When the lady returned, wearing black stockings and carrying a pocketbook over her shoulder, she waved me into her office, a tiny room in the crammed basement. I sat on a blue canvas director’s chair and she perched at her desk, waiting for me to make my move. She knew I was married, and fleeing the city; I had said that much when our intercourse had been lubricated by the party. Now my gears were sticking. We smoked, gingerly talked about the art market, and gossiped about our hosts the night before. She knew Sally Berman well enough to say firmly, “She is not happy.”

I was startled, and somehow took it personally. “What should she do about it?”

“That’s for her to figure out.”

“Well,” I said lamely, “I’m sure she will.”

“What’s in your little paper bag?” she asked.

“Oh—a toy for my daughter. A toy brush and comb. She’s not quite three, and has just learned to brush her hair.”

“She sounds ravishing, Howard. I wonder if I’ll ever have a child—they say it’s worth it.”

“It’s wonderful, but it doesn’t solve problems. It adds problems.”

She grew a bit more distant at my implication that she had problems. I, her woman’s eye could see, was the one with problems. “Good luck up there,” she said stoutly in parting, like a headmistress wishing me well. “I hope it’s not too lonely.” She had that Manhattan faith that only New York people were real, and the rest were laughable phantoms.

“Oh—there are a few congenial spirits, even up there.”

“How often do you plan to get back to New York?”

“I don’t know. Not often. It’s a long way.”

“Please come see me when you do.”

“Yes. I’d like to. Very much.” But, though she held out a bare, plaster-pale arm toward me with almost a beseeching grace, we hadn’t happened, just as New York hadn’t happened for me.

Airlines existed in those days, yes, but one didn’t think of flying what would become a shuttle route, a bus in the sky for gray suits. One took trains back and forth, a five-hour trip with the layover in New Haven while they switched engines. From Boston’s South Station I took a cab to North Station, and found it would be nearly two hours for the next train to my town on the North Shore. But a train for Haverhill was leaving in five minutes, and in my ignorance of New England geography—we had moved just a month ago—I thought that, since Haverhill was also to the north, it would be a time-saving move to get there and then telephone my wife.