“I’m not married. I thought, if I wore the ring, guys would stop hitting on me, but that was a bad idea—now only married men hit on me,” the tall woman said.

“I see—so what’s your first name?” Mary asked her, just to speed things up.

“Wilson is my first name—I’m one of the last girls to be named for that old president, I hope,” Wilson said. “I’m the fiction writer who asked you if you’re depressed all the time, like me,” she confessed.

“Yes, all the time,” I answered. I was signing her copy of my novel when Nora kicked my leg, under my chair. I’d been dotting the i in Wilson when Nora kicked me, and the dot ended up over the W.

“Maybe we could get together, just to talk about it,” Wilson suggested. Perhaps I was attracted to her because she had no guile concerning how to come on to someone. “You have my number,” Wilson added meekly, as she was leaving. Not only had I been slow to respond; I hadn’t noticed that what I’d mistaken for an ornate frame around her name on the notecard was actually a phone number. And now Nora was giving me an overly familiar shoulder massage; Nora never massaged me. Em, who’d come around to my side of the signing table, suddenly sat in my lap.

“Imagine being a woman named Wilson! At least she’s leaving,” Mary observed.

In a faraway part of the lobby, we could see that Wilson was about to cross paths with Fred. We knew what Fred had been up to. Fred was obsessed with Jasmine. He’d been outside, looking for a bed-shitter on Lexington Avenue and Ninety-second Street. “She’s gone—the bed-shitter is gone, or she never came!” Fred called to us, unmindful of Wilson, who was walking the other way.

Poor Wilson, I thought, putting the notecard with her name and number in my pocket. Pity was always my undoing. Nora had stopped massaging me, and Em got out of my lap, now that Wilson was gone. In addition to her constant depression, Wilson had wandered away on Lexington Avenue, knowing a bed-shitter was on the loose in the Upper East Side. If she’d known Jasmine was fifty-seven, Wilson might have been even more depressed.