He can’t even recall the young woman’s face, just the kind of energy that comes with such a connection or flirtation, call it what you will, attention, a secret, that feeling of being invited in, everything easy and no strings to tie or alarms going off. He slipped and then floundered, and found himself wanting to be near the young woman in blousy Indian cotton tops and faded jeans and flip-flops, long hair yanked back, and not a trace of makeup on her young, smooth skin, a body tanned and untouched by childbirth cool beneath him. She lay there, arms raised over her head, wispy auburn hair there under her arms, something he found arousing, which surprised him, and he had to shut off that part of his brain where he could hear Lil telling their daughter how she really hoped she would shave under her arms: Lil had called Becca “Fuzzy Wuzzy” and said that rhyme—“Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,” like Becca might’ve been six and not a grown woman in her twenties, and a woman in her twenties is every bit a woman, or can be, which had surprised him—and then Becca had said, “Mom, please,” as she had said a million times before, and Frank slammed the door of his mind on them. He slammed the door because he was drawn into the warm smell of citrus and earth, and he had never been kissed or touched that way, or so it seemed, and what were years after all? Lines etched in a tree or a shell or a face.

They passed notes in department meetings and lectures—how innocent was that? Little slips of paper that he threw into the sewer on his way to his car, except then he wanted to save a couple and he couldn’t help but reread them, couldn’t help but study the letters and the word choice: Was there more meaning there?

One day, she drew the Eye of Horus, and he thought of it for days after. Was she suggesting safe travel for them together? Warding off anything that might interfere with what seemed a tender connection? Or was it just fun? A doodle: an eye with the curl below, what could be a tear. It seemed a secret message, and with it came a rush of power and energy he had not felt in years. It was the same kind of sudden excitement that comes when you spot something shining in the earth or the flash of silver with a fish on the line, the tug and pull that exhilarates and, for just that little bit of time, erases all else. He once wrote an article on the earliest known fishhook, carved from a snail shell twenty-three thousand years ago and found in a cave in Okinawa—rustic and primitive, and yet its purpose the same as modern hooks, the need behind the purpose the same.