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relationships until Connie. He had once described his social life in college as a succession of calls to women the day after they had met someone special.
    Connie was five years younger than he, but possessed a worldliness and sophistication that he felt were missing from his life. She had an MBA degree from Northwestern, a management-track position at one of the big downtown companies, a condo in the Back Bay, a silver BMW, friends in the symphony, and an interest in impressionist painters (“Pissarro has more depth, more energy in one brush stroke, than Renoir has in a dozen canvases, don’t you think?”) and foreign films (“Zachary, if you would stop insisting on plot all the time, and concentrate more on the universality of the characters and the technical brilliance of the director, this film would mean more to you”).
    Friends of his spoke to him from time to time of what they perceived might be a mismatch, but he countered by enumerating the new awareness Connie had brought into his life. Whether he truly loved the woman or not, he was never sure, but there was no questioning that he was, for most of theirtime together, absolutely infatuated with her beauty, her confidence, and her style.
    Her decision to break off their engagement had hurt him, but not as deeply as he first thought. And over the months that followed, he had spent what free time he had flying the radio-controlled airplane he had built in high school, exercising himself back into rock-climbing shape, hiking with Cheapdog, and horseback riding with friends, along the seashore at the Cape—but not one minute at a gallery or locked in combat with a foreign film.
    “Hi.”
    Startled, Zack knocked over his Styrofoam cup, spilling what remained of his coffee into a small pool on the veneer tabletop.
    “Hi, yourself,” he said as Suzanne Cole plucked a pad of napkins from the nearby counter and dabbed up the spill. Was there to be no end to his ineptitude in front of this woman?
    “It would seem you might have reached the limit of your caffeine quota for the day,” she said.
    She had changed into street clothes—gray slacks and a bulky fisherman-knit sweater—and she looked as fresh as if she had just started the day.
    “Actually,” he said, “I use caffeine to override my own inherent hyperness. I think it actually slows me down.”
    She smiled. “I know the syndrome. I’m surprised to find you still here, what with tomorrow being your first day in the office and all.”
    “I wanted to be sure Annie was out of the woods. She’s been pretty special to me and my family. Besides, I just finished my residency yesterday. It’ll probably be months before my internal chemistry demands anything more than a fifteen-minute nap in an institutional, Naugahyde easy chair.”
    “I remember those chairs well,” Suzanne said, leaning against the counter. “There’s an old, ratty, maroon one in the cardiac fellows’ room at Hitchcock that I suspected would one day have a sign on it proclaiming: ‘Suzanne Cole slept here—and only here.… ’ So, it’s a progress report you’re after. Well, the news is good. At least for the moment. Your Annie’s awake and stable, with no neurologic deficit that I can identify, although you might want to go over her in the morning. In fact, I think I’ll make her your first consult, if that’s okay. You did say you were going to do neurology as well as neurosurgery, yes?”
    “Absolutely. I actually enjoy the puzzles nearly as much as I do the blood and guts.”
    Her eyes narrowed.
    “You sure don’t talk like a surgeon,” she said. “The ones I know have signs in their rooms like: ‘To cut is to cure,’ and ‘All the world is pre-op.’ ”
    “Oh, I have those, too. Believe me. Only as an enlightened, Renaissance surgeon, mine say:
‘Almost all the world is pre-op.’ ”
He pushed a chair from the table with his foot. “Here, have a seat.”
    “Sorry, but I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got