A surely imaginary happiness bathes my memories. Once, in January, I stood at Jane’s front windows looking down at the tops of a row of buttonwoods as a slanting wet snow laid crescents of white on each little round pod, while the apartment at my back overflowed with the plangent human pealing of the Swingle Singers performing Bach fugues—a record Jane had received at Christmas, I didn’t ask from whom—and I was joyful to the point of tears. My body, wrapped in a loose wool bathrobe of hers, felt stuffed with the spiritual woolliness of contentment. At my back, just off the kitchen, she was setting up our breakfast. Paraboloids of orange juice and a cylinder of marmalade glowed with inner light. The scent of toasting English muffins intersected the sight of the diagonal snow adhering to the buttonwood pods. The morning moment kept overflowing, on and on, Bach going at it again and again, never getting enough. Jeffrey, Jane’s son, was with a friend or his father so that, this once, we had the apartment to ourselves. I had spent the night, daring the phone back at the hotel not to ring. Jane was close enough to my size so that I could wear her blue robe. I could never have gotten into a robe of Carole’s; she was petite and neat. What I loved in Jane was her excess, her muchness—the hips so wide she walked with a seesawing lurch, the cedary hair that was always falling into my face, the angular downy arms, the legs that stretched to the corners of the bed. It was a single bed; we had slept badly, snoring in each other’s faces, dodging elbows.

Her ex-husband was an artist, not successful enough to supply child support or for me to have heard of him but not so unsuccessful that he had to abandon an artistic image of himself. I hated and envied her world of artists—their lofts and debauches, their self-exemption from the ruck of ordinary labor, their otherworldly charm. Jeffrey, nine and then ten, was doe-eyed and gravely polite, perhaps because I usually saw him when he was being put to bed, at the moment of my departure with his mother. His tiny room’s one tall window looked south, upon the lights of midtown mounting in rectangular masses higher and higher—an Arabian Nights view that made me abjectly grateful to have been granted, a marauder from upstate, my small illicit purchase upon such display, such splendor.