We lay there for fifteen minutes or so. We didn’t speak. Out in the yard, John’s dogs snarled and woofed. The oil burner kicked on and the radiators clicked with the expanding heat. She touched my chest but my thoughts were already drifting. The National Book Awards. It is possible I could win. That would be good. It would change things. People would return to me, read me more carefully. I glanced at ’Gitte and she was watching me. She smiled.

I rose and found the window. A gray day, or perhaps the sun was setting. Hard to tell this deep in the woods. The unblinking pony stood by his shed. The dogs circled my car. One peed on a rear tire. ’Gitte and I still hadn’t said a word. The lengthening silence generated more silence. The growing chasm between us was pushing me out the door.

’Gitte watched as I dressed. I stepped over to where she lay and kissed her. She was so warm. My last image is that of the lovely ’Gitte lying on the bed, beaming at me, eyes brimming with love. At that moment I finally put it all together. ’Gitte had slept with me because of who I am, not who I once was. The kid I was thirty years ago, she barely remembered that guy. Young Richard was nothing more than a shadow to her. No. It was the guy in the magazines, the guy she told her son about, that was who she was after. Of course.

As I escaped down the rutted road, the woods darkening all around me, I prayed out loud that I didn’t bust a spring and have to return to the house. I made it out to the two-lane. Relief eased me into a meditation on what could have been, should have been and was. Such a short distance between fantasy and memory.

In my old journals, I called ’Gitte an angel but the truth is that in the day we’d never said much to one another, John did all the talking. I had always assumed she was brilliant, but quiet. Naive on my part, I guess. And was she genuinely beautiful once? Who knows? I was stoned every time I saw her. Never saw her in daylight. If she was a beauty, that was no longer the case. Not really. Her belly was wrinkled and her legs were thin and varicose. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for. She was a middle-aged woman who lived in a house in the middle of nowhere. With dogs.

October 19, 2006

I spoke to ’Gitte on the phone the next morning. Oddly, she had yet to mention Theo, and I was not about to bring him up. I told her I had to get back to New York, giving her a complicated excuse relating to the National Book Award nomination. I implied that I would be up again before Christmas. Not sure why I said that, but I did.