eans by that or he feels he needs to explain it or elaborate, that he always takes it with him, physically or in his head, so long as he has a copy of the original manuscript on his work table in his apartment in case the part he takes to school gets damaged to the point where he can’t read it or lost. And when she does answer the phone and they talk and the conversation goes well or lags a little but sort of reaches a certain time limit for a first call and he says something like “With all your teaching and other activities, you must be quite busy and I’ve taken up a lot of your time, so I should come right out with it and ask if you’d like to meet for coffee or something one of these days — tomorrow or the next day or whenever you’re free,” what could be the worst thing that could happen? She says no. But no with an explanation that does something to his stomach. She’s seeing somebody. Not only is she seeing somebody but it’s somebody she feels quite strongly about. She’s sorry she led him on. She probably wouldn’t say that. At the time when she gave him her phone number—“You mean, how to get it,” he’d say if she said that, and maybe say it a bit angrily, and she might say something like “Whatever way you got it — I wasn’t completely aware how deep my feelings were for this man.” She probably wouldn’t say anything like that either. She’d probably think she doesn’t need to explain. After all, they barely know each other, they only talked briefly, this is their first and probably their last phone call, so who is he to her? She’s not even sure about his name. Is it Martin Samuels? Samuel Martin? Oh, she’d know his name all right, he thought, but as a joke to herself it could be what she’d think. Lots of people, when they first meet him and some awhile after, have called him Samuel or Sam. Instead, she might say, if that she is seeing somebody what’s stopping her from meeting him for coffee and possibly also that she doesn’t want to lead him on, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” If he said “Is it because you’re seeing somebody that’s stopping you from meeting me for coffee and also perhaps you might think you’d be leading me on?” she’d probably just say she’d prefer not going into it. Or just — after he asks her if she’d like to meet him for coffee one of these days or even a drink — she’s sorry, she doesn’t think so and she’d rather not go into why, but it was nice meeting him even so briefly, maybe she’ll see him again at one of Pati’s parties, and this time at the party and not after they leave it. “She gives so many of them,” she could say, “and always one on her birthday, or has since I’ve known her, but where we have to promise not to bring a present.” “Yeah,” he’d say, “she already told me to set aside that date. An easy one to remember: Lincoln’s birthday,” and she might say “Darwin’s too — Pati told me that.” “Same here,” he’d say. “That’s the only reason I know and I’ll probably always remember it.” “Well,” she’d probably then say, “goodbye,” and hang up. Anyway, bad as he’d feel if she turned him down for coffee, or a drink at the West End, let’s say, which is just up the street from where she lives, on Broadway, he can only find out what her answer will be by calling her. But if she told him how to get her number, which is the same thing, really, as giving it, then it had to mean she intended to meet him, other fellow or not, at least for coffee, and to continue what he thought, and she might have too, was a fairly good conversation for a first one, at the elevator, in it and on the street. They did talk in the elevator, didn’t they? he thinks. More than just that business about pushing the floor button, or was that just in one of his dreams tonight? But the butterflies in his stomach, and they’re flying around now like fighter planes, he remembers thinking and writing down someplace and coming upon sometime later and thinking “What was in my head at the time to want to write down such crap?” are telling him something. What? Something. But what? That he really doesn’t want to blow this. He knows, he knows. So attractive and elegant and dignified, he meant to say, and seemingly good-natured and probably high-minded and obviously smart. He knows: whatever you do, don’t blow it. For how many future chances will he get to meet a woman like this? And he wants the whole works with one: sex, love, marriage, children, and the chances of getting all that, let’s face it, are fading. He’s losing his looks and hair and back teeth and is only minimally successful in his writing after almost twenty years at it, and the prospects, though he is being published by small places and in one recent big place though at the bottom of its list, seem slim of ever living anything but skimpily off it. And he has very little money saved and only a small amount of royalties owed him and no job possibilities to speak of and it doesn’t look good he’ll ever have them: applied the last five years to he doesn’t know how many English and writing departments, college and a few New York City private high schools to teach writing and, if he has to, a little contemporary fiction with it, and not one of them bit. Not one even asked him to be interviewed for the opening or wanted him, when he suggested it, to send his one and then two and then three published books. And a couple of them said, so many more must have thought, they’d never consider anyone who didn’t have an