“My mother,” he said. “I’d say she, mostly, and then there were other people that showed me little things. A lot of it too is just using your mind and trying new things all the time. Then you start creating like a music composer.”

“Right,” she said. “You can project how certain things will work together and adjust before you commit.”

“Yeah … exactly.”

“So,” she asked, smiling, “do you cook all the time or just when you want to impress people you don’t really need to impress because they’ve already fallen into you?”

“Well, for people like that,” he said, eyes radiating humor, “I extend myself beyond food.”

“Yeah? To where?”

“To drink.”

He took a lime from his pocket. “Now, in the hands of an ordinary man this would be a simple green ball,” he said with a straight face. “But watch magic happen.”

He wiped his knife on a napkin and sliced the lime. He pointed to her glass. “Now I want you to take a sip.”

She did.

He squeezed some juice in her glass and stirred it with his finger. “Now taste it.”

She giggled as she lifted the glass to her lips.

“Taste different, don’t it?”

“Yeah,” she said, playing along. “Wow, that magic ball was really impressive.”

“But it wasn’t the lime,” he said, reaching out and stroking her face. “It was the magic finger.”

Out on the street now, she in a red summer dress and he in a khaki shirt and pants, they walked along dreamily, holding hands and hugging like they were no longer humans with choice and free will but puppets—marionettes moved by wires to the keyboard of a grand puppeteer.

On the cobblestoned Promenade above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway they sat on a bench and looked out over New York harbor at the concrete forest of Wall Street. The sun was pinned to the creaseless sky—a medal on a soldier’s chest—and the East River was as alive with boats as it used to be with fish, big boats that seemed tiny as they sailed beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, whose cables from this distance were a giant spider’s web. In the foreground, right below them, old warehouses were stretched out on the water’s edge, basking, like caimans on a jungle embankment.

“Have you read Brazil?” she asked, taking his hand.

He had.

“And did you like it?”

He understood this for what it was: her way of saying that he shouldn’t think low of her for being here, because she’d been pushed to this … for the man—he wouldn’t use his name anymore—didn’t make her feel like being natural was enough.

“I like Updike’s work a lot,” he said, being careful not to claim him as an influence. That would’ve modulated the discussion. Changed its key. Made it about him. Which he didn’t want. Not that he was ashamed of being a writer. He just didn’t want to be defined by it. For he was many things, with many dimensions—all of which he wanted her to eventually see and know.