Then I told her about the elephant. Exactly how this happened, I can’t recall. Maybe we were talking about something having to do with animals, and that was the connection. Or maybe, unconsciously, I had been looking for someone—a good listener—to whom I could present my own, unique view on the elephant’s disappearance. Or, then again, it might have been the liquor that got me talking.

In any case, the second the words left my mouth, I knew that I had brought up one of the least suitable topics I could have found for this occasion. No, I should never have mentioned the elephant. The topic was—what?—too complete, too closed.

I tried to hurry on to something else, but as luck would have it she was more interested than most in the case of the vanishing elephant, and once I admitted that I had seen the elephant many times she showered me with questions—what kind of elephant was it, how did I think it had escaped, what did it eat, wasn’t it a danger to the community, and so forth.

I told her nothing more than what everybody knew from the news, but she seemed to sense constraint in my tone of voice. I had never been good at telling lies.

As if she had not noticed anything strange about my behavior, she sipped her second daiquiri and asked, “Weren’t you shocked when the elephant disappeared? It’s not the kind of thing that somebody could have predicted.”

“No, probably not,” I said. I took a pretzel from the mound in the glass dish on our table, snapped it in two, and ate half. The waiter replaced our ashtray with an empty one.

She looked at me expectantly. I took out another cigarette and lit it. I had quit smoking three years earlier but had begun again when the elephant disappeared.

“Why ‘probably not’? You mean you could have predicted it?”

“No, of course I couldn’t have predicted it,” I said with a smile. “For an elephant to disappear all of a sudden one day—there’s no precedent, no need, for such a thing to happen. It doesn’t make any logical sense.”

“But still, your answer was very strange. When I said, ‘It’s not the kind of thing that somebody could have predicted,’ you said, ‘No, probably not.’ Most people would have said, ‘You’re right,’ or ‘Yeah, it’s weird,’ or something. See what I mean?”

I sent a vague nod in her direction and raised my hand to call the waiter. A kind of tentative silence took hold as I waited for him to bring me my next scotch.