“So you’re infatuated?” Ian asked, thinking about his feelings for Margaret. The word “infatuation” seemed too sweet. His feelings required a more clinical name, one that would include the image that was in his mind now. Margaret was lying down, smiling, in a coffin.

“So what about people who are infatuated and then fall out?” Ian asked, trying to gauge the odds of Margaret and Phil breaking up.

“Sometimes it wasn’t infatuation in the first place,” Fire said, “but another kind of attraction … money … sex … a whole heapa things.”

“And how you tell the difference?”

Fire shifted around on his haunches as he felt the urge to gloat. Ian seemed so denatured now. So who was the pussy after all?

Blowing the smoke through the side of his mouth, Fire leaned toward him, watching his eyebrows rising with anticipation, and said, with a raspiness brought on by the cigarette, “You feel infatuation all the time, while you feel other kinds of attraction only in certain contexts. If your attraction to someone is sexual, you don’t feel connected unless you’re fucking. If it’s money, you don’t feel connected unless you’re buying. But infatuation doesn’t need a context. Because when you’re infatuated you feel connected to that person in countless ways. And that’s why society is terrified of it. Infatuation doesn’t respect the rules. So why not take the day off and lay up in bed with your woman? So why not max out a credit card to go watch the sunset in Negril with a two-hour advance purchase?”

“Or why not get involved with a woman who already has a man?” This was said with a flourish, Ian’s voice beginning low then rising to a sarcastic climax.

“That’s why it’s dangerous,” Fire said, the rawness of his nerves suddenly revealed. “It can make you do some crazy things.”

“So what you going to do with the letter, then?”

Fire puffed his cheeks. “I don’t know. The situation is kinda no-win, isn’t it? I mean, what would it say about her if she left him for me?” He paused, more to gather himself than to think. “Plus I know from experience that that kinda mix-up is usually not worth it. If she really wants to leave him she’ll leave him … on her own … and if we happen to meet again when she’s single, then … who knows? Fate makes all these choices, man. What is for me can’t be un-for me.”

“But you knew she had a man when you met her though?”

“Yeah … but it started as a kind of joke, y’know. After Blanche I didn’t think that that kinda thing coulda happened to me again. So when I met her on Spring Street then met her again at Claire’s and she kissed me, I was taking it as one of those humorous things that I could just maybe write about. But we flirted with each other that night and I lost my balance and fell over the edge.”