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jeans.”
    Samson imagined himself on a glossy black motorcycle with a teardrop tank, a cigarette dangling between his lips. “Did I ever ride a motorcycle?”
    Anna looked at him strangely. “No.”
    She held her cigarette limpidly between two fingers. It surprised him how easily she handled things, how fluently she shared her life with the hundreds of objects that passed through her hands.
    “How’re you doing, Samson?” She drew her knees up to her chest and laid her head on them, looking at him.
    “I’m okay.” He smiled weakly. “How are you?”
    “Lonely.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to rub her ankle along the little ridges left by the elastic of her sock.
    “You feel so far away.”
    Samson nodded.
    “Do you feel that way too?” she asked.
    “Far? No. I don’t know how to explain it. Like I’m …”
    “What?”
    “Present. In myself.”
    “But you’re not
you.”
    “I feel like I am.”
    Her face contorted and he thought she might cry.
    “Please,”
she whispered, rocking her knees. “It could still come back. It
has
to come back.”
    “Anna—”
    “No. Don’t say anything.”
    He put his hands on her knees and gently held them still.
    “You know, sometimes I get the feeling that we’re just a bunch of habits,” she said. “The gestures we repeat over and over, they’re just our need to be recognized.” Her eyes were fixed on the TV, as if she were reading subtitles. “I mean that without them we would be unidentifiable. We’d have to reinvent ourselves every minute.” Her voice was soft, and Samson felt she wasn’t speaking to him but to the man in the photographs.
    She exhaled and dropped the cigarette into a glass, where it fizzled, and as she got up to brush her teeth she leaned in close and breathy as a nightclub and kissed his neck. The feel of her lips stayed as he watched the blond movie star leap up and show the audience the cheerleading routine she still remembered because though she had been fat she’d still been a cheerleader. The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.
    Samson washed the dishes, walked Frank, then headed out to an appointment with Dr. Lavell at eleven. It was half past nine, and though he had time to spare he found himself hustling up Broadway anyway, keeping pace with the crowd. He was drawn to the window displaysbut felt it would be awkward to stop and look, to disturb the flow by standing still and forcing people to move around him. He tried to mimic the sense of purpose of these people bound for destinations, who could, at any moment, draw up an itinerary of their futures, who received curt instructions from the tiny telephones they listened to like walkie-talkies.
    It was hot outside, and Samson was already sweating in his suit. He took off the jacket and held it crumpled at his side. When he got down to the subway platform it was a furnace, dead air trapped in subterranean vaults under the city, great generators of inner-city weather. He listened to the thunder of trains slamming in and out of the tunnels.
    Inside the crowded metal car under the ultraviolet lights, the helpless passengers looked like a litter of baby mice. Samson found a seat next to a huge boy, the biggest boy he had ever seen, who was serenely explaining to an interested man just how he could break his arm in two places. Samson’s eyes came to rest on a girl hunched across the aisle who was chewing the polish off red nails, the kind of girl who looked like she hadn’t slept at home last night. If she looked up and caught him staring he would look away, but she kept her eyes on the floor. Samson watched her until the 116th Street stop and then she stood, glanced at him with a precise and practiced boredom, and got off. Samson closed his eyes and the train thundered on through