advanced degree in literature or creative writing no matter how great a teacher and writer he may be, “and I’m not saying you are,” one of them added, “though in all probability you could be. I’m unfamiliar with your books and have no idea what you’re like in the classroom and was simply being hypothetical,” and he doesn’t know what other kind of work he can now do. Certainly not bartending or waiting on tables again or subbing in public junior high schools. So what would he be bringing to a relationship at forty-two? Though she might have found him halfway interesting and even physically appealing to a degree and maybe intelligent or whatever positive things she might have found him when they first met, on the phone with her, since he’ll feel some pressure to perform and because of that will have a hard time trying to act naturally, she could easily think him dull or too self-absorbed, or self-conscious, or something, but fake. And just being nervous about calling her up and speaking to her and afraid of blowing it, he might say the wrong thing or a series of them and turn her off. Something dumb or trite or silly or truly stupid and then try to apologize or alibi his way out of it and get himself in even deeper. And would she agree to meet what she was beginning to believe was a silly or stupid man even once? Would he with a silly or stupid woman even once? he thought. He might. No, he wouldn’t. He’d think nothing good could come of it. Going to bed with the woman that first date? After all, if she’s silly or stupid or let’s just say not very clever, she’d probably be more persuadable, so there’d be a better chance. That used to be enough, but not anymore. He feels too lousy about it after. That he’s being totally dishonest, done something wrong, hurt the woman, convinced or tricked her into doing something she didn’t want to or intuitively knew not to and now thinks less of herself, and so on. And she’s a woman, this Gwendolyn is, who could probably get just about any available man she wanted, so he’s saying if he acts like a sap on the phone, why would she want to meet up with him? Though maybe she’s not as intolerant of people as he is, or so quick to pass judgment, is more like it, besides sensing his nervousness and making certain adjustments for that. After talking with people for a minute or so or a little longer, he often thinks he knows what they’re like — silly, stupid, vapid, nothing to say, no original thoughts, uninterested in anything serious he is — and he sticks with that opinion. She, on the other hand, might think — she somehow seemed like this — that everyone’s good for at least one conversation over coffee or a beer — well, maybe with her not the beer; but something he ought to try thinking himself, since he can be so rigid with people. That’s not the word he wants, but he knows what he means. You can learn a lot about a person, and thus, people in general, that first and maybe only talk: hopes, goals, background, life history, so on, so on. Where the person’s been, what the person’s done, and everything that goes along with it, whatever he means by that. Maybe no conversation, or few, between two people can be so wide-ranged and packed tighter than the first one if it’s long enough, hour or two, especially if they’re eager to get in almost everything that interests them or think the other person will think interesting and makes them look good, something he doubts very much she’d do and he has to watch out for in himself if, and he should be so lucky, it ever comes to that. It’d be interesting, though, to find out what she really thinks about what he thought she might — that everyone’s-good-for-at-least-one-or-two-hour-long-conversation, etcetera. For all he knows it could be close to what he guessed. And his hopes and goals and such, if they do meet and she asks? She’s a part of them, that’s for sure, but of course not what he so soon would want to express. Talk about scaring her off fast. He’d just be matter-of-fact, not give away anything as to what he’s been thinking about her, talk seriously about his writing and where he wants it to go and that if some college, preferably here but almost anywhere in the States if that’s all he can get, would give him a break and look at his list of publications and the New York State writing fellowship he’s gotten and not just his lack of any postgraduate degree, he’d like to start teaching, for the income and time it’d give him to write, and other things in his life—“To be honest, eventually marriage, children. I’m already past forty, so you understand, but not to rush into anything, just to have these things.” And after an hour or so and they’ve finished their coffee or she, tea, and maybe a refill — well, you don’t usually get a refill of tea unless it’s already in one of those small teapots that sometimes comes with the cup or mug — and start to leave — he’ll pick up the check even if she insists he don’t and she’s had something, for him, expensive with her coffee or tea. He’ll only have coffee and if she says something like “You’re not having anything to eat?” he’ll say “Not hungry, thanks,” although he might be but knows once she orders a sandwich or some other food like that and he’s intending to pick up the check, that he really can’t afford more. Or maybe he’ll do this — ask her if she’d like to meet him again — in front of the coffee shop, for that’s what he thinks it’ll be if she agrees to meet