Modem Times and at the New Yorker theater where I first met you, I could also be mistaken. My memory’s never been one of the keenest. Though I do feel sure it was at an art movie house where we first met — the Thalia perhaps. And that you struck up a conversation about the movie, to get to meet me I realized and didn’t mind, and we had coffee after or we didn’t. Maybe I’m getting all the art movie houses mixed up with the art coffeehouses — and then you phoned me a few times. Unfortunately, or quite truthfully, I couldn’t go out with you or wasn’t interested. It could have been I was seeing someone at the time. Though I’m almost certain I did go with you once to the Metropolitan Museum. Probably just an innocent Sunday afternoon date. And then for the next few years I kept running into you at various palaces of culture in the city. Carnegie Hall, I believe.” “No. Carnegie Hall is the place you said, when I bumped into you at the museum Met, ‘Well, I suppose we’ll next meet each other there.’ Meaning, at another palace of culture.” “Then the Modern.” “Never the Modern. I would have remembered. Of all places, that’s the one I most wanted to go to with you. And to also have a snack in the garden restaurant there, or if it was too cold, the one inside. Never the Modern. Never Carnegie Hall.” “But places like that. As I said, my memory was never that sharp, but I never thought it was this bad. Anyway, it’s been nice talking with you, Howard. Again, my regards to your fiancée. See? I remember I said that.” “Listen, she’ll be here any second. She’s usually late, but not this much, and I’m sure she’d like meeting you.” “I’m already very late.” “You also might be interested in her. She was an actress, pretty successful at it from the time she was ten, but gave it up. She even did TV soap operas and a couple of drama shows and made Broadway three years ago, in a good play, as far as the critics were concerned, and she’s friends with a couple of women who went to Sarah Lawrence and you went there, didn’t you?” “I graduated last year, but I don’t have the greatest memories of the place or the people in my class, so I’d rather not talk about it. Well, Howard, I’ll see you again I’m sure,” and heads uptown. Years later he’s living with a woman who once took a class at the Sarah Lawrence continuing ed school and for some reason was being sent the alumni magazine. He always reads the alumni news in it for the year Gwen graduated. She’s never listed. Years after that he’s seeing a woman and they’re at the apartment of a friend of hers and he asks where the bathroom is. The friend says “I think the one off the living room’s filled; there’s another in my bedroom.” He goes to it. On the night table is the latest Sarah Lawrence alumni magazine. He takes it to the bathroom, turns to the alumni news for Gwen’s year and looks at it while pissing. Nothing about her. Puts the magazine back on the night table and sees a stack of alumni magazines on the radiator. He goes through about ten of them before finding something about Gwen from two years ago. She’s produced documentaries on nature, done public television writing, “ghostwritten a poetical biography of a dying city,” finished a “mastodonic novel which I decided would never get published and if published, never be received well, so I immediately trunked,” took up residence in five cities in three countries in the last eight years “doing work research on I won’t say what or with whom and I hope the finished results won’t show,” been married and divorced twice, no children and “because of all the undertakings I feel I still have to do and get done, I doubt I’ll have any — my loss, not theirs,” is now living and painting in a “saintly little town in the mountains near Santa Fe, something I’ll most likely be doing for the rest of my life, for I feel I’ve finally found my art form.” “She gives,” the class correspondence secretary says, “no address, and no one should even attempt to reach her through New Mexico phone information, since for the next two years she’s in self-imposed solitary without so much as a flush toilet, running faucet, mailbox or phone, refining her work for a solo showing at what I’m sure will be a prominent NYC gallery. Gwen also writes she’s periodically gloomy because of her solitude but has never been more creative in her life — this from the one who was Ms. Creativity in our class for four straight years, and we had some winners. For companionship she says she has several sheep, horses, innumerable cats and a hundred-ten-pound Great Pyrenees named Fluffy to protect her from real mountain lions, bobcats and bears. Gwen only answered my inquiry — which came via a family member of hers, so don’t think I have her address — to spare me the task of trying to track her down for the next ten years. Her parting words — and I apologize if she didn’t mean for me to print any of them, even if I’m sure she doesn’t get the alumni mag and wouldn’t read anything about herself if she did — were ‘Right now I’m solely and totally involved with my animals, artwork, and putting the finishing touches on my house’ (which she built all by herself, I forgot to say, and without the help of electric screwdrivers and saws) ‘but no people, and if all that sounds phony if not pathalogical, so be it.’ It doesn’t, Gwen. It sounds heavenly. From all of us: Follow your star.” He reads art reviews and announcements of art exhibits in the New York Times for the next few years, but she’s never mentioned, nor have any artists he knows heard of her work. During this time a friend who’s a writer gives him a literary magazine with two of his stories in it. One’s about a woman named Gwen Wakesman. In it the fictional character has a blind date with her when he’s eighteen, French-kisses her on the first date, feels her breasts through her bra on the second, gets his hand in her underpants on the third, makes love with her in her apartment — her parents are in the Caribbean and her sister and the housekeeper went to the circus — on the next date. On the fifth date he teaches her how to go down on him without hurting him — she says it’s her first time — and how to position her body so he can stick it into her behind — and they see each other for a year, having sex almost every time they meet, before he dumps her for her best friend. She becomes very upset over this, gets a room in a cheap hotel and calls him and says she’s going to slit her wrists in the grubby bathtub, and she brought the razor blade to do it with, unless he spends the night with her there. He comes, undresses her, carries her to bed kissing her, then drops her on the floor and beats her up. “Now do you believe we’re finished?” “Finished,” she says. “And you’re not going to do anything stupid again? Because if you are I’m going to really mess up your face” “Nothing. I was wrong to threaten you.” “Good. Now get dressed, clean yourself up and I’ll take you home.” Two days later she commits suicide. He goes to the funeral, gets on his knees in front of the open coffin and screams he’s sorry for his heartlessness and prays for her to be alive again. He has a vision there that she steps out of the coffin and pats his head and says “Don’t fret, my darling; it was more my fault than yours. I depended too much on our love affair going well. I was young and impulsive and ignorant and I forgive you with all my heart.” That night he sleeps with her best friend, who was also at the funeral — they had dinner and saw a movie after — and he says “Don’t ask me why but the sex just now was the best in my life. I thought I saw God. Maybe I did if he looks a lot like what the ancient painters depict him as in so much of their art.” “I almost reached that state also,” she says, “or maybe I did. I know there was a lot of clearing and light.” “No, you’re supposed to know a mystical experience when it happens to you, there is no probably or maybe. But it was good, right? You explain it, because I can’t. And now I’m not only still feeling the buzz from my come but I also feel no remorse over Gwendolyn anymore whatsoever. I truly believe she forgave me today,” and she says she still feels remorse just a little but she thinks she’ll get over it in time, and they go at each other again. Howard calls his friend and says “You knew Gwen Wakesman?” and he says “Yeah, you too? I went out with her when I was around twenty. I changed my age a little for the story.” “You know she’s not dead, of course. She’s living near Santa Fe, or was, up till about three years go.” “She’s still there but on a reservation now, learning how to make indianlike jewelry, silver and rugs. I’m in touch with someone who met her.” “So how much of the rest of the story’s true?” “You ask that of an author? You should be ashamed of yourself. Besides, you haven’t said what you thought of it.” “Some of it though, right?” and his friend says “What do you think? I went out with her for months and my libido hasn’t changed since I was a sex-starved five.” “But you’re such a putz. What the fuck did she ever see in you and why in hell didn’t you at least change her name? You can’t use someone’s real name like that. It’s demoralizing; it’s degrading. You’re a total schmuck as a writer and the biggest shit as a person — no, the reverse. No, both, and I never want to see your scummy face again,” and his friend hangs up. Couple of years later he’s at a dinner party and the woman he sits beside at the table talks about herself, grew up in Lake Forest, boarding school in New Hampshire, summers in coastal Canada or Spain, graduated Sarah Lawrence—“Oh, what year?” “Sixty-two.” “A year after Gwen Wakesman. Did you know her there?” “No I didn’t. There were always two groups, academic-aesthetic and the finishing school types. She must have been in the other.” “Which one were you in?” and she says “Are you belittling me? The academic-aesthetic.” “That would have been the one she was in too.” “If she was I would’ve known her, even if she was a year before me. We all interweaved.” “She’s been in the alumni magazine. I’ve read it. As an artist living outside Santa Fe.” “I don’t read that silly magazine. It’s only published to raise money from the finishing