That left the no-less-indecisive Fernando and Lucy. The bright sunlight was cruel to Fernando’s facial tattoo. The bleeding heart, stabbed on Fernando’s cheek, bled more profusely in the sun; the name of Fernando’s onetime true love, MYRTLE, was easier to read on the pierced heart. Lucy looked at him, then looked away. She was an underage girl with missing teeth. Whatever else Lucy was missing wasn’t clear, but it seemed evident she had not thought through the repercussions that could come from her licking men. “I’m goin’,” Fernando said, looking at Lucy, but she wouldn’t look at him. “You comin’, or what?” Fernando asked her, but Lucy shrugged; she kept looking away from him. Fernando was half a block away, and walking faster, when Lucy called to him. Lucy’s voice and her thoughts were clearer than the snowshoer and I were expecting.

“I do know the difference between what I want and what I don’t, Fernando! Sometimes, I do know what I mean—sometimes, I do know when I’m bein’ encouragin’!” Lucy called to him, but he just kept walking. “I know why Myrtle left you!” Lucy screamed after him. Fernando appeared to trip, or he staggered for a second, but he kept walking. “Because Myrtle found out about Buddy!” Lucy screamed. We watched Fernando veer west, across Park Avenue; speaking strictly for myself, I was hoping he would be struck and flattened by something. “Buddy left him, too—everybody with half a brain leaves Fernando, eventually,” Lucy said to the snowshoer and me.

“Did you know Buddy?” I asked the girl.

“I wasn’t around when Buddy was around—I just heard about her,” Lucy told me. “Buddy isn’t around anymore, or nobody’s seen her around here,” the girl said.

A taxi whizzed by, the windows open, the radio blaring—or Simon and Garfunkel, unseen, were somehow singing “Scarborough Fair” in the cab’s backseat.

“What about you guys—where are you goin’?” Lucy asked us. I thought she was being a little encouraging. We walked together, east to Lexington Avenue, and along Lexington to East Sixty-fourth Street, to the little Barlows’ pied-à-terre. Lucy had a look at the writing team’s apartment, while Mr. Barlow and I packed up our things and changed our clothes. I had my writing notebooks with me, and all the other stuff I’d brought from Vienna.

I hadn’t noticed that the snowshoer was wearing a bra until we were walking against the wind on Lexington Avenue. The wind whipped the little English teacher’s necktie over his shoulder and pressed his white dress shirt flat against his chest, where I got a glimpse of the bra—only briefly, before the snowshoer clutched his overcoat closer to his chest. The cups of the bra were too small for my mother. Was Mr. Barlow buying his own bras now? I wondered. A training bra, I presumed. At least it was white, I was thinking—a black bra would have been more noticeable under a white dress shirt.