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to the street (we also shared a love of people-watching, of gazing raptly out windows) and for a few minutes I was free to search openly for him under the guise of watching the sparse parade of humanity. But she would soon grow tired of this passive receptive mode, eager to go out and I, intent on prolonging the outing, would succumb.
    As fate would have it, the shop with the largest windows to the street was The Toy House. Attached to a bluebird-blue gingerbread cottage, the storefront was an indoor porch made almost entirely of glass, conveniently fortified with every type of toy you could imagine. One could stand inside the shop and discreetly look out at the street, shielded by a mottled mob of dollhouses, stuffed panthers, red-handled jump ropes, silver harmonicas, clown-shaped punching bags, Tinkertoys, croquet sets, rubber balls, kaleidoscopes, badminton sets, and the like.
    What would I have done if he had paused in front of said window? (But how unlikely! He was, after all, too old for toys!) If, by some erratic stroke of fate’s otherwise steady hand (pushing me firmly as it were, into the store with Maria, the street barren behind us), I were to find myself inside the shop looking at a dollhouse, myself on one side of the glass, the young man on the other, our eyes suddenly meeting through a tiny curtained window, would I will myself, chameleonlike to blend with the toys? Would my Liberty print blouse become, to the untrained eye, simply another busy pattern in the window? Or would I signal to him? Press a finger to my lips and a note to the now lightly steamed window? Or would I step toward the door, Maria’s hand in mine, to expose myself for what I really was: a mother with a tote over her shoulder, shopping for the toy that would stand as payment to her child for another excursion to the “city” endured?
    Only once did I catch a glimpse of the young man out in the world and it was not on Main Street but on the state highway. I have always been slow to notice when someone is noticing me and I am becoming increasingly obtuse with age (though there is also increasingly less to notice). I was walking along the side—looking back now I see I made a pitiful spectacle of myself—wearing my long black coat en route from the library to the apartment. He was driving in a little gray car toward me. As the car passed and he saw me, his double take was so dramatic that even I understood he was trying to catch a second glimpse. The absurd swivel of his head recalled that of a battery-powered doll and reassured me of what I had never quite been certain was true. I was ecstatic.
    This encounter left me with the false impression that I would soon see him again, the sense that he was nearby, that if I stayed where I was, I would, inevitably, encounter him. Though not an avid traveler, I did, on occasion, go across the water for social and professional purposes. Seeing him outside the confines of the library caused me to regard such excursions as foolish distractions. In its geographic specificity, encountering the young man was akin to encountering certain celestial occurrences. One can’t very well observe the aurora borealis while standing in the southern hemisphere. The island glowed green with a rose-shadowed light that outshone the larger blue world. Indeed my local attendance was required.
    I knew I had lost my former grip on Reality when I declined an invitation to present a paper on Japanese and Japanese American Floating World Literature at The New School in New York for the sole reason that I did not want to leave the island. Var, as if sensing disaster, offered to drive me but I refused. I was no longer compelled to do anything that required standing on a piece of earth that was not connected to the piece of the earth on which the young man too was standing. To be off-island would nearly nullify my chances of encountering him. I wanted nothing of networks, of connections to the main. What seemed formerly