school types in exchange for them telling us the names of their newest horse, boat or island and for the few a-a egotists in every class to talk endlessly about themselves and to promote their book tours and art exhibits and plays they’re in.” “I’m sure she would have been in the artistic group at school.” He next sees her name in the obituary notice for her father. Surviving are his wife Gladys, daughter Gwendolyn Leigh-Balicoff, and two grandchildren, Olympia and Augustine. So she might have got married again and the kids could be hers or her sister’s. She might even have adopted a couple of Indian children. But no mention of her sister. She die? Then it would have said “deceased.” They disown her? Weeks later he looks up her father’s name in the phone book; they’ve moved to Park Avenue, if it’s the same Philip. Calls to find out where she’s living. An older woman answers. If Gwen had he thinks he would have immediately hung up. “Hello, I’m trying to reach Gwendolyn Wakesman, now Leigh-hyphen-Balicoff. I have the right number?” “She’s living in Munich,” the woman says, “and I’m not allowed to furnish her address or phone number.” “Munich. Well, nice city. And she has a phone now? Good. Could you possibly be the woman who worked for them then, Rose or Ruth?” “Ruth, yes.” “You probably don’t remember me, Ruth. My name’s Harold Zeif. I used to date Gwen — just two dates, really — years ago, when we were in our teens.” “I don’t remember you, sir.” “How could you, and there wouldn’t be any need to. And God, you’re still working there, unless you’re only visiting for the day.” “I’m still employed by the Wakesmans, though my chores have been reduced and I no longer live in.” “Also, I was probably one of many young men Gwen knew. She was so pretty and intelligent and mature and charming, she must have had many suitors.” “That she was and did, sir. I remember that.” “How’s Mrs. Wakesman taking the death of her husband? I mean, I didn’t know her well either. I came in, her parents said hello, they were very nice — but it was a matter of seconds, maybe a minute I saw them and just one time. In the living room of the old Riverside Drive apartment, with all the paintings.” “Same paintings are here now. Different furniture though.” “I remember the furniture. Big elegant flowery couch, right?” “Vertical stripes.” “I remember flowers. I’m of course wrong. But the chairs — soft easy ones — were flowered then.” “Plain. A deep rich green one and a deep rich red one, if you’re talking about the armed padded chairs. Both are gone now. They had a decorator in and out everything went. I got the red chair, cigarette burn-holes and all.” “Then I’m thinking of someone else’s apartment. But how’s Mrs. Wakesman doing?” “Not well, as should be expected. They were tightly knit, at work and as parents.” “I remember they were. From Gwen talking, and just for the minute I saw them they seemed like very fine people. Polite, generous, cosmopolitan. And Toby? It is Toby, right — Gwen’s sister?” “Toby then but she changed it back to the original Dorothea when she turned twenty. She died many years ago.” “Ohh, that’s what I was afraid of. When the obiturary didn’t list her name as surviving. But no ‘deceased,’ it said, which puzzled me.” “That was an error of the newspaper. It was asked to say she died and didn’t survive.” “I should have thought of that. I worked on newspapers and so know how they leave things out. But what a nice cute kid she was. Did she get sick?” “It’s a story I don’t want to go into, sir.” “She didn’t kill herself, I hope.” “I shouldn’t be saying anything, sir, and it doesn’t seem you were close to the family.” “Not with her wrists.” “No, something much worse. Complete mutilation. They never got over it ever, neither Gwendolyn either. After all, there was only the two of them for the parents, and as sisters they were always little buddies.” “I’m sure. I didn’t know Dorothea well, but the times I did see her — I think she was there both times I went out with Gwen and then I used to see her walking on Broadway sometimes — she was a wonderful girl. Peppy, lively. Well, they’re the same thing, but that’s what she was. Double lively, chipper, energetic, I think — a real spark with a beautiful face and smile.” “That’s so. All of that. I loved her. Of the two, and I loved them both, she was my special little doll,” and she starts crying. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to bring it up.” “That’s all right. I like to cry for her.” “I’m really sorry. Gwen, I suppose, was in for her father’s funeral?” “I’d like to stop now, sir; I’ve things to do. May I ask why you called, so I can jot it down here? Is it to pay your condolences?” “In a way, yes. But especially to Gwen. And now for both her sister and father.” “I’ll try to convey it to her. Your name was how spelled?” “Harold. And then Z-e-i-f. It’s been so long, she might not remember who I was.” “I’ll let her know, if she happens to call and I get on or if her mother writes to her.” “Just one more thing, Ruth. Is Gwen now married?” “No.” “So she married only two times?” “Three, b