“Doesn’t everyone? Oh god, I’m so glad to see you,” she said against his shirt. He was wearing one of his big, crazy Hawaiian print shirts over chinos, with cheap sneakers he bought out of the bins on Fourteenth Street, which made him look like a giant toddler much of the time. George was well over six feet tall, yet he moved with the unconscious gait of a child. This shirt was one she particularly liked, with red and white monkeys and bananas.

“I’m sorry I was 404 all day. I had a great day, actually, very productive, but I feel bad that you wanted to talk to me when you couldn’t. You should implant a microchip or something. A Lo-Jack. I am so sorry. I hate the way I am not a grown-up, if it added to your upsetness.” He hugged her tightly for a moment and then resumed his syncopation on her back, now double-timing it, adding a complicated counter-rhythm with the other hand between the wings of her shoulder blades, suddenly genuinely fascinated with new possibilities, new inventions. “Beck, you know the wonderful ‘Walking the Dog’ sequence in Shall We Dance?” She nodded as she felt his big hands segue into the pattern of that familiar musical interlude.

He swayed a little, almost dancing with her, as he hummed the opening—“Hmm hm hm hm hmp-hmp”—and then interrupted himself. “You know Gershwin scored that using only six instruments?”

“You tell me that about once a month. We’re not both senile. You’re obsessed. Something about how he wrote it to mock big orchestral flourishes, right? Do I win the car? Or the trip to Hawaii? Or just your voice on my answering machine? But do we have to talk about this right now? May I come in, instead of having this truly fascinating if somewhat familiar conversation in your doorway, where there is a bit of a draft, which doesn’t seem to bother you but makes me wonder if someone left the door to the roof open again? Maybe busboys up there on a smoking break, like last month? And do you want to say where you were more specifically? And may I tell you about Esther?” Rebecca asked, disengaging gracefully in order to drag her overnight bag in from the hallway and kick the door shut behind them.

George’s loft was the entire top floor of a late-nineteenth-century building that had a mix of apartments and professional spaces in the five floors beneath him. The recalcitrant elevator always alarmed her, so Rebecca was a little breathless from having taken the stairs. The rich, garlicky aroma that had followed her up the stairs emanated from the Italian restaurant on the ground floor. She was hungry, though not enough to want to eat there. It was an old Village fixture, mentioned in memoirs of various Beat poets and New York School painters, but it was no longer very good (if it ever really had been—there was a time when red-checked tablecloths, candles stuck into Chianti bottles, and insouciant waiters with accents were all a restaurant needed to be considered the real thing).