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didn’t know how to put it, and said nothing. (When I did tell him, more than a year later, he was aghast that I hadn’t warned him beforehand. What would you have done, I asked him. I don’t know, he said, I would have wanted to mark it somehow. You mean an ad in the paper? No, he said, serious. It’s just sad when something important goes by and no one notices …)
    The bus pulled in and he took my hands. You haven’t asked if there’s anyone in my life.
    I didn’t want to know. Is there?
    I’m hopeful.
    I smiled and kissed him. I guess I’m sealing my fate, I said.
    When I got home, Molly was pulling the sheets off her bed, and we stood staring at each other through her doorway.
    Sorry, I said, looking at the bedclothes.
    Sorry? I’m having them framed!
    Martin and I spent most of our early weekends meeting in other spots around the state. I taught him to drive. I showed him how my father liked to hold the steering wheel, with his hands at the bottom, the wheel lying in his palms. Driving in a relaxed pose like that induced my father to make a sound I used to find strangely soothing: it was the sound of his ring tapping against the steering wheel. Just an occasional, light
tick
. It was sometimes the only sound on the way home from a dinner somewhere, driving back through Ithaca, or Letchworth, or Albany. A reassuring sound that there was someone awake in the car, watching over you.
    Click your ring against the wheel, I said.
    Martin looked over at me, confused. Why?
    I like the way it sounds.
    Tick
. And again,
tick.
    I thought I’d want to share him with my friends, but we instead retreated to privacy, opening our stories over suppers and walks, incubating an intimacy I began to guard like someone with knowledge of a diamond trove. He’d gone some time without a woman in his life, a result of having his nose in his work. And also a general confusion about what women his age wanted (he said, as a group, they seemed worried). As a result, he hadn’t gone on a date in over a decade, and his last dates were convincing disasters.
    On these first weekends, on our travels, we’d stop in little towns, read the grave markers for the revolutionary soldiers. Martin would go into the Woolworths or the dusty little corner stores and come out with his triumphant purchases: a book of cut-out animals, a pack of soap-bubble pipes, a die-cast milkmaid carrying her pails, an old velvet ring box with a stain of tarnish on the inside and no ring. Or else a paper bag filled with lemoncream snacking cakes (which he could live on), a fragrant peach at the bottom for me. He’d make me things from what he found. The milkmaid ended up in the ring box: you lifted the lid to find her lying on a bed of hay, the pails and the iron bar removed, so she lay there, succulent, her arms outstretched as she awaited her lover. The animals from the mobile were pasted on the inside edges of the box: lion, otter, viper, elephant.
    Strange assortment of beasts for a barn, I said.
    They’re code.
    I stared at it until I figured it out. Then dragged him to the floor, out of view of the windows. Maybe this was in Albany. Maybe that beautiful inn we found at Allen’s Hill. I look back now and that life seems like pins in the map I was making.
    We spent the rest of the summer and into the fall living like this. And I’d come back to campus full of the stories of an increasingly exotic life, pulling out a new artwork made for me, or increasingly, as time went on, keeping it to myself. To our friends, Molly and I started to seem like different people, like we’d moved up with the juniors. We stayed in Obreshkove over the summer, and in the fall, with many of our sophomore year moved on to other dorms, or even other universities, we became the grand dames of the house, treated with a kind of distant fear or respect. I’d leave on Friday and she’d have the place to herself for whatever recent conquest was going to take up her weekend. (To her credit,