“Late again,” Glenna said with a smile. “God, I never know what time it is.”

“So sometimes you’re early?” I asked, startled by how suddenly I disliked her for always making me wait and never apologizing for it.

“No,” Glenna answered, losing the smile. “I’m not.”

Robin said, “She’s practicing for stacking up patients in her waiting room.”

I shared Robin’s amusement; Glenna did not. She said to Robin, “Aren’t you going into the city for a poetry reading at the Y?”

“There’re no real guys there,” Robin replied. “Only poets.”

“Try the Teamsters,” Glenna said, paying off Robin for her waiting-room remark.

Robin’s social reflexes were acute enough to feign amusement, but then she took a quart carton of Breyers mint chocolate chip from the mantel of the fireplace, pulled out the spoon sticking in the top, and dug into the ice cream with the grim methodicalness of a gravedigger shoveling into frozen ground.

Watching her, I had one of those ephemeral insights that you dismiss as irrelevant: Robin should be my date. But dating unkempt, sad-eyed girls in baggy overalls wasn’t my thing, so I said see ya to Robin and helped Glenna on with her champagne-colored shawl.

DRIVING INTO the city, we traded personal trivia. Because Glenna was well along in her schooling, I was surprised that she was my age. Turned out she was an only child who’d been a brain in school, skipping the eighth grade at Fieldston, a tony, progressive private academy close to her family’s house in Riverdale, and graduating from the University of Vermont in three years. She’d gone to UVM to be near the skiing at Stowe and to needle her pushy parents, who had hounded her to apply to Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Radcliffe. Her father, Dr. Herman Rising, was an anesthesiologist, and for med school she chose Dad’s alma mater.

“I’d grown up by then,” Glenna explained. Her mother, Kay, was born some species of Protestant in Maine; Herman was a Bronx Jew; and both now worshipped at the Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture.

“Not that you can categorize what Ethical Culturists do as worshipping,” Glenna said. “It’s more like AA meetings for atheists.”

She fiddled with the radio. When a classical station came on, she turned it off. “I hate Bach.”

“Why?”

“Reminds me of my last date.”

“You went out with Bach?”

She rolled her eyes. “I went out with a radiologist who was a closet harpsichordist. He had a compulsive desire to hear string quartets at Philharmonic Hall.”

“You’re safe from string quartets with me.”

“Figured that,” she replied, resting her hand on my leg for an exquisite instant.

Then I believe she said that she loved the Beatles, and the song “Here, There and Everywhere” was her favorite, and I’m sure that she said some other things, but I can’t recall, because by the time I’d parked on Bleecker, and we were walking to Little Italy, Glenna had stuffed my heart in the lusciously curved back pocket of her bell-bottoms.