This is getting nowhere. I sigh and turn to Jean, who looks completely mystified. “Let’s go, okay?” She nods dumbly. Humiliated, I take Jean’s hand and we get up—she slower than I—brushing past the maître d’ and the couple, and make our way back through the crowded restaurant and then we’re outside and I’m utterly devastated and murmuring robotically to myself “I should have known better I should have known better I should,” but Jean skips down the street laughing, pulling me along, and when I finally notice her unexpected mirth, between giggles she lets out “That was so funny” and then, squeezing my clenched fist, she lets me know “Your sense of humor is so spontaneous.” Shaken, walking stiffly by her side, ignoring her, I ask myself “Where… to… now?” and in seconds come up with an answer—Arcadia, toward which I find myself guiding us.

After someone who I think is Hamilton Conway mistakes me for someone named Ted Owen and asks if I can get him into Petty’s tonight—I tell him, “I’ll see what I can do,” then turn what’s left of my attention to Jean, who sits across from me in the near-empty dining room of Arcadia—after he leaves, only five of the restaurant’s tables have people at them. I’ve ordered a J&B on the rocks. Jean’s sipping a glass of white wine and talking about how what she really wants to do is “get into merchant banking” and I’m thinking: Dare to dream. Someone else, Frederick Dibble, stops by and congratulates me on the Larson account and then has the nerve to say, “Talk to you later; Saul.” But I’m in a daze, millions of miles away, and Jean doesn’t notice; she’s talking about a new novel she’s been reading by some young author—its cover, I’ve seen, slathered with neon; its subject, lofty suffering. Accidentally I think she’s talking about something else and I find myself saying, without really looking over at her, “You need a tough skin to survive in this city.” She flushes, seems embarrassed and takes another sip of the wine, which is a nice sauvignon blanc.

“You seem distant,” she says.

“What?” I ask, blinking.

“I said you seem distant,” she says.

“No,” I sigh. “I’m still my same kooky self.”

“That’s good.” She smiles—am I dreaming this?—relieved.

“So listen,” I say, trying to focus in on her, “what do you really want to do with your life?” Then, remembering how she was droning on about a career in merchant banking, I add, “Just briefly, you know, summarize.” Then I add, “And don’t tell me you enjoy working with children, okay?”

“Well, I’d like to travel,” she says. “And maybe go back to school, but I really don’t know…” She pauses thoughtfully and announces, sincerely, “I’m at a point in my life where there seems to be a lot of possibilities, but I’m so… I don’t know… unsure.”

“I think it’s also important for people to realize their limitations.” Then, out of the blue I ask, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

She smiles shyly, blushes, and then says, “No. Not really.”

“Interesting,” I murmur. I’ve opened my menu and I’m studying tonight’s prix fixe dinner.

“Are you seeing anyone?” she ventures timidly. “I mean, seriously?”

I decide on the pilot fish with tulips and cinnamon, evading the question by sighing, “I just want to have a meaningful relationship with someone special,” and before she’s allowed to respond I ask her what she’s going to order.

“I think the mahi-mahi,” she says and then, squinting at the menu, “with ginger.”

“I’m having the pilot fish,” I say. “I’m developing a taste for them. For… pilot fish,” I say, nodding.

Later, after a mediocre dinner, a bottle of expensive California cabernet sauvignon and a crime brûlée that we share, I order a glass of fifty-dollar port and Jean sips a decaffeinated espresso and when she asks where the restaurant got its name, I tell her, and I don’t make anything ridiculous up—though I’m tempted, just to see if she’d believe it anyway. Sitting across from Jean right now in the darkness of Arcadia, it’s very easy to believe that she would swallow any kind of misinformation I push her way—the crush she has on me rendering her powerless—and I find this lack of defense oddly unerotic. I could even explain my pro-apartheid stance and have her find reasons why she too should share them and invest large sums of money in racist corporations tha-

“Arcadia was an ancient region in Peloponnesus, Greece; which was founded in 370 Bs.C., and it was completely surrounded by mountains. Its chief city was… Megalopolis, which was also the center of political activity and the capital of the Arcadian confederacy…” I take a sip of the port, which is thick, strong, expensive. “It was destroyed during the Greek war of independence…” I pause again. “Pan was worshiped originally in Arcadia. Do you know who Pan was?”

Never taking her eyes off me, she nods.

“His revels were very similar to those of Bacchus,” I tell her. “He frolicked with nymphs at night but he also liked to… frighten travelers during the day… Hence the word pan-ic.” Blah blah blah. I’m amused that I’ve retained this knowledge and I look up from the port I’ve been staring thoughtfully into and smile at her. She’s silent for a long time, confused, unsure of how to respond, but eventually she looks deeply into my eyes and says, haltingly, leaning across the table, “That’s… so… interesting,” which is all that comes out of her mouth, is all she has to say.

Eleven thirty-four. We stand on the sidewalk in front of Jean’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Her doorman eyes us warily and fills me with a nameless dread, his gaze piercing me from the lobby. A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It’s as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there… is… no… key.

“Dinner was wonderful,” she says. “Thank you very much.”

“Actually, the food was mediocre, but you’re welcome.” I shrug.

“Do you want to come up for a drink?” she asks too casually, and even though I’m critical of her approach it doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t want to go up—but something stops me, something quells the bloodlust: the doorman? the way the lobby is lit? her lipstick? Plus I’m beginning to think that pornography is so much less complicated than actual sex, and because of this lack of complication, so much more pleasurable.

“Do you have any peyote?” I ask.

She pauses, confused. “What?”

“Just a joke,” I say, then, “Listen, I want to watch David Letterman so...” I pause, unsure as to why I’m lingering. “I should go.”

“You can watch it…” She stops, then suggests, “at my place.”

I pause before asking, “Do you have cable?”

“Yes.” She nods. “I have cable.”

Stuck, I pause again, then pretend to mull it over. “No, it’s okay. I like to watch it… without cable.”

She offers a sad, perplexed glance. “What?”

“I have to return some videotapes,” I explain in a rush.

She pauses. “Now? It’s”—she checks her witch—“almost midnight.

“Well, yeah,” I say, considerably detached.

“Well, I guess… it’s good night then,” she says.

What kind of books does Jean read? Titles race through my mind: How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You. How to Keep a Man in Lone with You Forever. How to Close a Deal: Get Married. How to Be Married One Year from Today. Supplicant. In my overcoat pocket I finger the ostrich condom case from Luc Benoit I bought last week but, er, no.

After awkwardly shaking hands she asks, still holding mine, “Really? You don’t have cable?”

And though it has been in no way a romantic evening, she embraces me and this time emanates a warmth I’m not familiar with. I am so used to imagining everything happening the way it occurs in movies, visualizing things falling somehow into the shape of events on a screen, that I almost hear the swelling of an orchestra, can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion overhead, the seventy-millimeter image of her lips parting and the subsequent murmur of “I want you” in Dolby sound. But my embrace is frozen and I realize, at first distantly and they with greater clarity, that the havoc raging inside me is gradually subsiding and she is kissing me on the mouth and this jars me back into some kind of reality and I lightly push her away. She glances up at me fearfully.