It could not have been more difficult that Gail was expecting to work with me directly after I’d met with her mother. God, I needed at least a day, days, maybe the rest of my life to understand what I was feeling. Instead, I’d had little more than an hour to collect my senses before I met with the girl who’d been charming me since the moment we’d met, whom I’d been falling—no, I couldn’t put it that way—for whom I was feeling such tenderness and . . . and loving affection, that was what it was. Loving affection.

An hour earlier, I’d stood outside the Hotel Claremont helping into a taxicab a woman who loathed me and was the mother of a child who might be ours, handing the driver her fare and tip, watching the cab pull away. After a while the doorman came over to me, holding a large umbrella. He asked, with a surprising measure of concern, if perhaps I’d like to step out of the rain.

I walked into the Terrace Lounge and, dazed, took a small table in the corner by a window. Just beyond it, the slate terrace was tiled with water, the rain dancing on it like a casting call of invisible chorus girls in tap shoes.

“Something to drink?” asked the waiter.

I’d never wanted a shot so bad in my life, but it was the last thing I needed. “Coffee,” I said. “Wait. Can you do beef bouillon?”

“Beef consommé.”

“Yes, in a coffee cup, extra strong.”

“I’ll have the chef boil it down. And I’ll get you an extra napkin to dry your hair.”

You’d have thought just once the fates would have given me a bye. Nearly a dozen years I’d spent allowing myself nothing closer to love than near-nameless encounters with women who knew I’d be leaving in a day or two. I’d shut down my feelings in the hope that being numb to pleasure might also make me a little more numb to the pain. Nancy I couldn’t even talk to for the first few years. I didn’t blame her, she didn’t blame me; we each blamed ourselves. We’d been necking, just necking, but a couple of doors down the street Linney had been breathing her last minutes of air, maybe calling our names, her small hands pushing at the—

I hit my fist against my leg under the table, not to inflict pain (it didn’t cause enough pain to call it punishment) but just to break my train of thought.