Eventually they came out of the room. We sat on the terrace in the orange evening sunlight while I fed William. Once Lonnie gave him a slice of lemon and he kept the sour thing in his mouth, moving his tongue around it. She’d beamed, putting his cheeks between her palms, “Yes, I knew I got a good one.”

I thought, He’ll spend the rest of his life trying to find another woman who looks at him the way she did that day.

Carlow told me about his artwork and how he grew up in one of the buildings I walk past every day. He had apparently taken a very famous photograph when he was in his twenties titled Woman in a Double Frame.

He seemed thrilled when I admitted I hadn’t seen it, but I wondered if his satisfaction was posturing—feigned humility. “I can’t get past that photo,” he said. “Every time I do an interview they want to talk about it. I’m not even working with photography anymore. I would much rather talk about my paintings.”

His paintings, I gathered, hadn’t yet garnered much interest, though he’d been doggedly churning them out for about five years. He didn’t actually tell me what the subject matter was, or what style they were in, he just said he was dealing with “light, and the history of the body.”

I pictured nudes, I pictured Lonnie naked in his studio, fooling around with random objects—telephones, chairs, those fake birds they sell in art supply stores made from Styrofoam with real feathers pasted on. A studio would be a fantastic place to make love—just a large blank space for messes, for inventiveness.

I asked Lonnie what James did for work, realizing no one had ever mentioned it before.

“He’s in finance of one kind or another,” Lonnie said, laughing a little.

I hesitated, then decided to venture, “Of one kind or another?”

“My father got him the job. They work together.”

Her face fell a little at this last bit of information, as if she were disappointed in how things had turned out for James’s career, so I quickly changed the subject. “Do you ever see anything interesting in those apartments?” I asked, gesturing toward the tall building at the end of the block.

“They’re either watching TV or doing sad old people exercises,” Lonnie said. “Nothing ever happens.”

While everyone else was in the water C lay down next to me and said, “I’m going to kiss you someday.” His hair all slick from the water. He said, “I don’t care how long I have to wait.” Anyway, I got mine. Poison ivy all over my left hip. Agony.