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strange.’
    â€˜All there is.’
    â€˜This. This is good.’
    â€˜Best of all.’
    We stopped talking and right away my head was clear and serene, I was lungs and legs and arms, sun on my shoulders, sweat seeping through the red handkerchief around my forehead, dripping to my eyes, burning, and I flicked it away with a finger. At the houses near the college he moved ahead of me, a pace or two. I caught him and ran beside him for a while, then he kicked and was gone; I stretched my legs, arms swinging, breath in gasps, and watched his back ten then twenty yards away as he sprinted past the gym and slowed and walked, head going up and down for air, hands on his hips. I walked beside him. He didn’t smile at beating me, but I felt a smile as though in his rushing breath.
    â€˜Competitive bastard,’ I said.
    Then he smiled, and I believed then he knew I was making love with Edith and he was telling me he knew, saying, You see Edith can’t touch me and you can’t either, what matters here is what matters to me and what matters to me is I will write and I will outrun you and I will outlive all of you too, and that’s where I am .
    He didn’t smoke, either. After the shower, a long time of hot water on the shoulders and legs and back muscles, then warm then cool, we drank Heineken draft in tall frosted mugs. We were alone in the bar, then a thin bald man came in carrying wrapped fish. Adjacent to the lounge was the dining room, where people ate fish from the sea and looked out at the dirty Merrimack; if you walked out of the lounge, across the hall, you went into the fish market. Before starting to drink, Hank and I had gone in and stood in the smell of fish, looking at the lobsters in a tank. I thought of Terry, but not with guilt; I had loved and run and sweated that out of me. I stood shifting my weight from one leg to another so I could feel the muscles, and I breathed my own clean smell with the salt water and fish, and resolved not to smoke for an hour, to keep the sharp sense of smell I always had after running restored innocence to my lungs; and I loved and wanted to embrace Edith and Hank and Terry, who in their separate ways made my life good. I felt at the border of some discovery, some way I could juggle my beloveds and save us all. But I didn’t know what it was.
    The man with the fish sat to our left, put his fish on the bar, and ordered a Schlitz. Betty was tending bar; she was a middle-aged blonde who had lived all her life in this town. She sat on a high stool near the taps and talked to the fish man. He looked at the Heineken sign over the mirror and asked if that was imported beer; she said yes it was. He said he’d never heard of it and she told him oh yes, it was quite popular, it sold ten to one here.
    â€˜Schlitz,’ Hank said, so they couldn’t hear. ‘Some people like it better inside the horse.’
    â€˜Did you see her before she left?’
    â€˜Yeah, I saw her.’ He gave me the foxy smile I got after he beat me running.
    â€˜To tell her goodbye?’
    â€˜Remember when I went to New York to see my agent?’
    â€˜Ah. I didn’t know you could lie so well.’
    He held out two dollars to the woman.
    â€˜We’ll have a round, and give my friend on the end a Heineken.’
    The fish man looked over at us.
    â€˜Well, thank you. Thank you very much.’
    â€˜Beats that horse piss Schlitz is bottling.’
    Betty grinned. The fish man was embarrassed and he started to say something, maybe about Schlitz, then he just watched her filling the mug; when he tasted it, he said: ‘Well, by golly, it does have something to it, doesn’t it?’
    He and Betty talked about beer.
    â€˜I’ve never spent the night with anyone but Terry.’
    â€˜Same old thing. Sleep, dream, wake up in the morning; piss; brush your teeth.’
    â€˜Have a cigarette, lover.’
    â€˜Hell no. Every time I want one