You’re wondering why I came here? Not at all, she said, not at all. How come you never answered my letters? I apologize; I didn’t really think you were serious. Those others? Other men write me letters. Do you think I’m serious now? Yes, right now I think you’re serious. What does that mean? It means that I think you’re serious right now. You’re right. It’s a now thing. What does that mean? What else could it mean, Henry?

He stopped at the side of a sycamore, leaned his back against the smooth bole of the trunk and drew the girl gently into his arms. She looked up at him, no longer smiling. He kissed her.

Why did you do that?

That’s what you said last time. He kissed her again, seriously. She responded by putting both her hands on the back of his head and pulling down, pressing herself against him, arching her body like a bow.

Let’s go somewhere, he suggested. Make love.

Love?

Get this agony over with.

Oh no, Henry, I can’t do that. Please don’t ask me to do that. One hour together and then I don’t see you again for—how long? Six months? A year? Ever?

I could stick around for a few days. We could go camping in the mountains. The aspens are turning gold now. The sunflowers are in full bloom—and the purple asters and the globe mallow. It’s beautiful up there, Claire. Cattle gone. Bull elk bugling in the high meadows. Brown trout jumping in the lakes.

She smiled up at him, her eyes misty with pain. No, I can’t do it. That would make it even worse for me. I’d be miserable all winter long, thinking about it. Missing you.

It’s a now thing, he said.

It’s too much of a now thing.

He walked her home, a mile over the sidewalks under the trees through shadowy residential streets. She lived with her mother—father gone—in a fine old brick-and-stucco house, three stories high, behind a wall, in a well-groomed neighborhood of fine old grave Victorian houses. She turned a key in the gate, they said good-bye and kissed once more. She entered and closed the gate, they touched hands through the iron bars, she withdrew. Henry watched her walk to the deep porch of the house, unlock and enter the front door, disappear.

Henry walked back to his pickup truck through the Denver night. At two o’clock in the morning, too restless and agitated for sleep, he started the engine and headed home. Whatever that was. Weehawken? No more. Stump Creek? Not really. Albuquerque, El Culito, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Naples, London, Paris, Madrid? Those days were gone. Back to the park in Utah? That season was over.

He realized with a shock of horror that he was at liberty to go anywhere he wished. Nobody cared where he went.

HE WANTED HER SO MUCH. For so long. He desired her so intensely over such a length of time that the longing became a malaise, a sickness. Desire—the word itself, in its very sound, with its dying fall of suspiration, resembled the enchanted misery of his fever. A fever in the blood, fever in the mind, fever of soul.