“You must get rid of them,” she said. “I love you too much to share you.”

“And you,” he asked, “are you involved?”

“The very question,” she replied, “insults me.”

They wrote once a week for the next two years—soppy letters that made them laugh—and saw each other twice, each time for three months during her summer break. He wanted to see her more, but couldn’t. He was routinely denied U.S. entry because he was labeled a communist.

Then twenty-six months, three weeks, and two days after they met, he got a three-day visa through luck and bribery, and went to New York to surprise her. He found out she was married—with a mortgage, a dog, and three children.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, as they cried in her office. “Just give me time … I’m just waiting on the right time to leave.”

“When will that be?”

“Soon,” she said. “Soon as things are right … it’s all in the timing.”

book one

chapter one

Chinatown collides with SoHo and Tribeca at Canal and West Broadway, chucking chi-chi bistros against hardware stores, stereo shops, and purveyors of fake Chanel. As the clock closed in on midnight, Fire stepped out of the subway here and strayed through the gates of love. Dressed in a red T-shirt and slack-fitting jeans, he forded Canal and strode up West Broadway in his tough, scuffed boots past cafés and bars whose faces were pressed together like a Polaroid of friends from prep school. His destination was the Marie Rose Galleries, where his friend Ian Gore was having his first show in five years. By the note in his pocket, the opening had been over for two hours. But this didn’t bother him. After twenty-five years, Ian was used to his lateness, and he understood Ian’s mood swings.

I wonder how he looks, he thought, as a doorway caught his eye. For all its pretensions, he liked SoHo. The brickwork reminded him of London and the ironwork reminded him of older parts of Kingston. He liked the scale of it. It was low. One could see the sky without trying.

As he walked along Spring Street, contemplating Ian’s life, he saw a woman walking toward him in a navy blazer with buttons shaped like sunflowers.

She was tallish and slender, with short, curly hair. And like a dancer, she walked with her toes pointed outward and her neck held loose.

Trailing behind her in the coltish breeze was a light silk scarf whose flutter he thought was romantic. As she passed, he turned around and sent her a smile, an unsigned thank-you card for having a nice vibe.

He hadn’t been to New York in a couple of years. And at Greene it struck him that the gallery had moved. Ian had forgotten to remind him.

From a phone up the block by a parking lot, across from a store named Jekyll & Hyde, he called Information for the new address. But what if they were gone? He glanced at his watch and decided to call, and as he angled to dig for pocket change, he saw the woman in the navy blazer waiting for the phone.