We had stopped living together a long time ago—after I first went overseas in 1983—but neither of us had entirely gotten over the relationship. In the first few years I was away we pretended that we could keep something going, even as we began sleeping with other people. But the edges got too frayed. When I would come back home at Christmas, there would be too much not to talk about, and we gradually let it slip. But she continued to live in my dreams for all the ten years I was away—making love in my subconscious, no matter who else I was seeing when I was awake. It was almost a parallel life. I went from dream to dream, weaving the secret threads together so that—truly, in my mind—it was as if we had never parted.

The very fact that I went overseas in the first place was partly Annie’s doing. Nearly all my friends had argued that I should stay in New York, have fun, play the young journalist’s game. Annie knew I wanted a new challenge—that if I didn’t try it, I would be forever diminished—and she urged me to go, even though she assumed it would mean the end of our relationship. I was so moved by that evidence of her love that I did something I had dithered about for several years: I asked her to marry me.

But she said no. Beirut was what I needed to do; she needed to do something quite different. She was just starting a journalism career of her own at Newsweek. She wanted ferociously to succeed.

Annie had come to journalism on the rebound, too. In her case, the first love had been not tennis but ballet. She had a dancer’s body: tall, slender, with arms and legs that were at once delicate and powerful. She had worked to develop that natural talent—practicing four hours a day, nearly every day of her life from the age of five to the time she went off to Stanford. I saw her onstage just once, a few weeks after we met. It was a production of Swan Lake by the San Francisco Ballet, and she was dancing in the corps. I fell in love the moment I saw those strong legs moving across the stage, her long neck taut as she fluttered her arms. A few months later she gave up dance, to concentrate on her studies, she said. But I always wondered if I was the real cause. Ballet, like any art, is fundamentally selfish, and when she fell in love with me, perhaps there wasn’t enough left for herself.