“Which is sorta the case.”

“Don’t remind me. I’m so embarrassed.”

“About what?”

“Our … how do you say … office phone sex … or is it phone office sex?”

“Who knows, maybe you were faking it. You were probably soaking your corns and clipping your nose hairs.”

“Okay, lemme come clean. You’re right. But I forgot to tell you that I put you on speaker phone. Now the whole office wants to meet you.”

He laughed with her.

She liked that Fire could be so zany and self-deprecating then turn around and write a poem like “Person.” For the poem was not only passionate. It was good. It showed a clear understanding of form. Of course she’d known men who could have written that and even better. But that was not the point. They hadn’t.

“Fire … why are you doing this to me?” she asked.

“Doing what?”

“Making me want to leave my job and come and spend the day with you.”

“How am I doing that?”

“By talking to me. The longer you talk to me, the more I want to get out of here. You care about me, don’t you, Fire?” she half said, half asked. “I know you do. Where are you going to be in a half hour? I have to leave here. I’m feeling very sick.”

They arranged to meet on the Brooklyn Bridge, on a bench on the walkway above the road. Sylvia dragged herself there, burdened by the weight of the sky, which had fallen on this humid day from the weight of its own wetness and draped itself across the city. Exiting a cab at Chambers Street, she picked her way through the flowered triangle of City Hall Park, edging behind a press conference on the steps of the neoclassical box that anchored the green. Weaving through a band of demonstrators, she ducked under a barricade, crossed the street, and entered the walkway in front of the Municipal Building, a towering Beaux Arts masterpiece with an awe-inspiring colonnade. There, she reached for her sunglasses and then made her way up the incline, dodging bikers and joggers, alert to the movements of camera-wielding tourists, herds of them in J. Crew, who stopped without warning, obstructing progress with the fuck-you languor of cattle.

He wasn’t there when she arrived. Knowing he might be hiding, she wandered around the base of the huge stone columns that support the bridge’s arches.

She checked her watch. She was on time. He, of course, was late.

Reminding herself not to sulk, she passed the time by reading poetry—Midsummer by Walcott—passing through screens of imagery to another life, a life of razor grass and bougainvillea and rivers that frolicked instead of oozed like the one that slunk beneath her now into a dishwater sea.

Drawn into transcendent verse, she lost track of time. And when she was through she realized that she’d been waiting for an hour, which didn’t bother her as much as she’d expected, for it gave her time to think about her actions and their possible consequences. She’d lied to her colleagues and slacked off about the receipts. But more important, she was having an affair. Now, as she sat there, higher than most of the city, she felt his spirit filling her, fading into her marrow. And there, on that bridge, halfway between her home and her office, she began to understand why Aretha trembles that way when she sings “A Natural Woman.”