“I’d like to turn on, Missy, do you have anything?”

“Not a crumb; I might have tonight when Benny comes but that’s not what you need.”

“I know, I know, but it would help.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t bear it. I hate living like this! I’m not like you and Weezy who can hang loose . . . I’ve got to have some structure, some terra firma, and instead I’m always in a swamp not knowing what to do. And where are we going next when we have to be out of here?”

Missy regarded Tina with an expression of near-irony. Lanky, unkempt, her hair in frizzled curls, Missy sat in a sagging armchair, her feet over the arm, and watched her friend stalk around the room. “You’re in touch with your feelings, Tee, I know you are. You are the prototype Dionysian woman. You know what to do in the main—why do you have to have even the little things so set up?”

“I can’t live this way, Missy, the way you do with no regular hours, men coming in and out all the time, things all over the place. . . .”

“Why don’t you go back to Duke? He still keeps asking about you. He’s a nice guy and he loves you.”

“How could I do that when I don’t love him? I’d never marry him and that’s what he wants.”

“You could just live in for a while without making it long-term. There are no rules to the game, Tee.”

“Some things are the way they’ve always been, Missy. Outwardly there seem to be big changes, but not with internal concerns. What’s complicated is that the whole thing is conducted in a more open and honest way, but the issues remain eternally the same—that is, do we want the security of long-term commitment in marriage or do we want to be ephemeral mayflies?”

After they left the sublet, Missy and Tina moved up to 106th Street. Tina let Allan Saltzman celebrate her passing her orals with a wildly expensive dinner at the top of the World Trade Center while she privately thought she would have chucked the whole pretentious thing for any number of little trattorie in Rome or Florence or Venice, or Féfé’s outdoor grill on the Adriatic, where they had gone in the Marche for huge bowls of mussels in broth, fish grilled over the coals, and the sunlight wavering between the vines that canopied them in the shade of a summer’s day. All the lost paradises of my life! she told herself as she looked out at the lights of Manhattan.

Still, she and Allan were good friends.

“What shall we do to celebrate May Day?” he asked one beautiful day in spring when they were walking to the library.

“Let’s go to the Statue of Liberty,” she said on the spur of the moment.