claimed to be simple but was not.

"So this is it for you then?" I asked. "This is what you want? The Village. The politics of the Walrus and Crane? Gentle Ben? It hardly seems enough."

"Oh, Larry, I just don't think about things the way that you do. It makes a family. And that's all that seems to matter."

And what could I say to that? Again she had frustrated me. Well, all right. I wanted the comfort of her body far less than I wanted her view of what had happened between us. I had once been given the comfort of her body. I had never been offered her view. I had never shared her vision.

In adolescence there come to you an urge to see the truth and to speak the truth and normally for most of us it passes. Under the weight of convention if you are weak; under the vision that at its best truth is a two-edged sword and most often misused if you are strong and wise. But at some point I had bet heavily on truth over convention and wisdom aside, I was not quite ready to give up that bet just yet. Morris and Melissa could have their big extended families. I wanted something more even if I didn't know exactly what it was.

"I don't see why my proposal should have shocked you so much," I said. "From what I've seen of your life here, it isn't all that uncomplicated."

"Gestures. It's nothing but gestures. You really wanted me."

"Yes, I did. But so I think do the others."

"Larry, can't you see how crazy you seemed to me. Think about my life. There is poor hurt Patricia who is in love with Andy, who can't decide if he's in love with Benjamin who he can't have or Otto who he could easily have completely. There's poor, sweet, wide-eyed Benjamin who wants me, but can't stand to hurt Patricia who thinks her problems would be solved is she could just make love to me, but failing that to Benjamin who seems to her to be the next best thing to Andy even though she can't figure out why. And then there is me - the Mom who wants to hold the whole huge family together. It's a ball, a cotillion, and I am a debutante. Can you imagine what would happen if this were played out to the end. Chaos. It would explode. You walked in here, strutting like Don Giovanni and saying I love you and I have two hours free. It was insane. I was speechless. I played my little game with you once and look what happened. Chaos and pain. I mean can you imagine what the Village would be like if the straights were as willful and passionate as the gays. It would be chaos."

I was beginning to get the idea that Melissa had a distaste for chaos.

"You walked into my world and I was expecting you to say, 'Melissa, may I have this dance?' and you were saying, 'Melissa, I want to fuck you.'"

I was silent. Thankful for even this much.

"Do you really think that something great must follow each time two people sleep together? It might be sort of a charming idea if it came from a nineteen year old."

"I think I would like to believe it for us," I said.

She looked at me closely. It was her turn to think now. I wondered if the reason the fascination between us continued was that the whole of our interaction was a long chess game. Elegant and fully considered. Peculiarly passionate and passionless.

"I'd like to tell you something," she said. "I've been involved with a lot of people but after the first few weeks there's never very much sex. If you didn't even know that about me than I'm afraid we might be such a good match."

What was she trying to tell me, I wondered? Was she trying to distract me with some riddle or was she saying that we were different people, people who communicated only fleetingly? Was she saying that my relentless pestering search after cause and effect was nonsense?

"Larry, do you even remember that night?"

"Yes, I do."

"Yeah, so do I."

"I remember I asked you if you came and . . . "

She laughed. "And I said, 'Well, I'm here, aren't I.' You know it really wasn't that good."

"I remember. I suppose that's why I was so eager to believe it hadn't ended with that. It's late," I said. "I think I'll be going back uptown."

She smiled then, a smile of relief, I imagined. "I really wish I could help you. I've heard of a few places uptown that you could go to. Discos."

That was too much. "Discos!" I said angrily. "Why would you suggest something like that?"

"It's just that you seemed so eager to have a woman."

"I have what I need. I've found what I came to find out."

I put my hand lightly on her arm and kissed her lightly. It was best sort of kiss - unpossessive, barely physical, a sign of pleasure other than the purely sexual.

I walked up Seventh Avenue towards the subway, adopting the swift self-absorbed style that served as my defense against the city. Melissa was still standing on the corner watching as I slipped down the stairs into the dank station.

About six months later, Melissa moved back to Chicago and called me. Her timing was terrible. Sarceti had finally come through with the promotion I had been expecting. It turned out not to be the manager's job I thought I had been promised but a sort of free lance trouble shooter position that would keep me on the road constantly for the next year or so. I was trying hard to unwind several relationships before I had to leave Chicago, but when Melissa called I had to make time. I took her to dinner at Berghoff's.

"The Walrus and Crane is kaput," she said. "Patricia cashed the checks for about thirty grand and then had a nervous breakdown and checked herself into a sanitarium. Andy got so upset he sold the place at a big loss to an Armenian."

"And Benjamin?" I asked.

"It's funny," she said. "For years he has been following me around like a puppy. This time he came back first and I didn't know what else to do so I followed. His Lake Forest past caught up with him all of a sudden and he is suddenly out in the suburbs working long hours somewhere and making lots of money. But now that he is Mister Suburban Serious he thinks I should be Mrs. Suburban Wonderful. He wants to get married. What am I going to do?"

"Think about it for a while," I suggested. "I imagine that you've got forty or fifty years to make up your mind."

In my last weeks in town she stopped by again and again although I was never able to give her my full attention. Perhaps that made me more attractive to her. She got to know my friend Amy and even began to talk about the two of them opening a restaurant together. I barely managed to stop that venture. "It wouldn't exactly be a business, Amy," I said.

One night the three of us had dinner in a pizza place on Clark Street near Lincoln Park. One of the waitresses knew Melissa from their time together in high school and they did a long, Did you know? No, did you know? routine that must have covered the last eight years of the lives of every one of their friends. When the woman finally left, Melissa turned her attention to Amy.

"She used to be my best friend in high school. You know I remember once I was here with Linda. I don't think we stopped to eat. We were just using the phone or something. It must have been a long time ago because Linda and I were still best friends. You must be careful, Amy, I'm very hard on my best friends. He's the reason."

The last night before I left for my new assignment out of the New York office, Melissa stopped by my apartment. She sat on the bed while I packed. She was wearing linen pants and a loose sweater. She had worn sandals that she had slipped off so that they lay familiarly on the bare floor. Most of the furniture had already been put into storage.

"I'm really starting to like Amy," she said. "She seems like such a solid person. Someone who would stay in the same place. Someone I could be friends with."

She looked great but I felt no desire for her.

"Doesn't it seem to you like one of us is always rushing away?" she said.

"Our paths will cross again," I said and then added ruefully, "Probably in an airport."

"You're the only guy I slept with once that I'm still friends with. Not like I picked you up in a bar or something. Still, it seems interesting."

She sat for a long time watching me with her lovely green eyes.

"I always think I'm pregnant," she said. "I'll sleep with someone and then I'll think I'm pregnant and I have to stay with them till I have my period and then there's this brief window where I can get away but I never quite make it and then I'm stuck with the guy again for another month. That was your mistake, Larry, you stayed away more than a month."