“Actually, I was thinking, what if we hooked up in Colorado? You like to ski, Whitney?”

Among the scant details I knew of Roland’s life, I recalled he grew up in a small Colorado city where his parents settled after arriving from Martinique. The name of the city had stuck with me: Arcade. Roland enlisted in the army out of high school and was deployed with NATO forces in Bosnia before being posted in Germany. I’d met him just before joining the Bystander, waiting for a train back to the city from Philadelphia, where he approached me on the platform. Getting picked up by a soldier felt like something from another era. He stayed with me for a weekend before he had to rejoin his comrades and ship out or whatever.

Roland had never heard of any of the places I wrote for. I tried explaining that even the president read the New Republic, and he was impressed without really caring. I’m a goner for simplicity. I could give myself to Roland without going through the complex strategizing I applied to my career. Someone else might take offense at how he always assumed I was single and ready, but he was always right, so who cares? After we’d fucked, it was always Roland who elaborated fantasies of our being together, spending more time, getting beneath the surface. I came away from our encounters with the impression of having broken his heart a little, until he’d call up out of the blue again.

“You’re not scared to fly or anything, are you?” he asked.

“No, why?”

“Just the terrorism.”

“Oh, just that,” I said.

“Well, you could fly in for the weekend. I know all the slopes.”

I told him I’d think about it, hung up, then booked a flight to Denver and called him back.

“Already?” he said, as if amazed by the freedom of civilians. “You mind booking the hotel too? I know good places, but if you could use your card.”

“No problem.”

“If it’s too much, you can just tell me.”

“I’m sure it’s fine.”

“And Whitney,” he said, “could you book it for tomorrow, in my name?” He laughed. “I don’t have a place to stay in Arcade anymore.”

2.

Over the snowbound valley, the plane tilted in its final approach, and we touched down in Denver. I rented a black Jeep Cherokee and hit Interstate 25, a brush of charcoal in the sky. As the elevation rose, snow began to fall. It whirled over the highway and blew hard across the hills with their caps of rusted rock. I remember wondering why I didn’t do this more often, get out into the world in a clean-smelling car.