After the film, Saul and Sofia wander through the tree-lined paths of Washington Square Park, trying their best not to look like good targets for pickpockets. They stop in a dingy artists’ bar on MacDougal and Saul buys them half pints of dark beer, which they drink standing, leaning together at a tall corner table. Sofia likes the light and foolhardy feeling it gives her and drinks another while Saul nurses a cigarette. She makes conversation about the movie; she makes up stories about the other patrons (a mistress, the woman with the too-tight dress and the carefully arranged curls; a journalist, notebooks in tow, twisting a wedding band around his finger, who doesn’t want to go home yet; an artist, who moved out of her parents’ home in New Jersey and has only milk crates for furniture). She fills the empty space in their conversation, all the while thinking about the bones of Saul’s arms, the jut of his knuckles against the skin, his dancing dreaming eyelashes. Inside of Sofia, the thing that has yawned open paces back and forth. It is hungry. Saul is quiet; his eyes look through her.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks, and Saul opens his eyes wider and focuses on her, as though he has forgotten where he is. He makes a twisted face; an inside joke, one he throws over the shoulders of men he is talking to when Sofia is standing just outside the room, watching. I’m right here, is what that face is supposed to say. But I would rather be just over there, with you.

“Nothing,” he says, which is what he says when he is thinking about his family, and Germany, and the layers of unspeakable mystery surrounding his life in Europe.

Sofia reaches for Saul’s hand, and he takes it, but his gaze stays neutral, focused somewhere above her shoulder. She doesn’t know where he goes, but she wishes he would come back.

“You’re somewhere else,” she says.

“I’m right here,” he says. He isn’t, though. And Sofia, who often falls back into her own thoughts when her conversations with Saul reach this impasse, sets her mouth and puts her hand on Saul’s chest. “Tell me,” she says.

“You haven’t seen the news?” asks Saul.

“Of course I have,” she says.

“Well, I’m—” Saul stops. He shrugs. “I suppose I’m thinking about that, then.”

“I suppose I’m trying not to,” says Sofia. She is thinking about Saul’s hands, about bubbles rising to the top of a glass of beer.

“I suppose,” says Saul, “I can’t help it.”