pecial trip or stop what he was doing in the store to hear me.” “You read? I’m sorry, I didn’t know, and I missed it.” “You bet, I read. To standing room only, but that’s because the store manager said she had just one chair to spare — I’m sitting on it — and nobody wanted to sit on a cold uncarpeted floor. Around six people attended the reading. I’m sure half of them were store employees told to put on their coats and look like customers so I wouldn’t think the audience was too small. Believe me, I came with no illusions there’d be a crowd, and was simply doing what my publisher asked of me. But nothing will go to waste. I can always take home the unopened wine and recap the vodka bottle. As for the food, I perhaps overbought, but I love pickled herring of all sorts and it takes a while for it to spoil. I can’t say the same for the caviar, though, if any’s left, so you should go over there and have some now.” “I will, and some of your vodka too, if you don’t mind. But to change the subject, I also want to tell you how much I admire biography writing. It’s got to be the most difficult and time-consuming form there is. All that research before you even get a word down, and the traveling you must’ve done in the Soviet Union. And no doubt dozens of interviews with people who knew him and going through archives and having to read twice, three times, maybe more, all of his fiction, and according to the flap copy, he was very prolific, in addition to the thousands of letters it says he wrote. The copy also says this is the first book-length bio and exegesis of him and his work in any language. That means you had to retrace his life and get all the facts and such yourself and couldn’t crib some details, as a legitimate shortcut but in your own words and citing where all the references came from, from other scholars’ books. By the way, did this book come out of your Ph.D. thesis at Columbia, or was that on someone or something else? But I’m prying, which I usually don’t do, and as one of the women before said, taking too much of your time. I also probably don’t know what the heck I’m talking about as to what goes into writing biographies. So let me buy your book already before the store closes. But would you do me one favor, though? I don’t know how you’re going to take this — maybe you saw something like it coming long before — and if it’s wrong of me or wildly misdirected, and not because of anything you said or did, and you feel offended or just put off by it in any way, I apologize. But could you, when you inscribe the book to me, if you’ll still be willing to after what I’m about to say, put your phone number under your name?” She said “Now there’s an approach I never heard. And I’m not offended. I in fact think it’s funny. But I’d rather not have my phone number near my inscription or anywhere else in the book. I can just visualize it. You forgetting the book on a bus and some sleazy guy picking it up and calling me. No, that’s carrying it too far. But all right, if you want to get in touch with me to have coffee together one afternoon, you know my name and I’m the only one with it in the Manhattan phone book. Now tell me yours, in case you do call, so I’ll know who you are when you give it, and can I make the assumption you teach on the college level too?” “Nope. I just write what others teach, although nobody’s ever taught my work, far as I know, or written about it except in a few small mostly negative book reviews.” And he’s said a number of times to Gwen and their daughters and a friend or two and once in a taped phone interview — right after the call he had misgivings he said it and called the interviewer to delete that part when she edited the tape for radio and she said she would but didn’t — that his first meeting with Gwen was the single most important thing to happen to him. “Event” was the word he used in the interview. “How could it not be,” he said, or something like it, “for look what it led to. The deepest most enduring love relationship in my life and the marriage and children I always wanted and at least a dozen fictional pieces and a whole novel and about half of another one based on that night. I even took a teaching job I didn’t want and have held on to it for more than twenty years now so I could support a family and get good health insurance for them and send my daughters to college no matter how expensive and buy a house with lots of trees around it and no neighbors close by and do some traveling with my wife and spend summers in Maine in a nice rental cottage near the coast and have a good retirement plan and then when I’m retired, enough money put away to shell some of it out to my kids, and so on.” But maybe he’s saying — he means, what he’s saying is that he might be getting some of what happened in that first meeting with Gwen mixed up or in with what he changed or took liberties with in the writing of it. He thinks he finally got that thought straight. Anyway, that can happen and has several times, especially with something he’s written so much about. But where was he going before, regarding the bartender? Not so much her but the bar. He was excited at the possibility of seeing Gwen again, if just for a coffee and maybe a walk. That’s what he thought as he headed home soon after he left her. He’d gone into the bar to look her up in the Manhattan phone book to see if she was really in it with the name she gave. If she wasn’t in the book, what would he have done? Not think she intentionally misled him; she didn’t seem the type for that. If she didn’t want to give him her phone number, he would have thought, she’d have told him straight off that for one reason or another, or no reason given, she’d rather