After the coffee, we told each other our life stories while a Burt Bacharach record played. Since I didn’t really have a life story as yet, she did most of the talking. In college she had wanted to be a writer, she said. She talked about Françoise Sagan, one of her favorites. She especially liked Aimez-vous Brahms? I myself did not dislike Sagan. At least, I didn’t find her as cheap as everyone said. There’s no law requiring everybody to write novels like Henry Miller or Jean Genet.

“I can’t write, though,” she said.

“It’s never too late to start,” I said.

“No, I know I can’t write. You were the one who informed me of that.” She smiled. “Writing letters to you, I finally realized it. I just don’t have the talent.”

I turned bright red. It’s something I almost never do now, but when I was twenty-two I blushed all the time. “Really, though, your writing had something honest about it.”

Instead of answering, she smiled—a tiny smile.

“At least one letter made me go out for a hamburger steak.”

“You must have been hungry at the time.”

And indeed, maybe I had been.

A train passed below the window with a dry clatter.

WHEN THE CLOCK struck five, I said I would be leaving. “I’m sure you have to make dinner for your husband.”

“He comes home very late,” she said, her cheek against her hand. “He won’t be back before midnight.”

“He must be a very busy man.”

“I suppose so,” she said, pausing momentarily. “I think I once wrote to you about my problem. There are certain things I can’t really talk with him about. My feelings don’t get through to him. A lot of the time, I feel we’re speaking two different languages.”

I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t understand how one could go on living with someone to whom it was impossible to convey one’s feelings.

“But it’s all right,” she said softly, and she made it sound as if it really were all right. “Thanks for writing letters to me all these months. I enjoyed them. Truly. And writing back to you was my salvation.”

“I enjoyed your letters, too,” I said, though in fact I could hardly remember anything she had written.

For a while, without speaking, she looked at the clock on the wall. She seemed almost to be examining the flow of time.

“What are you going to do after graduation?” she asked.