I said to myself, ‘Edgewater 5340.’ That, in the days before the numerical prefix, had been her phone number. She was, I think, the only girl I ever called on. I wasn’t much of a wooer. When I rang at her front door, her mother seemed taken aback. I should have been the dry cleaner’s messenger, picking up blouses.

But Amy had taken her raccoon coat from the hall tree and put on the matching round hat. She had a style of her own with hats – they were set back from her forehead. There are foreheads that can’t tolerate the pressure of a hatband.

The house was not the usual brick. It was Indiana limestone. The porch was one thick slab of it. When Amy came out on the graystone porch, I inhaled her personal odor. Part of it was Coty’s face powder. I ask myself whether Coty is still using the fragrance it used in the fifties. When we embraced and kissed in the park, the odor of the damp fur was much stronger than the powder.

The imperfect application of her lipstick was another point of identity. That was the whole power of it – the beauty of this flesh-and-blood mortality. Just as mortal was the shape of her bottom as she walked, a mature woman swinging a schoolbag. She didn’t walk like a student. There was also the faulty management of her pumps. They dropped on the minor beat. This syncopation was the most telling idiosyncrasy of all. It bound the other traits together. What you were then aware of was the ungainly sexiness of her movements and her posture. The years between, with their crises and wars and presidential campaigns, all the transformations of the present age, have had no power to change her looks, the size of her eyes, or the brevity of her teeth. There’s the power of Eros for you.

It’s a March morning, then, on the fault line between cold and mild. A blizzard has burst, in a way peculiar to Chicago. The snow is going round and round, heavily, and Amy is in the tiled shower, soaping herself. The double cheeks of her backside are still well modeled, and she washes with the experienced hands of the mother who has bathed small children. A whole lifetime of self-care is apparent in the soaping of her breasts. Thirty years ago, I had the ecstatic privilege of lifting them up to kiss their undersides – and also the parted thighs.

Amy doesn’t have the appearance of a woman who sets off such fantasies. There’s a reserve about her that discourages a directly erotic approach. She seems very steady. She always has seemed so. At school she was an average sort in appearance. Except on Costume Day, in tights and lipstick like a showgirl. Young men like Jay, specialists at reading the sexual signs, guessed her to be excitable. ‘There’s potential, there’s action in that girl,’ he said. I was ‘going’ with her, in our junior year, until Jay cut me out. They were married much later – after the Cuban missile crisis. A second marriage for both of them.