I am losing her. The mist that arose when we first met, surrounded by glaring blue scrawls, threatens to swallow all the details. The chopsticks, the taxicabs in the depths of night, my excited impersonation of a man buying flowers for a sweetheart—what else can I remember? We must have talked, thousands of words, but of what? Our expertise was in quite different areas, and if we talked too long about our marriages, we would trip over the fact that hers was ended and mine was not. Once, when, after a longer absence than usual, I entered her, she breathed in my ear, “He’s home,” which almost unmanned me, it seemed so sad an untruth. My home was in Eggertsville, with the three children, the ensemble furniture, the Saturday-night dinner parties, the Sunday-morning men’s tennis group for me and the Methodist choir for Carole. Jane’s appeal was exactly that she was not home, that she was a splendid elsewhere.

New York City did not miss me; it did not occur to me that she might. Yet, explaining away a weepy mood—Jeffrey had a fever, she did not think she should leave him with Brenda from downstairs, so we sat together in our clothes, in the room with the view of the tops of the buttonwoods—Jane let drop, “Yeah, but you haven’t been racing downstairs every day to the mailbox hoping for a letter from Buffalo.”

Her letters to me, directed to my office at the plant, embarrassed me, as well as putting a funny look on the face of the department secretary as she delivered one, addressed in Jane’s sprawling round handwriting, to my desk. The struggles of the gallery to survive, her glimpse at an opening of Robert Motherwell or some other giant, Jeffrey’s progress at school—the details of her world, when I was not there, seemed meagre and unreal. The details of my own might estrange her by painting a life less lonely than hers. In Buffalo I had everything I needed for a life, except for her, my New York girl, tucked into my consciousness like a candy after dinner, like a mint on my pillow. “I have nothing much to say,” I told her. “Except that I adore you.”

“ ‘Adore’ implies a distance, doesn’t it?” Jane had a stern face she reserved for people who came into the gallery just to loiter on a cold day. She clumsily stubbed out her cigarette, smoked down to the scarlet filter, in a fashionably rough clay ashtray on her stack of art books. She had caught Jeffrey’s cold and kept clearing her throat.

“You don’t want to hear,” I assured her, “about which child of mine has had his bicycle stolen or which dog has died.”

“I don’t?”

“Or how Carole’s station wagon had a flat tire doing the car pool, or how drunk so-and-so got at so-and-so’s rather dreadful dinner party.”