he didn’t call her. He wouldn’t have liked it. He probably would have thought at the time “Too bad, what a loss, first woman in a long time I’m really attracted to and think something could come of our seeing each other, but nothing I can do about it: she’s not interested, so that’s that.” Or maybe he would have pressed her a little — sure, that’s what he was like then — and said “Listen, what’s the harm, just for a cup of coffee, and, if the weather’s okay, maybe a short walk. Or forget the walk; just a coffee. Though maybe you don’t want to meet because you’re presently tied up with some guy and you don’t want to lead me on. If that’s the case, not that I have to tell you how to act, you should say so, although I still think it shouldn’t stop us from meeting sometime for a longer conversation about your work and past studies and European literature in general, even, over coffee,” or something like that. Also, if she wasn’t in the bar’s Manhattan phone book, he would have checked the cover of it for the period it was printed for. If it was even a year out of date, it might have meant she had an unlisted phone number then or had only recently got her apartment and didn’t have a phone yet at the time the book was printed, or did have one but it was too late to get her listing in it. If it was an old book — last year’s or later — and she wasn’t in it, he thinks he would have gone to another bar farther uptown, ordered a beer and asked the bartender for the Manhattan phone book, if it’s the current one, or looked for it at the pay phone there, if they had one, or just gone home and looked her up in his phone book. The phone company dropped off a stack of Manhattan phone books once a year in the vestibule of the brownstone he lived in then and he always picked one up and brought it to his apartment, so he was sure to have the current one. If she wasn’t in any of the phone books he looked at, current or out of date, he would have called Pati the next day for the phone number, saying he met Gwen for the first time at the elevator after they both left the party, they seemed to hit it off, at least enough so that when he asked her if he could call her sometime to meet for coffee or lunch, she didn’t so much give him her number as tell him how to get it in the Manhattan phone book, but he couldn’t find it. He looked in several other Manhattan phone books and her number wasn’t in them either. Would Pati have it? If she gave it to him right away — she might have said something like “Let me see if it’s all right with Gwen first, even if I’m sure it will he, based on what you just said”—he would have called Gwen that day or the next and said it was Martin Samuels from the other night, Pati’s friend from Yaddo. He couldn’t find her name in the phone book where she said it’d be, so he got it from Pati, if that was okay. She still interested in having a coffee or something one day? If she is, then maybe they should just set a time and date. He also probably would have thought before he called Pati or went into another bar for a current Manhattan phone book or looked in the one he had at home, that maybe he got the spelling of her last name wrong. Then he would have looked up in the Manhattan phone book in the first bar, even if it was an old one, all the possible spellings of the name he could think of: Leaderman, Leiderman, Leederman, Lederman, even Liedermann and Leadermann and so on. But before he looked up any of those, he would have dialed Information from the pay phone in that bar and given the spelling of the last name he thought Gwen gave him and said he thinks it’s under “Gwendolyn” but it could also be under “Gwen” or just the initial G instead of a first name and that the address, if it’s listed, is an Upper West Side one, most likely around a Hundred-sixteenth Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Riverside Drive or even on Amsterdam or Riverside Drive — anyway, near Columbia University: a Hundred-tenth to a Hundred-twenty-fifth — and got her number that way. The bartender said there was a Manhattan phone book by the pay phone just past the entrance to the bar. He said he saw the phone when he came in but not the book, and she said the book’s got to be there unless someone’s stolen it again. “It’s attached to the phone stand by a chain, but a flimsy one,” he thinks she said. “Or it could be hiding in the little cubbyhole in the phone stand.” He went to the entrance. Chain but no book. He actually hadn’t seen the phone when he came in and doesn’t know how he could have missed it, but didn’t want to admit to the bartender he was so oblivious. Could be all he had his mind on was Gwen and getting into the bar and asking for a Manhattan phone book to see if she was listed in it, and if she was, to write her phone number down. Pen and folded-up sheet of paper he always had with him. But what does he do now, he thought, or something like it, go to another bar for a phone book? He also might have thought he should forget it for now — and dealing with the bartender, just from her harsh looks and voice, could turn out to be unpleasant — and pay up and leave the bar and go straight home and look in his phone book there. He really didn’t want the beer he ordered — he’d already drunk plenty for the time being. When he gets home, especially if he walks all the way, he’s sure, he may have thought, he’ll want a beer or two or couple of vodka and grapefruit juice drinks, something he started drinking when he was a bartender two years before, though he told his manager and customers if they asked, that it was plain juice to keep his energy up and just to drink something, and drink them while he sits in his easy chair and reads a book or the