I boarded the bus waiting beyond the gates to the building. In Saratoga Springs I changed buses for New York City. I kept thinking of Phillip. He had smiled at me. He had smiled at the other prisoner. I had seen the difference in those smiles before.

By the time I got home it was late at night. The apartment felt empty. No use doing stretching exercises or yoga as tired as I was, so I went right to sleep. For once, the emptiness of the apartment was soothing. Jesse didn’t come back the next morning, and I got to the office early enough to sort the mail. From the thirty-fifth floor I could see people scurrying inside before nine o’clock. And then I remembered that this building was a mere rectangle of cinder block, with the same squared windows one can see everywhere in New York City or in Comstock State Prison for that matter. Small difference between apartment windows with accordion gates and prison windows filled with metal slats for ventilation. Sunlight never had it so hard. I telephoned my apartment. No answer—Jesse hadn’t returned. At noon, I went home for the day.

As soon as I entered the apartment I knew that Jesse had been there. Why hadn’t he answered the telephone when I called? His signs were everywhere: dishes washed and put away, sofa pillows fluffed and propped into place. Cleanliness all over again and here I was messing it up. Then I noticed scraps of paper with phone numbers on the kitchen counter top.

I had a salad for lunch and packed my leotards and dance tights for class. Jesse would be there and we’d dance, letting the movement of our separate bodies work out the tension between us. Maybe. If we didn’t dance together we’d at least have shared the same space. I’d have to work hard to make up for missing class the day before, but all I could think about during the stretching warm-ups, the triplets and leaps across the floor, the Graham contractions and Wideman extensions, was that Jesse wasn’t there filling space with his arms and legs and gyrating torso or watching me watch him. It wasn’t like him to miss class this close to audition date. During the ten-minute break before we worked in pairs for combinations across the floor, I asked among the other dancers. No one had seen him.