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and she walked into the living room, facing the wide entrance to the dining room. I had laid out the salmon on a platter, flanked it with cream cheese and a basket of the hot rolls, just out of the oven a few minutes before she arrived.
    â€œIt’s lovely,” Elizabeth said. “And you can see the Hudson River. I could never get used to that. If I lived here, I’d just sit and stare.”
    â€œI’ll get the coffee,” I said. “Unless you want something first—like a glass of wine?”
    â€œAt eleven o’clock in the morning?”
    No answer to that. I didn’t know what came first. I wasn’t used to young women at eleven in the morning. I brought out the coffee and pulled out the chair facing the window. “Sit here and you can have your fill of the river.”
    She sat down, smiled at me, and said that I was very sweet and very funny. I never thought of myself as being either sweet or funny. “You went to church,” I said—for want of any other way to open the conversation.
    â€œOh, yes. I’m not a very good Catholic, but I do lean on it—and I felt so good this morning.”
    â€œWhere do you work, Elizabeth?” I asked rather abruptly.
    â€œPart-time in the shoe department at Interdale’s. Women’s shoes. When Sedge moved us to New York—that was three years ago, just before the annulment came—my new job at Marymount fell through. I tried to find a teaching position at Manhattanville and Fordham and some of the smaller Catholic schools, but none of the art departments was hiring. Anyway, I was sort of going to pieces, and I was paralyzed by three months of utter depression, and that’s when I signed all the papers he brought me. I would have signed anything—I was so terrified of him at that point—and all I knew was that I must do what he wanted so I would never see him again.”
    There were tears in her eyes now, and I switched to a discourse on smoked salmon, telling her that in Copenhagen, where I had taught a semester one summer, it was the beloved food of the whole population, and they called it lox—which I had always considered to be a Yiddish word but was actually the name for it in all the Northern countries. I piled her plate with salmon and a large lump of cream cheese, and then I spelled out my plans for the day, tentatively.
    â€œI can’t take your whole Sunday. I thought it would just be breakfast.”
    â€œLet me tell you about my Sunday,” I said. “I would read the New York Times , which would take about three hours. Then I would have some scrambled eggs and toast. Then I would take a walk, and then I would come back here and listen to the Boston Symphony on Channel 13 and probably fall asleep. Can you imagine anything more important or exciting?”
    â€œIke—why?”
    â€œIf you don’t stop crying, I can’t tell you. A woman’s tears break me up.”
    â€œI love music,” she said, drying her eyes, “but I’m wearing jeans.”
    â€œFine. Absolutely de rigueur. Now eat.”
    She was hungry. I watched her finish the lox and cream cheese and two bialys and two cups of coffee. There was no use lying to myself. There was something about her that absolutely fascinated me—an openness and vulnerability, and a gentle acceptance of this relationship that she, like myself, was unwilling to let go of, which left me wondering whether anyone had been kind to her since she had been here in New York. I found her very attractive physically, and I thought of myself kissing and caressing her—at the same time feeling that I, out of my own loneliness, was using her. She was intelligent, well educated, and we talked about books and art. As I was to find out, her knowledge of art and its history was encyclopedic.
    The plan worked well. In the Times we found a string quartet offering an all-Mozart program scheduled to play in a small