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for Giselle.”
    “Still, I guess you can understand why he’s concerned.”
    “Why?” she said.
    “Uh, just that she’s, you know, his daughter, and he doesn’t know who I am or how long I’ll be here. You know.”
    “Do both of you think I haven’t considered this?”
    “Of course you have.”
    “I can take care of us.”
    “I can’t let you do that, we’ve talked about this.”
    “I didn’t mean you.” She was looking at me just like her husband had.
    In the Luxembourg Gardens the child and I ate
croque monsieur
and discussed the strategy of the pitchout. Her mother was off negotiating. “Basically it boils down to intuition and good communication between the catcher, the pitcher, and the first and second basemen,” I said.
    “But most of the time you’re going to end up giving away a free ball,” she replied, peering across the metal table at me, squinting with the effort of trying to grasp the concept.
    “Which is another reason why staying ahead in the count is so important, because of the options it gives you. And after it has worked once, for the rest of the game, the other team’s baserunners take an extra look before heading for second.”
    “So it’s the fact that you might use the play that matters more than using it.” Swinging her skinny legsunder her chair, her pleated plaid skirt tucked carefully under her, not a stray crease anywhere.
    “You’ve just summarized baseball strategy.”
    “Will you take me to a Yankees game the next time we’re back in the States?”
    “Of course.”
    “When will that be, do you think?” Eyes like a hunting cat’s. Not even the suggestion of a blink.
    Waiting for her after her soccer game: I had cheered my lungs out, embarrassing her mightily but no more than I had irritated the
grande dame
beside me, who had cast her mean little eyes back and forth between me and the game with a
froideur
that could freeze your heart, but it was my throat that was weak and hoarse now and the child insisted on taking me for a
limonade
on our way home.
    Setting down the glasses on our little round table she asked me if I had made a decision about what I was going to do in the fall. “Not yet,” I said.
    “Papa asks me that every time he talks to me.” We both nodded at that.
    “It’s hard, figuring out what you can and can’t do without sometimes.”
    She sipped her
limonade
, looking over her glass at me, sitting perfectly straight like no North American child not in a neck brace, and she set down the glass on the metal table and folded her hands in her lap. There was a long pause.
    “Your mother will be wondering where we are.”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “We should go.”
    “Yes,” she said.
    I walked up the stairs to Leonard’s apartment building. I was nauseous. It was after nine and she hadn’t called. I had picked up the telephone four times before I decided to go over myself. Giselle had watched me leave the apartment from around the substantial waist of her Yugoslavian neighbour/landlady. Giselle didn’t say anything, she just nodded at me when I said that I wouldn’t be very long.
    No answer at the heavy wooden door for a long time. And then Leonard answers, smiling and shrugging his bare shoulders. Come on in, a trace of apology at the indelicacy of the circumstances. I speak to her from the hall, standing there in my jacket. Her voice rolls around the corner, slow and guarded. He reappears in a shirt.
    “So Maria will look after her for an hour or so but I said I wouldn’t be any longer than that. You might want to hurry,” I call to her around the corner.
    “I was going to talk to you about this. It seemed clear to me what you wanted most,” she said.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “No hard feelings,” Leonard says from the kitchen.
    When I was packing up my apartment, a mutual friend came by with a parcel. It contained two shirts I had left at her apartment. No letter. The shirts smelled like Giselle and her mother and the smell of cooking