“I’m very consoled by George Washington,” he said. “You find something too, Annie, something that consoles you.”

“I have a strange question to ask you. Do I have a middle name?”

“That’s not so strange,” he replied. “Let me see. I have your birth certificate somewhere. I can go fetch it. It may have been Elizabeth, after your mother, you know. My mother loved the old names. My middle name is Luke. She was very fond of the Apostles.”

They said good-by, each exercising a restraint for which the other was grateful. Annie walked down Broadway, thinking of her new name, a dark, fragrant name. The nearly empty shops gave the street an idle, post-Christmas dispirited look. Haunted by thoughts of Uncle Greg, worried about things she undoubtedly had forgotten to do in preparation for the next day, she turned into a movie house that was showing Wuthering Heights. Uncle Greg had given her the book years ago. Movies were like a faint thumbprint pressed on recollection; as handsome and intense as he was, the actor playing Heathcliff violated some private notion of her own.

Afterward, she took a subway downtown to the restaurant on Twelfth Street. Walter was late. Annie sat in a corner, averting her gaze from the hopeful glances of men standing at the bar. Then Walter appeared in the door. She was startled at the pleasure she felt upon seeing him.

As he held his hands around the candle on their table, she observed a small flat mole on one of his fingers. She touched it delicately—he stopped in the middle of something he was saying —and there was a yearning look on his face that seemed to have no connection with their gasping bodily struggles in hallways and on beds.

For a while, he spoke of himself, of his father who lived in Sacramento and whom he hadn’t seen in eight years. He was a terrible man, Walter said. Once, when he’d taken some friends home from Berkeley—yes, he’d gone to college for a year—the old man had gotten into a rage because there’d been a ring of dirt in the bathtub, and he’d said Walter’s friends weren’t fit to be in houses. So Walter had told him what a petty bourgeois bastard he was with his nasty little real-estate business. He walked right out of that house and there’d not been a word between them all these years.

A girl came in and went to the bar. Walter stared at her intently. Then, turned to Annie, he said, grinning, “I thought I recognized her back.”

Annie shrank back into her chair. Walter grabbed her hands. “Take it easy,” he said. “You’re so easy to tease, baby!”

“You always laugh at me…”

“Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’m taking you uptown to meet a Spanish friend of mine.”

“Another meeting?”