Jeffrey was precocious at school, and Jane was proud of that. Occasionally he and I talked; my impression was of a sly docility toward me, a guarded hope. His mother’s loneliness was the air he breathed, and I gave him a brief change of air. He was blonder than she, English-looking, with a pointed chin and pale skin and rosy cheeks; only his owlish brown eyes and black eyebrows gave evidence of a darker strain, his father’s. He had read lots of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis; at school he was having a little trouble with how to add unlike fractions. Of the men in the margin of his life I must have been the only one with a degree in engineering.

“You make the numbers so nicely!” he exclaimed, when I began to instruct him in common denominators.

“You’ve got to. If they’re not clear they’re worse than useless. That kind of ‘4’ you make, with the closed top, looks too much like a ‘9.’ ”

“But, Stan, the ‘4’s in books all are closed like that.”

“Books get away with a lot we can’t get away with in real life,” I told him, paternally. It was enchanting, somehow, to be called “Stan” by a child the age of my own children. I was momentarily a member of this family, but the membership was woven of angel hair, insubstantial, with none of the weight of real family ties. I was temporarily magical, to go with their magic, so precariously poised in mid-air here, between the tops of the buttonwood trees and the ranks of burning skyscraper lights.

Jane’s apartment was furnished cheaply; unframed out-of-series prints were tacked to the walls, and instead of end tables she simply used stacks of art books and catalogues. I felt unprecedentedly nimble in this apartment, light-footed, stealthy, stealing happiness from these rooms and then gliding out the door, into the elevator (how loud its doors and gears seemed, in that solidly sleeping building!), and on to the barren streets that with mysterious quickness yielded a roaming cab, its third eye blazing.