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 it could always lead to something deeper — and you never know. You can look at what you’re giving off in a different way than you did before. You’re actually still not a bad-looking guy and she never has to see that you’re missing most of your back teeth, and you’re built well, tall, not much blubber. Okay, you have lost a fair amount of hair and nothing you can do about that, certainly not comb it over. But you’ve got brains and a sense of humor and you are a serious writer and published — there are plenty of serious writers your age who can’t even say that, or not published in so many places — and it’s happened with a couple of women as beautiful, or almost as beautiful as she. Give it time. Whatever you do — all this, of course, predicated on her agreeing to that first meeting — don’t push it faster than it should go. You think you know what you’re saying there. If all works out, it could end the way it did with the two other beauties, but better, and one of them — the other said she’d never marry you, when you raised the possibility; being married once was enough, she said, just as her one kid was all the children she wanted: that living together till either one of you lost interest in the other was as far as it could ever go — you were even engaged to, only time you were engaged, and came weeks or months away from marrying her, when she broke it off. Why? Some bullshit excuse that was nowhere near the truth. Their different religions and also that she didn’t want to get tied down so young. She was how old? Twenty-five or twenty-four. Twenty-four, spring of ’61, and you were a few months older. Maybe in the future, she said. Truth is, she didn’t love you that much, nothing like the way you did her, and she didn’t want to come out with it because she didn’t want to hurt you. And when you grabbed her shoulders and shook her back and forth and screamed for her to give you the real reason she was breaking it off and admit she was getting rid of you for good, she told you to get your things together — she hadn’t planned to ask you this soon, she said — and leave her apartment because she was afraid you were next going to hit her. ‘I could, I could,’ you said. But enough; no more talking to yourself out loud or at least not to go on so long with such chatter. Bad sign. Of what? Of the obvious.” Anyway, it’s not like he has a problem. He’s not crazy, in other words. Talking to himself out loud isn’t something he does regularly or has ever done, far as he can remember, at such length before. He was just horsing around, so what’s the harm? — nobody was here to listen. And the butterflies — butterflies and horse, he thought; anything to make of that? — are gone. Went when he decided not to call her just yet and maybe not even till tomorrow. So maybe that’s why he talked out loud to himself so long. To get his mind off the call he knows he’s going to make. Something like that. He remembers slamming the receiver down fast after one or two rings the two times he dialed her entire number. So there’d be no chance she’d answer the phone and hear him putting the receiver down without saying anything. He thought she’d be alarmed or concerned in some way if she heard the slams. But he thinks he got the receiver down before she’d be able to pick up the phone. He just didn’t want to get caught. Caught how? She wouldn’t have known it was he slamming the receiver down. She might have guessed, though, maybe not the first time but the second — a wild guess, maybe something to do with the nervous and erratic way he thinks he acted with her by the elevator and then in it and later on the street and also that someone ringing and quickly hanging up twice in so short a time in one night, and the chances are pretty poor it could be two different callers, would seem less like an accident than only once would be — that it was he and wonder, if she was right, and it increasingly looks like she is, she might think, why he didn’t stay on the phone. Butterflies in his stomach at speaking to her? she might think. She’s so beautiful and desirable that it’s probably happened, and she’s aware of it, with other guys when they first called her for a date, he bets. If she asks, when he does finally call her, did he call her twice before or twice in a row last night and hang up after the first rings — it was just so unusual, she could say, and she thought, for some reason, it might have been him — he could say it wasn’t, this is the first time he called, or he did call those times she said and he hopes he didn’t upset her, and then give an excuse. Suddenly had to go to the bathroom and she might say “Twice?” and he could say “Yes, unbelievable as it might sound — and I don’t have a health problem with it, by the way — twice.” “Why didn’t you call back after?” she might say, and he wouldn’t know what to say to that, or not right away, so some other excuse. He’s good at excuses, or usually. He’s a good liar, is what he means. Probably has something to do with being a writer, or what helped him or steered him into being one. “I suddenly — just after your phone started ringing — got an idea for a story,” he could say. “I’m a writer, you see — I don’t know if I told you that night we met — fiction, only — so an idea for a story involving several phone conversations, though not one with you, and wanted to write it down before I lost it, and hung up. I figured I could always call you back later, but a good story idea, when I lose it I usually lose it for good. I hope you didn’t mind, hearing the ringing cut off. And I was right. Wrote the idea down, then started on the first draft of the story right after — somehow got caught up in it — and I wrote the entire first draft in one sitting and it’s a story I like and that stays with me, so after I finished the work I was working on — a short-short that took much longer that I thought — I started the first draft of the new one and will work on it till it’s done.” “I can understand your hanging up for that,” she could say, “but why did you hang up a second time without waiting for me to answer?” “Did I say I hung up twice?” he could say. “I guess I did. Well, to be honest, and it wasn’t something I thought quite right to talk about in our first phone call, but the first time I hung up — getting the story idea was the second — occurred when I all of a sudden had to go to the bathroom. I have no medical problem with it, you see. I just waited too long.” “What’s the story about,” she could say, “other than involving several phone conversations?” He could say “Oh, I’m very bad at summarizing my plots — they always come out sounding idiotic and trite — but I’ll give it a try. It’s about a writer, pretending to be a customer, who phones several bookstores in town asking if they have his newly published book. Saying things like ‘I think I have his name and the title right — anyway, it’s supposed to be an exceptional novel.’ Or ‘I tried getting it at a bookstore closer to my home but it was all sold out,’ etcetera. None of the seven or eight stores he calls carry his book or had planned to and most of them hadn’t even heard of it. Maybe all of them hadn’t heard but they just didn’t want to admit it. His aim, or course, was to generate interest in the book and increase sales. What he finds out, though, is that his novel, far as interest and sales go, is pretty much a flop, which will hurt if not kill his chances of selling his next novel to the same publisher. Not to go on too long about this, most of the salespeople he speaks to on the phone say they can special-order the book for him and have it in the store, depending on its distributor, in a matter of days. To the first one he says something like — to the others he just says ‘Don’t bother’ or ‘No thanks’—‘Yes,’—and all this will change a little to a lot in the final draft, since I do more than one of them and am always changing the text—‘Yes, please order it for me — I wish the bookstore near me had suggested that — and I’ll drop by in a few days to pick it up,’ which he had no intention to. And this woman, or maybe it was a man — doesn