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his knees to his chest. In the past, when he had imagined kissing her, his worst-case scenario—also his most likely scenario—had ended with humiliation. He would plant an exploratory kiss; she would balk, embarrassed; he would be humiliated. He had not anticipated the lunge, the greedy engine driving him through the kiss toward more and more. “What’s wrong with me?” She didn’t say anything. He looked at her. “Really. What’s wrong with me ? You go out with other guys. I know you like me more than them, but you let them kiss you.”
    “Nothing’s wrong with you,” she said. “Usually.” Whatever debt might have been between them had been erased, or reversed, by the word tease . She owed him no explanation for why she didn’t love him the way he wanted her to. “Let’s just forget about this. Let’s go home.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
    “I know,” she said. “Let’s forget about it.” But when he extended his hand to help her up, she waved him off.
    “You’ll get sand in your cast.”
    “You’re the one who wanted to go to the beach,” she said and set off over the dunes.
    They saw each other that summer but not often. Jacob was scrupulouslyrespectful. Joan made a show of joking about all the girls he would get in college. Georgetown had gone coed the previous year. There was malice to the way she showered him with affectionate mockery, but he endured it, thinking about how he would leave in August and get some perspective. That would be a relief. Their friendship was no longer a thing in itself. They were warily circling a different thing, something that might exist or might not.
    Then he left and heard nothing from her, and for a time he thought their relationship, whatever it was, might have run its course. He missed her, but he also felt a self-congratulatory satisfaction in having outgrown her. He learned to play racquetball. He drank beer. He decided on psychology, much to the disappointment of his mother, who had been pushing for medicine. He dated a girl named Sarah and lost his virginity to her. Everything was fine, and then, late one night, drunk, he wrote his first letter to Joan.
    THE DOOR OPENS AND A WOMAN COMES INTO THE BAR ON A BURST OF cold air. She is bundled in a sheepskin jacket with epaulettes of snow and a purple scarf. An ear-flapped lumberjack hat is pulled low on her brow. She stops short. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says, staring at Jacob from between hat and scarf like a knight peering out of a suit of armor.
    “Liesel?” he says. “Is that you under there?”
    In answer, she unwraps her scarf from around her broad, shrewd milkmaid’s face. “Ta da,” she says. Before he can process what is happening, she goes and kisses the mustache guy on the lips. The guy raises his glass at Jacob.
    Liesel pats the guy on his beefy pectoral. “This is my boyfriend, Ray.”
    “Hey,” Jacob says.
    “Ray, this is my ex-boyfriend, Jacob.”
    “Yeah,” Ray says, “I’d guessed.”
    “Really?” Liesel looks between them. “How?”
    “He said he was married to a ballet dancer.”
    “Do you tell everyone?” Liesel asks Jacob with scorn and amusement. “You should get cards printed up and go around tossing them in people’s laps on the El. Anyway, I thought I got custody of this place.”
    “I wanted a beer,” he said. “It’s too cold to walk anywhere else.”
    They have not spoken much for a year, not since he dumped her, which he had only done because, perplexingly, she had not dumped him after he told her about Joan’s pregnancy. She takes off her jacket and turns it inside out over a barstool; snow drips off it onto the floor. The bartender sets a beer in front of her.
    Her wispy blond hair, recently and unwisely cut to chin length, lies limp against her head, but the cold has flushed her cheeks and lips in a way that makes him think of sex. He chides himself for being so predictably horny, like a lab subject responding