ON A Monday, when I had to be at the Long Island Press in Garden City to pitch a new profile to Mack Grunch, I offered to drop off Glenna at the hospital, figuring I could ask her about her restlessness.

The fall was warm and sunny that year, as though reluctant to surrender to winter, and I put the top down. Driving into the city, I told Glenna about the subject of my profile, Izzy Aronowitz, a seventy-three-year-old ex–carnival barker, with a white ponytail and rakish goatee, who owned the head shop where Todd worked and who was revered around the East Village for his extensive collection of groupies, both young and old. As I spoke, Glenna sifted through my eight-tracks, unable to decide which one to play. She gave up and stared out the windshield, focusing on that place I imagined she saw in her sleep, her own badlands, all dust and sorrow.

“You’ve been having trouble sleeping,” I said.

Glenna said, “You’re the first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes this morning.”

Her statement wasn’t exactly a coherent response to my observation, but Glenna was clearly trying to tell me something, even if she wasn’t sure what it was.

“What do you usually think about?” I asked.

“My patients, or what I have to do on rounds.”

“Very romantic,” I said, kidding around.

That was not how Glenna took it. “I thought about you first thing. What else do you want?”

“You know that song, ‘I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl, That Married Dear Old Dad’?”

“The world’s out of stock,” she said with a sad smile. “Permanently.”

“What’s going on, Glenna?”

“When I’m—”

I waited.

“When I’m at the hospital and I have a second when I’m actually not busy, I think about you—about coming back to the house and seeing you—and it takes me another five minutes to concentrate again.”

I glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle was on E.

Glenna said, “I feel like there’s not enough room in my life for me. Like I want more space and can’t get it.”

“Can’t get it? Why?”

“Because then I’ll lose you.”

“I’m right here,” I said. “You won’t lose me.”

Tears were leaking from her eyes. She took a Kleenex from her burlap bag and wiped them away. I swung into an Esso station, handed the attendant $4, and as he gassed up the GTO, I went in to get change and buy a pack of Marlboros in the cigarette machine, stuffing the box in the knapsack with my notebooks so I could avoid a cancer lecture.

Back in the car, Glenna was looking around for me, her eyes narrowed with concern, like she thought I’d abandoned her in a gas station. Partially hidden behind an island of pumps, I was, as always, awestruck by the creamy naturalness of her skin and the sublime planes and angles of her face, but that was secondary to the fact that Glenna seemed frightened that I wouldn’t come back. At last, she spotted me, then smiled with an uninhibited joy she hadn’t shown me before, and for the briefest of moments I was certain that she loved me. Later, I’d be haunted by the possibility that I’d fallen in love with Glenna alone, fallen in love with the reflection of my own appetite to be loved, which was as voracious as Robin’s for Breyers ice cream. But not at that moment. The wind was blowing Glenna’s hair off her shoulders, and we gazed at each other, not daring to move, for movement could break the connection. I heard the cars and trucks going by and realized that Glenna had put the Mamas and Papas in the eight-track. Above the whoosh and rumble of the traffic, I heard them singing “California Dreamin’,” and their poignant harmony stayed with me so that for years afterward, whenever I heard that song, I remembered Glenna smiling at me from a candy-apple-red convertible with the brilliant autumn sunlight in her eyes.