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the card in a special drawer, where I will not lose it. I put it away feeling reassured that at last I had some power over him. I had something I could hurt him with. I now know I saved the card because it was my only proof of his love for me, it is the only part of him that belongs to me.
    The night before his wife’s return from the conference she’s attending in Los Angeles, we drive to our usual restaurant where the Japanese waiter smiles at us in away he interprets as friendly, while I recognize amusement dancing at the corners of his mouth. I lift my purse into my lap and politely ask permission to smoke.
    “I’d rather you didn’t. My wife has a good nose for tobacco.”
    How much I want his wife to come home to the smell of smoke in the family car. After she has walked off the plane and through the terminal to where her luggage revolves on the carousel, after she has picked out his face among the faces of other husbands waiting to greet their wives and take them home, I can see her leaning back in the passenger seat, rubbing her neck, tired after her flight and eager for sleep — then the trace of smoke acrid in her nostrils, mingled perhaps with my perfume. In my fantasy she turns to him, wild-eyed and tearful, she demands that he stop the car, she wrenches the perforated wedding band from her finger and throws it at him before she opens the door and leaves.
Give it to that slut,
she will say.
    “Maybe I’m subconsciously trying to ruin your marriage,” I smile as I light a cigarette and watch the smoke momentarily fill up the front of the car.
    “Please don’t,” he says calmly. I think a man whose marriage is in my hands should sound a little more desperate, but in the dark I can only see his profile against the stores and buildings blurring outside the window,and it is unreadable. I wish afterwards that I had looked at his hands, to see if they tightened on the wheel.
    He tells me that we will have lots of time together over the years but I have no concept of time. I ask him to leave the city with me.
    “Would you really do that?” he asks. “Run off with me?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m very flattered.”
    “Don’t be. It wasn’t meant to be flattering.” I pause. I want to say,
It meant more than that.
“Why can’t we just take off?”
    “I can’t do it right now,” he says. “I have people depending on me — my patients. I’d love to. I can’t.”
    “I have just as much to lose as you do, you know,” I say, but he doesn’t believe me. He has been feeding me whisky all evening, and I am swaying in a chair in front of him. He places my hands together between his own and pulls me out of the chair, collapsing me to my knees. Kneeling, I sway back and forth and squint up at him, my hands stranded in his lap.
    “You should go,” I say.
    “Yes, I have to work tomorrow morning.”
    “And you have to pick your wife up from the airport,” I say, struggling to my feet to press the color of my lips against his white cheek.
    I do not realize I am clutching the sleeve of his suit jacket until we have reached the door, where he chuckles and pries my fingers loose. He adjusts his beeper inside his pocket and walks out into the rain-misted night.
    Back inside the apartment I am intent on finishing the bottle of Chivas he left behind on the kitchen counter, but when I go to it I find an envelope next to the bottle, weighted by an ashtray. I tear it open, my heart beating painfully — it could be a letter, he could be saying that he can no longer live without me, that tonight he will finally tell his wife about us. Instead I pull out a greeting card with a picture on the front of a girl standing by a seashore. She is bare-legged, with dimpled knees, wearing a loose frock the color of daffodils. She looks about twelve years old.
    Inside are no words, just two new hundred-dollar bills.
    He tries to alleviate his guilt by giving me money: checks left folded on the kitchen table, crisp bills tucked