Carole and I had met in college—the University of Buffalo, before its SUNY connection. A math major, she was bright, methodical, compact, and rounded. She had thick glasses and thin, serious lips. I saw at a glance that she would be a trustworthy partner and mother to my children. My estimate was sound; she was all I could reasonably ask for in a helpmeet. We both studied too hard for much of a formal courtship; we just palled around for two years and in senior year agreed to get married. So to stop at one of Manhattan’s corner flower shops and buy an armful of red roses or lavender gladioli was to play a rôle, that of a swain, for the first time. I played opposite the veteran Italian actress behind the counter, with her faint mustache and frayed sweater and tightly wound iron-gray bun into which a yellow pencil had been thrust at a dramatic angle. In the burning limelight, all my senses were heightened a notch: I registered with a feverish keenness the petalled colors massed with their reflections in the black display window, and the chill that wafted out of the glass-doored refrigerator where the cut flowers were stored, and the angry deft gesture with which my co-star plucked the pencil from the back of her head and scribbled the receipt before sending me out into the street with my green-paper cone of blooms. Bearing flowers enrolled me in the city’s anonymous army of lovers. A few bright doorways up Columbus Avenue, I would stop at the liquor store for a quart of Wild Turkey—the most expensive brand of bourbon within my sense of possibilities. At home Carole and I drank Jim Beam, and not much of it. But I was somebody else here, a sugar daddy from Singapore. Flowers and liquor—what else could I take Jane to clothe my gratitude? Sex paid for, however inadequately, was better—clearer, more naked, more of a rush—than married sex that we expect to sneak up on us for free. I did not drop in at the liquor store often enough—four or five times a year—to warrant a greeting from the dour brothers who owned it, but after a year I could see something flicker across their wary faces, a suspicion that they should know me, that I was familiar. My courtship glow made me stand out, perhaps. I might have been a young husband, new to the neighborhood and still dazzled by the delights of cohabitation.