him a first time, someplace simple — and just pray, maybe even hold his breath; in other words, hope very hard she says that important second yes. She does, he thought, he thinks he’d begin to believe that maybe they’d started something, for why else would she agree to see him again? Would talking about his fairly prestigious writing fellowship be too much like boasting? Not if he says it in a way where it doesn’t. For instance: The fellowship, and this only if the subject or it comes up or something closely related to it, enabled him for the first time in his life, and he’s been writing for around twenty years, to do nothing but write for a year. More than a year. He managed to stretch the fellowship money to a year and a half before he had to look for work again. His most productive period too, though he won’t say this to her, at least not yet, on the phone or if they meet, because that would really be boasting: forty-two short stories and a rewrite of a short novel, and most of those stories eventually got into one magazine or another and some of them into his first two story collections, while the novel is still making the rounds. Actually, he had another writing fellowship, but he doesn’t know if he’d want to talk about it, again at least not yet, even if he had the chance. Certainly nothing to do with boasting. He got it years ago, an academic fellowship, and he had to uproot himself to California at some expense to take advantage of it and about a third of the fellowship money went to the tuition of the once-a-week graduate writing seminar he had to take and he felt the criticism he got in class from the other fellows and graduate student writers set his writing back a year. Just about all of them and one of his two teachers, though they referred to themselves as coaches, hated his work, and the other teacher or coach thought he showed some promise in the short story form but none in the novel and that he was going through the obligatory experimental phase almost every serious writer in his mid-twenties does who’s been reading Faulkner, early Hemingway, Kafka, Borges and Joyce. Anyway, what he wants now, though, and he wishes he hadn’t set himself up for such a big disappointment if he doesn’t get it, he thought in his room about a week after they first met, sitting on his bed fully dressed, first week in December he thinks or last in November, for Pati’s party was right around Thanksgiving, either day after or before, holding the receiver so long the dial tone went dead, determined not to stall anymore but to call her right now or sometime tonight and if she doesn’t answer, he remembers thinking, not to wait around to call again but to go out for a short walk, maybe stop in someplace for a coffee or beer and call her from there or after he gets back home, is for her to say after they’d talked awhile about various things and he then asked her out some day for coffee — no beer: that could be the second date if the first went well—“Yes,” or “Sure, that’d be nice,” or “I don’t see why not,” or “Why not? What’s a good day and time for you and we’ll see if it jells with my own schedule? Let me get my appointment book,” but something like one of those and they work out where and when. Just imagine, he thought, if it came out like that. After he hung up the phone he’d go “Whoopee,” and make a fist and slam it through the air and maybe shout “Yeah, yeah; goddamn it, you dood it, you done dood it, you imbecile; it’s working,” and be all smiles and maybe have a shot of vodka from the bottle in the freezer or a glass of wine just to calm himself down and then go out to his neighborhood bar for a draft beer and hope his friend Manny was there — he usually was around this time; it had become his weekday nighttime hangout, first stool nearest the door if he could get it, under the shelf with the television on it and by the payphone, where he got and made calls — if when he reached her was the first time he dialed her and she answered and he hadn’t already been out for a short walk. Oh, forget it for now, he told himself or might even have said out loud. He thinks he did. “You’re still too nervous. You can call later if it’s not too late. Or tomorrow. But definitely no later than tomorrow if you don’t call tonight, around this time or late afternoon, the likeliest times, you’d think, other than early morning — and you don’t want to call anytime in the morning; that’d seem like you were desperate to reach her — when she’d be home. But again, not too late if you call at night. No later than ten, maybe ten-thirty, but not a minute after that, and probably, because your watch might be slow, no later than a few minutes before. People get uneasy when they get calls later than that. You do, anyway — a little uneasy: your mother suddenly sick or hospitalized or worse, for instance? — and she might. You can see her hearing the phone ring and looking at her watch or a clock and wondering who could be calling this late and what could it be about. And later than ten-thirty, she might be preparing for sleep. Or she might be tired after a long day and want to get to bed and be in no mood to talk. She might even be in bed or soon going to be with some guy, a boyfriend or just some man she finds attractive and likes to sleep with. You hope not. Come on, what you really hope for is that you become that guy — the boyfriend, though you’d take the other for as long as you both wanted it and