We went through six or seven stores before she decided on a red dress with one hell of a price tag. In her purse she had a checkbook as thick as a finger. In many of the stores, given that she was asking me to advise her, the clerks looked to me. “This afternoon will cost me my life!” she said, laughing. “He’s so jealous!”

“In that case, I’m leaving,” I said.

“Why?” she said. “I’m not afraid of dying anymore. And anyway, it would be so romantic!” She grabbed hold of my shoulder and pressed her cheek to it. “Your smell,” she said. “You always smell so good! Some of it’s the smell of your car. Do you still have it?”

“Yes,” I said as fragments of the previous year started to rain down on me. In a moment I was buried in an avalanche of forgotten emotions, memories of my life with her in the last summer of my life. I didn’t say anything else and she too was silent but must have been thinking of the same things because when by accident our hands touched they remained clasped. Her hand in mine was very small and very cold. Around us people’s faces had become blurred, were just bright patches above their shoulders. “Listen,” I said, “let’s go to my hotel and slash our wrists.”

“If we really do need to go to a hotel, we can do something more amusing there,” she said. “Aren’t you in that apartment anymore?”

“No,” I said. “I left it. And besides, it wasn’t the same anymore.”

“Of course,” she said. “I wasn’t there.” She’d stopped in front of a bookstore. “I’d like to buy you a gift,” she said, “but not a book. Something gray, to match your eyes.”

“No,” I said.

“Please!” she said.

I shrugged and she started dragging me from one store to the next until she found a gray silk shirt.

“Do you think he can afford it?” I said.

“Oh,” she said without taking offense, “he can afford a whole lot of things. As long as people buy paintings, at least.”

“Especially bad ones.”

“Yes,” she said, after thinking this over. “They are bad. But he knows that.”

“And do you think he can afford these too?” I said, pointing to a pair of pants with silver arabesques. They were the most fucked-up pants I’d ever seen.

She started laughing. “I think he can afford a few pairs,” she said. “Do you have anything against the ones with red arabesques?”

I had nothing against the ones with red arabesques and we bought them. Then we went on to buy a pair of English shoes, two dozen Chinese ties, complete with dragons, and a pair of cardinal red slippers.