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display. At that moment I saw the dancer inside at the register, he saw me, we locked eyes. For a second, I considered hurrying on my way without remembering exactly what it was that made me so uneasy. But this quickly became impossible; the dancer raised his hand in greeting and all I could do was wait for him to get his change and come out to say hello.
    He wore a beautiful wool coat and a silk scarf knotted around his throat. In the sunlight I saw that he was older. Not by much, but enough that he could no longer be called young. I asked how he was, and he told me about a friend of his who like so many in those years had died of AIDS. He spoke of a recent breakup with a long-term boyfriend, someone he had not yet met the last time I saw him, and then about an upcoming performance of a piece he had choreographed. Though five or six years had passed, S and I were still married and lived in the same West Side apartment. From the outside, not very much had changed, and so when it was my turn to offer news I simply said that everything was fine and that I was still writing. The dancer nodded. It’s possible he even smiled, in a genuine way, a way that always makes me, with my unrelenting self-consciousness, feel slightly nervous and embarrassed when I encounter it, knowing I could never be so easy, open, or fluent. I know, he said. I read everything you write. Do you? I said, surprised and suddenly agitated. But he smiled again, and it seemed to me that the danger had passed, the story would go unmentioned.
    We walked a few blocks together toward Union Square, as far as was possible before we each had to turn off in separate directions. As we said goodbye, the dancer bent down and removed a piece of fluff from the collar of my coat. The moment was tender and almost intimate. I took it down off my wall, you know, he said softly. What? I said. After I read your story, I took the painting down off my wall. I found I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. You did? I said, caught off guard. Why? At first I wondered myself, he said. It had followedme from apartment to apartment, from city to city, for almost twenty years. But after a while I understood what your story had made so clear to me. What was that? I wanted to ask, but couldn’t. Then the dancer, who though older was still languid and full of grace, reached out and tapped me with two fingers on the cheek, turned, and walked away.
    As I made my way home, the dancer’s gesture first baffled and then annoyed me. On the surface, it had been easy to mistake for tenderness, but the more I thought about it, the more there seemed something condescending in it, even meant to humiliate. In my mind the dancer’s smile became less and less genuine, and it began to seem to me that he had been choreographing the gesture for years, turning it over, waiting to run into me. And was it deserved? Hadn’t he gamely told the story, not only to me but all of the dinner guests that night? If I had discovered it through surreptitious means—reading his journals or letters, which I couldn’t possibly have done, knowing him as little as I did—it would have been different. Or if he had told me the story in confidence, filled with still-painful emotion. But he had not. He had offered it with the same smile and festivity with which he had offered us a glass of grappa after dinner.
    As I walked, I happened to pass a playground. It was already late in the afternoon but the small fenced-in area was full of the children’s high-pitched activity. Among the many apartments I’ve lived in over the years, one had been across the street from a playground and I’d always noticed that in the last half an hour before dusk the children’s voices seemed to get noisier. I could never tell whether it was because in the failing light the city had grown a decibel more quiet, or because the children had really grown louder, knowing their time there was almost through.