I took Jennifer by the hand and turned to go, but she was frozen to the spot. Then, before I could do anything, she let go of my hand and started running. When I caught up to her, she was standing next to the homeless woman who had almost run us over. Jennifer dug in her purse and handed the woman a fist-ful of money. There was no sign of recognition in the woman’s eyes; her expression remained dull, blank, without comprehen-sion. Jennifer reached down and put the money inside the overcoat pocket and stood aside and watched her go.
“You have a good heart,” I said as we walked to the car.
She looked up at me. “No. Just bad memories.”
The engine was running by the time I got around to the passenger side, and the Porsche was moving away from the curb before I had the door shut.
“What do you think they talk about?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the road. “They move along the streets like they’re in a trance.
Have you ever watched them?” she asked, darting a glance at me.
“They seem to stick together, don’t they? You’d see them sitting on the sidewalks, or in an alleyway, or in a park, all huddled together. It’s like a community of their own-maybe a country of their own. What do you suppose they tell each other?”
Both hands were on the wheel, her head was up, her eyes vibrant, excited, with almost too much life in them, as if what had made them that way was itself not quite normal.
“Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a whole civilization all around us, right in front of our eyes, and we didn’t even know it-like a kind of parallel universe that is there and yet isn’t there?”
She cranked down the window and lifted her face to the rush of cool night air. It seemed to sweep away all the feverish excitement, all the anxious care. A dreamlike smile floated across the long curve of her sad gentle mouth.
“Want some music?” she asked as she turned on the radio. As soon as she heard it, the smile on her face started to dance and her eyes began to come alive again. Then she was laughing, the way she had laughed when she was still a girl and did not yet know what it was like to be unhappy. She was laughing, and I knew why.
“You just happened to turn on the radio to Johnny Mathis singing ‘Chances Are’?”
She reached down between the seats. “I cheated a little,” she admitted as she pulled out a plastic CD holder. The laughter faded into the night and the sparkle in her eyes became a warm, luminous glow.
“It’s Saturday night,” I said, as she turned onto the street that ran along the river at the edge of the city. “What would you like to do?”
“Nothing,” she said, a wistful look in her eyes. “Be with you.
What would you like to do?”
“Marry you.”
She did not look around to see me and there was no change in her expression, nothing, except a slight quiver at the corner of her mouth.
“I love you, Joey. I always have. I always will.”
That was all she said. She did not say yes, and she did not say no, and when she reached for my hand it did not seem to matter.
She lived in a condominium on the edge of the river less than half a mile from town. As soon as we shut the door behind us, she was in my arms. She kissed me on the mouth and then, keeping hold of my hand, led me into the living room. She turned on some music and kicked off her shoes. We went onto the balcony and watched the lights of the city reflected in the black water of the river and listened to the thousand sounds drumming in the glass and steel darkness. Closing the sliding glass door, we went back into the living room and with both her arms around my neck we began to dance. We moved slowly to the rhythm of the music and then more slowly still.
“It’s like the first time,” she said in a muffled voice as she lifted her face to mine.
I slept late into the morning and for a few minutes after I woke up thought I was still asleep. At first I did not know where I was, and then, when I remembered, wondered if I had been left there alone. I found my clothes draped neatly over the arm of an up-holstered chair in the corner of the bedroom and put on my pants.
Then I slipped on my white dress shirt, fastened one button and rolled up the sleeves. In the bathroom, I washed my face and tried to do something with my hair. With my shirttails hanging down behind me, I walked barefoot out to the living room and through gauze curtains saw Jennifer sitting on the balcony.
Leaning against the sliding glass door, I squinted into the bright yellow sunlight. “What are you reading?” I asked.
She put the paperback novel down next to her coffee cup on the black metal table, got up from the deck chair, and kissed me on the side of my face. “I’ll get you some coffee,” she said, laughing at the way I looked.
I stood there, in my rumpled shirt and wrinkled pants, bleary-eyed and unshaven, watching her as she walked away, clean and fresh, in a white silk T-shirt and a pair of cuffed shorts that flared out above her thin knees. When she disappeared into the kitchen, I went out onto the balcony and sat down on the other green-cushioned wooden chair. I picked up the book she had been reading and looked at the cover. A woman with a low-cut dress was laid out in a half faint, held around her slim waist by a muscle-bound bodybuilder with hair longer than hers.
“I’ll bet you can’t find anything like that in that library of yours at home,” she said as she handed me a cup of coffee.
“Is it any good?”
She laughed. “That? Of course not. But I’m afraid I don’t read much of anything that is. I just do it to escape.” She sat down on the edge of her chair, her knees close together. She could not stop laughing. “I’m sorry. But you look like someone who got caught sneaking out of someone’s hotel room.”
She stood up, took the cup away from me, and held out her hand. “Come on,” she commanded. “Get the rest of your things.
I’m going to take you home so you can change clothes and we can go somewhere.”
“Where?” I asked, stumbling along behind her.
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. It’s a gorgeous day. We’ll just go.”
She drove me home and waited in the library while I changed.
When I came back, she was sitting in a chair with her glasses on, peering intently at the open page of a leather-bound book.
“So if we were married,” she said, looking up, “we would sit in here every night, and while I read some of my trashy novels you’d be reading…” She thumbed back to the title page. “The History of Italy by Francesco Guicciardini.”
“I have to read that sort of thing,” I explained as I took her by the hand. “I spent too much time in school chasing girls.”
“You caught a few, too, from what I heard.”
“Lies, all lies.”
We climbed into her car, and she switched on the ignition.
“Yes,” she said just as she pushed on the accelerator and we shot down the driveway and out the open gate at the bottom.
“Yes?” I asked, my hand braced against the dashboard.
“I’ll marry you.”
“When?”
“In a year-if you still want to.”
From the moment weeks before, when she showed up on my doorstep and after an interval of a lifetime had gone on another drive to the coast, what I wanted or did not want had disappeared as questions I could no longer ask. I had never lived with anyone for longer than a few months at a time, and had been hurt so badly the last time it had never entered my mind that I would ever do it again. And then Jennifer showed up on my doorstep, and before we had reached the coast I had known that nothing any longer was a matter of choice. We were going there again. The top was down and the wind raced past us as she drove ahead of the sun, speeding toward the western sea. I folded my arms in front of me, and sank back against the leather seat and closed my eyes, and I knew better than I had ever known anything before that I belonged to her and she belonged to me. We were nothing more than different parts of the same person. We might as well have been married at birth.