She looks levelly at him. Then she smiles in an unfriendly way and says in mock surprise, “Oh, you’re married!”

He waits a moment before he answers her. “As it turns out, I am. Or really, as it turns out, I always was.” He takes a deep breath. “I always felt . . . bad, about this. About us. Even when I felt most good.”

She is silent. Then she says, “When was that?” her voice empty again.

“When I felt most good?”

“Yes.”

“When we made love, of course. When all of that fell away for a few moments.”

He’s become aware of her hands in motion on her lap, her fingers scratching at her thumbs. “And then it came back?” she says. “All of that?”

“Yes.”

After a moment, she speaks again. Her voice is almost hoarse. “And what, exactly, was all of that?”

He takes a deep breath. “It was Annie. The way I feel about Annie. The way I always feel about Annie.”

“Except for those few moments when that fell away.”

“Yes.”

Her hands still. “Well, you must have wanted it to fall away.”

“I suppose I must have in some way, or I wouldn’t have come. But that’s not what I’m aware of feeling.”

There have been pauses between everything they’ve been saying to each other. Now, after another pause—as though it’s taking her a long time to form the correct question—she says, “What are you aware of feeling?”

He can’t tell if she’s mocking him, but he doesn’t want to think about that now. “Mostly that I love Annie. That I want to guard my love for her.”

A bitter little smile reshapes her lips.

“That I want to protect her. That I don’t want to hurt her.”

“How nice that must be for her. To be protected.”

Now it’s his turn to pause. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I can’t protect you, Rosemary. That you’re, more or less, out here on your own. I’m sorry.”

Her face goes rubbery, unpretty. Tears rise in her eyes. He can hear her breathing slowly, trying to stay in control of herself.

“It’s no consolation, I know,” he says. Yet he wants to console her. He wants to protect her too. “I know a little, I think, of how it feels to be newly alone. To want someone. Anyone, really. To be . . . unready to see how unlikely it is for some particular person to work out.”

“A person such as you.” An accusation, as she says it.

“Such as me.” He bows his head slightly: okay.

Her breathing slows, her face sags. It seems she won’t cry, after all.

“I’d be a bad bet even if there was no Annie, Rosemary. I would have been. I’m just not good at saying no. I want—I always want to say yes. And I want to want to say yes. To everything. I’m a greedy person. More or less bottomlessly hungry.” He thinks of babies again. “What I’ve tried to be, with Annie, is less hungry. In general, less hungry. More hungry just for her.”

“No luck there, it would seem.”

“Well. You interrupted a long string of luck.”

She looks away, out the big curved window in the bay behind the couch. The settee. “Just my luck, I guess.”

He reaches out. He puts his hand on her knee, the part of her closest to him. “It is your luck. Your luck that I’m getting out of your life. As a lover.”

She looks back at him, sharply. “Oh, you’ll be my friend,” she says, with heavy sarcasm.

“I am your friend. I wasn’t your friend when we started this. But I am. I am being your friend now.”

“Sure. A friend I won’t see again. Or talk to alone again. Or touch again.”

Without planning to, he lifts his hand from her knee.

She looks down and laughs, a quick bitter noise. “Yes, indeed,” she says.

After a moment he says, “Do you remember what I was saying to you when all this started? At dinner that night?”

“No.”

“I said how many people were going to be lined up to be your lover. How many men. And I meant that. It’s just that I shouldn’t have been the first in line. I should have been smart enough to treat it as a kind of joke when you suggested it—that I get in line. But it’s true. There will be others. Better others. In the sense that I’ve been a crappy other. Chock-full of my own torment and guilt. And useless to you.”

She looks out the window again. It’s open a few inches. The air stirs outside, the leaves rustle. She looks back at him, her face unguarded. “But what if I love you?” she says softly.

“You don’t.” He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t ask it that way if you did.”

Her voice instantly hardens. “Oh, you know better. You know better than I do what I feel.”

“And if I say yes, that I do?” They sit, each looking at the other, as quickly as that, enemies.

She smiles. “Do you know what you sound like, Graham?”

“No.”

“You sound exactly like a parent, talking to an adolescent.”

Suddenly he’s remembering talking to Sarah in her adolescence, telling her it would end—her loneliness, her pain. Her weight problem.

How little he’s done for anyone he loves, really.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to. It’s the last thing I mean to sound like. Or to be.”

She’s looking down now. “I think you should go,” she says tonelessly.

“Fair enough.” He stands.

Rosemary doesn’t move. She’s still not looking at him.

He waits for a moment. Should he touch her? Kiss her goodbye? He’d imagined something like that, he realizes. Yes. A fond goodbye. Forgiveness.

Stupid, stupid.

All he can see of her from this angle, standing above her—her face turned down—is the top of her head, the pinned-up damp hair drooping against the curve of her cheek.

He crosses to the archway at the foyer and stops. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Sure,” she says, softly.

Without looking back again, he goes to the door, opens it onto the evening air, and steps outside.

For the first few blocks, he carries his remorse with him. And then it begins to lift—though there’s shame in that, isn’t there? In that lifting?

Yes. And remorse, for that quick reversal.

But he can also feel a kind of joy rising in him, a release. His pace over the bumpy bricks quickens. On the sidewalk outside the convenience store a few blocks from home, he sees a white plastic five-gallon bucket with a few only-slightly-tired bouquets left in it. Daisies and some other purplish flower. Annie, he thinks. An offering for Annie. He pulls a bunch out of the water, the stems dripping, and takes it inside to pay for it.

Carrying his bouquet as he walks, he begins to feel somehow aimed at her. An arrow making its way directly to her. He actually tries running for a few steps, but that’s not going to work. He slows down, panting. Amused at himself, at his absurd idea of himself—the heavy bear, as arrow—he laughs out loud. He’ll make a silly story of this for Annie. Another offering. He takes his jacket off and slings it over his shoulder, dangling it from one finger.

At home, Graham shuts the front door behind him and turns to the shadowed house to call Annie’s name. But he can tell, even before he does, that she isn’t home. That there is no one home. He was so ready to be received back into his own life that his disappointment feels like a kind of grief. He’s suddenly tired. He goes slowly through the living room to the big kitchen to find a vase for Annie’s flowers.

But then he hears her, outside, her voice steady and gentle. The back door and the windows are open, and she’s sitting with Karen in the old chairs on the patio. Graham stops, motionless, the flowers in his hand. He stands within the kitchen’s shadows, looking out at her, feeling a wash of relief, feeling how close he has come today to the nothingness of a moment ago, when there was no one here to welcome him.

Karen says something, her voice querulous, and Annie answers her.

He watches her face, the play of amusement and concern as Karen talks now at some length about something. Her eyebrows register her response. Graham loves her eyebrows, her dark eyebrows, and the way they give her away, even when her face is most still.

He notices then that there’s another—a much better—bouquet set on the kitchen table in the old white pitcher. It’s enormous and droopy and lush, giving off an intense lilac odor.

Ah! These are the flowers that he should have bought for Annie, the ones he would have bought if he could, the ones that would have spoken to her of everything—his sorrow about himself. His love for her.

He steps forward and bends over them to breathe in the rich, erotic perfume. Something funny happens for a moment in his chest, and then it seems to him that the world shifts and is full of an almost painful joy. Just as he lifts his head to look at Annie again, she looks up too, she sees him there in the dark, and her face opens to him in a kind of answer.

7