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wrote her a letter explaining that I fully understood why she’d snubbed me and left me sitting alone in the coffee shop. I deserved to be treated severely. As a side note, I added that on that fateful Sunday afternoon I finally realized how awful I must have been for such a kind woman to treat me so cruelly. I licked and mailed the missive. I had nothing to lose. Undoubtedly, finding the letter in her mailbox, she would first feel a bit shocked, and then reading it, she would become confused—until, of course, her eyes lighted upon the word “Sunday,” which wasn’t the day we had arranged to meet on. If she were as trusting as I hoped, she would assume that I had made an error or, perhaps, that she’d made the error. I could still be saved.
    My first front mobilized, I had only to wait for the response, and if I heard nothing for a week, I’d make another advance. I didn’t know what this would be, but I knew that if it also failed, I’d try again. With persistence, I planned to worm my way into the heart of that little peach. Although all my past experience told me that women are unfathomable, distant, and closed, I recognized that the history of man was a history of seduction. Of course, I wasn’t made like a mighty son of Priam, who could take a woman by force and lock her up in his bed chamber. Nor like a young, handy, rutting scholar, could I have been bold enough to saunter up beside her, grab hold of her by the quim, and swear my death was imminent without her loving. Yet, Homer and Chaucer aside, perhaps I was able to act like a cousin to the sweet maiden, drive her around and around until her fatigue and my constancy wore her down, and then, at that moment, work my puny, insidious magic charm. Unfortunately, Victorian modesty prevented Thomas Hardy from fleshing out the details of such a young girl’s seduction, and so my manual was lacking. Even though I didn’t know how the “cousin” actually un-frocked and de-bloomered the maiden, I knew that he pestered and wooed her until she finally gave in. If Hardy proved anything about the female race, it was that a woman is simply seething passion all bundled up and straining against the seams of her corset, waiting for the slightest tug upon the slightest thread, so she may burst forth and unravel upon her man. With hope, Morris the sister, my own pretty “Tess,” may have unraveled upon me.
    On the other front, undoing Claudia Jones’s knot, pulling her string, required the same sort of machination, though on a more stupefied level. I could have been a slobbering idiot who pursued her from pasture to pasture, then down across a foreign field, the both of us lumbering on, until I had her trapped in some ravine. There, in the thick purple hours of twilight, we would meld together, not just our flesh or the noise of our bellows and moans, but also the mild confusion, the indifference, and the languid passion that belongs to all the over-ripe, simple beasts.
    II
    The second week of autumn brought with it a spell of dismal weather that had apparently chased Claudia indoors. A gray drizzle seemed to be in a constant state of fading, of tapering into a mist, but after a few days of these vague diminutions, the gloomy weather didn’t seem as if it would ever break. I set myself before the window and watched the alley. As puddles formed, the oil and grime rose off the pavement to the surface of the water in twisted hues of purple and yellow and green. A few stray clothespins hung from the line, and the milkcrate was turned over on its side against the wall. I had a book, written by one of my colleagues, opened facedown upon my thigh. She was a short, intense, over-wound woman, whose voice—when I was forced to hear it in an elevator, hallway, or meeting—always metamorphosed in my mind into the violent yappings of a small dog. I was reading her book because of an unwritten rule among the faculty: We