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“I’m too busy to gas with you now,” Karl said. I heard the cash register ding again. “Thanks a million. Hey, pardon me, ladies, you want your change, don’t you? Two cents is two cents. Next. Come on, don’t be shy, sweetheart.” I waited for Karl to blast back something else infuriating, something more about my message being mixed. But he simply put the phone down without hanging it up, as if he meant to return, so that for a minute I could hear him going about his business serving customers. But in a while I put my receiver back on the hook and just stared out at the sparkling, alluring river beyond me in the dark, letting my breathing come back to normal.

My call to the Algonquin and Sally had a completely different, unexpected and altogether positive result, which, when I got home and found out Paul had weathered his surgery as well as could be hoped, allowed me to crawl in bed with all the windows open and the fan on (no more thought of reading Carl Becker or drifting to sleep) and to swoon off into profound unconscious while the cicadas sang their songs in the silent trees.

Sally, to my surprise, was as sympathetic as a blood relative to my long story about Paul’s getting beaned, our never making it into the Hall of Fame, my having to stay in Oneonta, then heading home late rather than pounding down to NYC to share the night with her, and instead dispatching her to the nicest place I could think of (albeit for another night alone). Sally said she thought she could hear something new in my voice, and for the first time: something “more human” and even “powerful” and “angular,” whereas, she reminded me, I had seemed until this weekend “pretty buttoned up and well insulated,” “priestly” (this again), often downright “ornery and exclusive,” though “down deep” she’d always thought I was a good guy and actually not cold but pretty sympathetic. (I had thought most of these last things about myself for years.) This time, though, she said, she thought she heard worry and some fear in my voice (buzzy timbres familiar, no doubt, from her dying clients’ critiques of Les Misérables or M. Butterfly on their chatty return trips to the Shore, but apparently not incompatible with “powerful” or “angular”). She could tell I’d been “vitally moved” by something “deep and complicated,” which my son’s injury may have been “only the tip of the iceberg for.” It may, she said, have everything to do with my gradual emergence from the Existence Period, which she actually said was a “simulated way to live your life,” a sort of “mechanical isolation that couldn’t go on forever;” I was probably already off and running into “some other epoch,” maybe some more “permanent period” she was glad to see because it boded well for me as a person, even if the two of us didn’t end up together (which it seemed might be the case, since she didn’t really know what I meant by love and probably wouldn’t trust it).

I, of course, was simply relieved she wasn’t sitting back with her long legs parked on a silken footrest, ordering tins of Beluga caviar and thousand-dollar bottles of champagne and calling up everybody she knew from Beardsville to Phnom Penh and regaling them at length about what a poor shiftless specimen I was — really just pathetic when you got right down to it — and actually comical (something I’d already admitted to), given my idiotic and juvenile attempts to make good. Just such narrowly missed human connections as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who’s at fault, and often result in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that “the whole goddamn thing’s not worth bothering with or it wouldn’t be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,” after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.

Sally, however, seemed willing to take a longer look, a deeper breath, blink hard and follow her gut instincts about me, which meant looking for good sides (making me up with the brighter facets out). All of which was damn lucky for me since, standing there by the dark gas station in Long Eddy, I could sense like a faint, sweet perfume in the night the possibility of better yet to come, only I had no list of particulars to feel better about, and not much light on my horizon except a keyhole hope to try to make it brighter.

And indeed, before I finally climbed back in my car and headed off into the lush night toward Jersey, she began talking at first about whether or not it would ever be possible for her to get married after all these years, and then about what kind of permanent epoch might be dawning in her life. (Such thoughts are apparently infectious.) She went on to tell me — in much more dramatic tones than Joe Markham had on Friday morning — that she’d had dark moments of doubting her own judgment about many things, and that she worried about not knowing the difference between risking something (which she considered morally necessary) and throwing caution to the winds (which she considered stupid and, I supposed, had to do with me). In several electrifying leaps and connections that made good sense to her, she said she wasn’t a woman who thought other adults needed mothering, and if that’s what I wanted I should definitely look elsewhere; she said that making her up (which she referred to then as “reassembling”) just to make love appealing was actually intolerable, no matter what she’d said yesterday, and that I couldn’t just keep switching words around indefinitely to suit myself but needed instead to accept the unmanageable in others; and finally that while she might understand me pretty well and even like me a lot, there was no reason to think that necessarily meant anything about true affection, which she again reminded me I’d said I was beyond anyway. (These accounted, I’m sure, for the feelings of congestion she experienced early Friday morning and that prompted her call to me while I was in bed snuffling over my Becker and the difference between making history and writing it.)

I told her, raptly watching while the last of the night’s anglers waded back across the ever darker but still brilliant surface of the Delaware, that I once again had no expectations for reassembling her, or for mothering either, though from time to time I might need a facilitator (it didn’t seem necessary to give in on everything), and that I’d thought in these last days about several aspects of an enduring relationship with her, that it didn’t seem at all like a business deal, and that I liked the idea plenty, in fact felt a kind of whirring elevation about her and the whole prospect — which I did. Plus, I had a strong urge to make her happy, which didn’t seem in the least way smooth (or cowardly, as Ann had said), and wished in fact she’d take the train to Haddam the next day, by which time the Markhams and the parade would be in the record books and we could resume our speculations into the evening, lie out in the grass on the Great Lawn of the Institute (where I still had privileges as temporal consultant without portfolio) and watch Christian fireworks, after which we might ignite some sparks of our own (a borrowed idea, but still a good one).

“That all sounds nice,” Sally said from her suite on West Forty-fourth. “It seems reckless, though. Doesn’t it to you? After the other night, when it seemed all so over with?” Her voice suddenly sounded mournful and skeptical at once, which wasn’t the tone I’d exactly hoped for.

“Not to me it doesn’t,” I said out of the dark. “To me it seems great. Even if it is reckless it seems great.” (Supposedly I was the one tarred with the “caution” brush.)

“Something about all those things I said to you about myself and about you, and now taking the train down and lying in the grass watching fireworks. It’s suddenly made me feel like I don’t know what I’m getting into, like I’m out of place.”