He thinks they were discussing grammar. One of them said “Not me.” Then one of them said “Which is it? ‘Not me’ or ‘Not I’?” Then she said she saw the play. “What play?” and she said “Beckett’s Not I, and another short play of his with it. Footfalls, I think, or Where There or something. “At Lincoln Center?” he said. “The Vivian Beaumont? Summer of ’77? I wanted to see it, particularly Not I, very much. More than any play for years. I wouldn’t have cared what play was playing with it. I went to the box office, even though I knew the cheapest ticket would be expensive, but they were sold out for the entire run. I didn’t have much money then, but would have paid anything for a ticket. I even twice hung around the theater lobby before the performance began to see if anyone had a spare ticket to sell, but nobody did.” “I went with my mother,” she said. “She ordered the tickets weeks before.” “I couldn’t order anything. No credit card then. Lucky. That you got to see it and to have a mother who’d buy tickets for you and who’d want to go to a Beckett play. My mother would never buy the tickets. It’s not that she’s cheap; she’s not. She’d just never think to. And if I bought tickets for her, she’d only go because she’d want me to have company or she’d think her going would please me.” “To tell you the truth, both plays were a little wearisome but well done. My mother hated the first one — you know how she is with movies, sometimes within minutes if she doesn’t like them — and left halfway through it and never came back.” “Wouldn’t have been wearisome or anything but wonderful for me, especially if that was where we first met. Was it a matinee you saw?” and she said yes. “That’s what I would have wanted to go to too and those days I went down to the theater for spare tickets were all afternoons. I never liked going alone to movies or the theater at night. But, hey, suppose we had? In the lobby during intermission, for instance. There was one, wasn’t there?” “An intermission?” she said. “Of course. Two plays, different scenery, spare as it was. For Not I, a giant screen showing a woman’s mouth moving throughout the play till near the end when it abruptly closes.” “No, it never stops moving or talking till the house lights up.” “So you’ve seen it?” she said. “I read it and it had to end the way I read it did, since he was a stickler about the play following his stage directions. But I thought they might have done something unusual with the two plays because it was Beckett and ran them intermissionless, with only a brief blackout or lowered and raised curtain.” “No curtains at the Beaumont,” she said. “Theater in the round. You remember Arcadia and Six Degrees etcetera, plays my mother bought us tickets for. She did that lots of times when we came to New York. The Beaumont was convenient to their apartment and we could drop the kids off with her, which she loved, and walk down to it and have a good time. But what were you saying?” “I’d go over to you in the lobby during intermission, as I wanted to at the party when we first met.” “It was at the elevator where we met, just after we left the party separately.” “I know,” he said. “I followed you there.” “You did?” “I’ve told you that,” he said. “I’ve kept nothing back. You were gorgeous and looked so bright. It was my last chance. But since your mother left during the first play and wasn’t waiting for you in the lobby…was she? If she was, the fantasy I’m concocting is going to have to change.” “She went home. She whispered she was going to just before she left her seat.” “So you’d be alone in the lobby during intermission and the chances of you bumping into someone you know there would be very slim. I’d notice you, be immediately attracted to you, and see you were standing alone. So would other men, so I’d have to move fast. Oh, I forgot. Did you leave your seat during intermission? If it was only to go to the ladies’ room, I’d come up with something to make us meet. Both of us leaving — not going into — our restrooms at the same time. But this fantasy has to stick to the facts.” “I don’t have the restroom problem you do, going to it every two to three hours to pee. I went to the lobby just to walk around and perhaps there’d be something interesting to see there or a cool nonalcoholic drink to drink. Lemonade. I think they had good lemonade.” “Did you get one? If you did, I’d have to include it.” “I don’t think so.” “So I’d go over to you and I know almost exactly what I would have said. ‘Hi. Enjoying the play?’ Or rather ‘Enjoy the first play?’ But ‘enjoy’ is so stuffy. ‘Did you like?’ No doubt something trite or inane to get me started. Then, ice broken I could even say ‘What did you think of it?’ Then we’d talk about the play, Beckett. You’d maybe say you found the play a bit wearisome. If you did, I’d say I liked it, which I’m sure I would have. If you didn’t say anything about the play being wearisome, I’d still say I liked it. ‘Been looking forward to seeing it for weeks. And a ticket wasn’t easy to get.’ I’d probably also say, if I didn’t think I was being too windy, how much I like his short plays, including the radio ones. All That Fall. Others. More than his longer works, plays and prose, and I like a lot of his poetry too. ‘Cascando,’ especially. That great passage ‘terrified again of not loving…of loving and not you…of being loved and not by you…’ and so on. ‘I can recite very little poetry by heart,’ I’d say, ‘but I read that one so many times, and the language is so simple, I remember it…that part, I mean, and a little more.’ Then the bells to get back to our seats would ring and I’d say ‘Like to meet for coffee after?’ And so convenient your mother went home, but I would have invited you both for coffee if she had come back to the theater to have a snack with you after the performance. That would have been a year and a half before we met. Think what we both would have been spared if we’d got together then. Me, not two but three quick bad relationships, which made me more and more disillusioned about myself when each of the women — two, actually — broke up with me, and the third — she was married, so it was ridiculous — didn’t want to have anything romantic to do with me. And you, a pointless relationship with a man you didn’t love but for some reason kept seeing whenever he flew into town and called.” “Not pointless. He was interesting, very smart, witty, fun to be with, treated me well and was a good lover. He fit my needs and limitations perfectly at the time, and I used to phone him too.” “Glad to hear it, for your sake. One thing. We probably would have married sooner and had babies sooner too.” “I don’t think so. You needed a decent-paying job first, and that didn’t come till September, 1980, or we’ll say, July 1st, since that’s when your academic year began. But if we had got married and had a baby sooner, that would have meant no Rosalind. Though I’m sure the one we had sooner, daughter or son, would have been as wonderful. And Maureen, three years later, since that’s the time spread we chose to have our children, would have been our Rosalind, but then we wouldn’t have had our Maureen.” “We could have had a third. I would have loved it.” “We almost did,” she said, “if I hadn’t miscarried. But now you’re going to say I wouldn’t have miscarried, because the third would have been our Maureen. Don’t. It’s gotten too morbid and complicated for me.” “I would have gone to Maine with you later that summer and also the whole summer of ’78, instead of your sometime-lover English architect for a week. But I’m wondering if you would have been interested in a forty-one-year-old man when you had only recently turned thirty, rather than the forty-two-and-a-half-year-old man a year and a half later when you were thirty-one and a half.” “Forty-one would have been cutting it close then, but I guess all right, and you rarely looked or acted your age except when you were working.” “What else do you think we would have done together if we had hit it off that summer of ’77?” “It’s all down in my journals. More plays, parties, poetry readings, dinners, lectures, symposiums, maybe a weekend at Mohonk Lodge, and of course lots of movies. And since I wasn’t in any kind of serious relationship at the time, I probably would have agreed to having coffee with you and later started seeing you.” “And your needs and limitations?” “I might have changed them for you,” she said. “You had many of the same positive qualities as my English friend, and in addition you were Jewish, a writer, and lived in New York.” “And I would have quietly flipped over you that first day when we had coffee after the plays, and I’m sure we would have continued it till today.” “Why not?” she said. “It’s only a year and a half more. But you know, if we didn’t begin anything then—” “If you didn’t want to have coffee with me after the plays, or anything more to do with me after we did have coffee—” “We would have had another opportunity to become more acquainted at Pati’s party a year and a half later. But this time, since we’d spoken to each other once before at the theater and maybe even had coffee together after the plays, we would have started talking inside the apartment and not at the elevator after we’d separately left the party. That would have been where I gave you my phone number, or how to get it, and not on the street in front of her building.” “And if we did start seeing each other after the plays and got serious, I wouldn’t have gone to Yaddo ’78, where I met Pati; Maine would have been my Yaddo. I would only have known her through you and come to her party as your boyfriend.” “Seventy-seven and ’78 in Maine with you,” she said. “I could have gone for that. Also as a distraction and breather from the three-hundred-page dissertation I was still working on those summers. I also would have tried to enlist you as a second reader of it, less for ideas than for looking out for possible mistakes and simplifying my language in places.” “Just as you, in a way, would have been a nice distraction from the stories I was writing then. But by the summer of ’78 they wouldn’t have been the same stories I ended up writing, because by then I’m sure I would have already been writing about you. I wouldn’t have let you see them so quickly, though. Not because you’d be in them or that I also couldn’t use help in catching mistakes. It’s just I never liked anyone reading my work before it was published but literary agents and magazine and book editors. Although I had nothing against reading out loud a line or word or two from a work in progress if I thought there was something really wrong with it. Or if there were two good ways of saying the same thing and I wanted to know which one this person thought was best. You’ve done that for me,” and she said “A number of times,” and he said “And you were always right.”