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on his BlackBerry and typed:
Thanks for the contribution. It was great to see you the other night.
    It occurred to him that their affair had preceded texting—or at least their own use of it. Maybe she didn’t text.
    A few minutes later the instrument buzzed, dancing on the onyx coffee table.
Great not quite the word I’d use. Had no idea would see you. Husband not real happy about sudden excursion into philanthropy.
    Don’t worry, I’ll cover you on that.
    Too late. Already settled up on the way out.
    Can I see you?
    Why?
    Tell you when I see you.
    He stood at the big window, looking downtown, as if he might be able to spot her out there down near the tip of the island, past the MetLife, the Chrysler and the Empire State Buildings, checking the screen of his BlackBerry as the minutes ticked by. The device finally vibrated again.
Working today in Bronx.
    Time to meet before?
    9 AM Caffe Roma.
    He wondered if he was supposed to know where it was, if she was testing him. He Googled it: a pastry place in Little Italy. They’d stopped there once, he remembered now, coming off the night shift at the soup kitchen. Cannolis and cappuccino. Holding hands under the table, the interior redolent of fresh-baked bread and coffee after a night in the acrid smoke, the airborne residue of the ruined towers, of which they both reeked. Still dark outside, the only other customers a table of revelers who’d closed some nearby bar or nightclub, soaking up the alcohol with sweets.
    If Corrine was trying to be discreet, she’d picked well. Little Italy, what was left of it that hadn’t been swallowed by Chinatown, was an unlikely destination for anyone they might know. A few tables away, a young French-speaking couple pored over a map. The only other customers were four strident Italians, throwing back espressos and talking with their hands—the whole place picturesque, quaint in a manner that to fashionable New Yorkers would seem kitsch: the white marble tables with their cartoonish bent-wire café chairs, the dark green pressed-tin ceiling sagging with innumerable layers of paint, the display case teeming with pale confections. He checked his e-mails, and tested his French by eavesdropping on the couple two tables away, who were deconstructing Scorsese movies.
    Through the window he spotted Corrine, hurrying up the sidewalk in a peacoat and jeans, and for just a minute he could see her as a type, a New York woman rushing somewhere important, harried but not frantic, confident that she would be waited for.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, sitting down across from him. “I was thinking of making you wait, of being deliberately late, until I realized how childish that would be, but then I got caught on the phone with our director about a lost truckload of cabbages.”
    Not a type at all, he realized happily, recognizing what he took to be the singular staccato rhythms of her thought, though he was baffled by the reference to cabbages. “I’m just glad you came at all.”
    “Well, I didn’t want your last impression of me to be flustered and tongue-tied. As I suspect I was the other night.”
    “I thought you were very composed.”
    “
Please.
I was…flummoxed. I had no idea what the event was, or that you were the focus of it. Kind of a shock, really. You could have warned me you were coming to town.”
    “If I had, you might’ve raced off in the opposite direction.”
    “I can’t believe I was totally oblivious to the fact that it was your charity.”
    “Do you know what I was thinking about when I was up on the podium?”
    “Your wife’s dimples?”
    “I was thinking about making love to you on that musty old couch in Nantucket with Gram Parsons singing ‘Love Hurts.’ ”
    “Gram Parsons was correct,” she said. “It does hurt. It would behoove us both to remember that.”
    He started to sing softly: “Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars—”
    “Luke, for God’s sake.” She was blushing, embarrassed by