“And you tell that psycho girl of yours that I didn’t do it. I didn’t talk to you, man. You talked to me! You tell her that!”

And then he’s running.

Two weeks later I find a job. It’s at a disconsolate, fumy parking garage in Rahway. No poured concrete parking structure has much in the panache department, but this one is a dump of the first order. It has prisonlike sight lines. It has clearance problems. It has the cheer, and odor, of a Soviet-era urinal. Eight hours a day I sit on a stool that has been made suave by the shifting asses of countless other unies and protect cars that no one would want to steal in the first place.

The job doesn’t make me feel more like a human being. I don’t feel a gusher of meaning at practicing even an ignoble facsimile of my craft. I am not getting in touch with the former proud pulse inside me. It produces no residue of self. I am still a sparkless, buzzless drone, a 165-pound hunk-of-carbon occupant of the space-time continuum, a drogue-dragger. That’s it.

Three days later as I sit in my box staring at keys dangling from the pegboard, I am certain that I smell Charlie. I eject from my stool and run out to the sidewalk but no one is there. It’s just a scent-cloud of Covet. Whoever it was, I just missed her. I still can’t quite place that mysterious Hesperidean ingredient, but I have finally deduced the character of Covet. Now I understand it. It is not an up-front perfume. It doesn’t zing you with fragrance from across the room. It doesn’t precede the woman. It’s an aftereffect, a comet trail of female presence. You only really get it when she has already gone past, but when it hits, you know you won’t be able to stop thinking about who she is—and where to find her—for the next hour. Or two. Or three.

Or, in my case, the rest of your life.

Further evidence of my dumbness: I keep thinking that maybe Charlie will come back. Against my better judgment, I keep on a sharp, pulse-eyed lookout for any covert signals she might send me. But they never arrive. Do I get a letter addressed in strange handwriting that contains polecat hair and a secret message revealing her location? No. Does she turn up in a bathroom of a restaurant, tell me to act natural, and then smuggle me into a limo with tinted windows? Nope. Is she ever standing behind me, like that day at the Frick, waiting for me to bump into her and whisk me away into her life? No she isn’t. She’s a ghost.