The town of Glenn’s Mills, New York-small, nondescript, economically marginal except for the retired cardiologists and downstate corporate attorneys who buy up and rehab the old houses-rests at the bend of a river once so polluted with tannery acids it was given the name Vinegar Creek. This is the town where Arthur has made his whole life. His law firm, a one-man outfit on the town’s ten-block main street-trusts, wills, real estate, the occasional divorce-was his father’s before it was his, and though in school Arthur had thought first that he’d like to be an engineer, and then an architect, and finally a big-city lawyer, he has no regrets about living a life that was, in the end, simply handed to him: The spring of Arthur’s last year at NYU law his father, a two-pack-a-day Lucky Strike smoker, entered his office, removed his hat and coat and scarf, lit his first cigarette of the morning at his desk, rubbed his rheumatic hip once in the ice-cold room, and suffered a stroke of such lethal power that it succeeded in rearranging all the details of his son’s world in one painless instant. By the end of the week twenty-six-year-old Arthur was meeting with his father’s clients and scraping the mud from their boots off the carpet and finding that he liked it, all of it; the thousand choices of his life suddenly included the choice not to choose, and within a month he had canceled his plans to clerk for a federal circuit judge in Manhattan and was studying like mad for the bar. He telephoned the girl he’d been dating in New York-Miriam, finishing up her master’s in library science at NYU-and invited her north for a visit from which she would return for only one semester to complete her degree; she found a job in the county library, shelving books and reading to children; within a year they married. If asked, Arthur would say he didn’t so much begin his life as find it, like a wallet or a ring of keys he’d merely mislaid.

Now, for the first time in thirty years in this quiet town of trees and houses and shops-“Glenn’s Mills, New York, Gateway to the Hudson-Mohawk Valley Region”; a town where the theft of garden tools from an unlocked shed makes the papers; where the same man who cuts your hair on Tuesday will run on Wednesday to extinguish the flames of your burning house; where the shopkeeper who catches your child pocketing a package of baseball cards will close up the store and drive the boy home (O’Neil, ten years old, claimed to have done it on a dare)-Arthur has felt this life, this pattern of meaning with its exchanges of goods and services and affections, disturbed, even endangered-all because he has fallen in love with Dora Auclaire. For it is her loneliness he loves, above everything else about her; when he sees her on the street or at a party, or he finds himself, on the second Tuesday of each month, sitting across from her in the small classroom at the high school where their novel-reading group meets, and listens to her voice-calm, precise, ironic-advancing some opinion, inevitably superior to his own, about The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Crime and Punishment or A Confederacy of Dunces (and Arthur must confess: he almost never finishes these books, which tire and oppress him; he keeps going only to see her), it is her loneliness that he hears, and it is her loneliness that moves him to love her. If he found her simply pretty or clever or sexy or generous to children, Arthur would know what to do: nothing. Do nothing, and let the sensation fade over time, like the buoyant happiness that lifts his heart after certain movies, or the delicious nostalgia he feels each November when the first snow falls, evening comes on, and he walks home through early darkness and a world drenched in the dreamy half-reality of new snow. (And wasn’t there a dream he had this morning, something about flying, flying over water?) But he can’t do nothing. The core of her life is loss-a forty-foot plunge on a damp morning in May-and somehow Arthur has zeroed in on that core, and trapped himself there.

The office is quiet; above the door to the waiting room-a dim, shabby space with battered file cabinets, an old plaid sofa, a coffee table dressed with stacks of wrinkled magazines, and the desk where his secretary sits when he hasn’t given her the day off, as he has today-the clock reads ten forty-eight. He has canceled his appointments, meaning to use this wedge of time between finishing his work and leaving for New Hampshire (already he is running late; he should be out the door at eleven, to pick up their suitcases and feed the cat and hustle to the library to get Miriam, all before noon) to solve the problem of Dora Auclaire. But what is the problem, exactly? Isn’t it true that he, Arthur, has made no serious mistakes, committed no unpardonable sins against his marriage? He looks at the page, the words he has written: Dear Dora. It is written on a yellow legal pad; its length seems suddenly absurd. How will he fill such a thing? He means to record what he feels, to give it shape, to make sense of it by setting it in words. Instead, he rips the paper from the pad, wads it in his fist, tosses it in the wastebasket behind his desk (a moment’s worry-should he leave it there? But it says nothing, only a name…), and begins again:

Dear Dora.

The problem is that there is nothing to say, no story to tell and therefore finish; that nothing has, in fact, happened between them at all. And yet: like every secret Arthur’s has a history, an arc of events. Pressed, he would trace this awkward, silent moment at his desk to an afternoon a little over eight months ago, when Dora came to see him in his office. He had done some work for the clinic before-a zoning variance for an addition, permits to build it, the odd dispute with a patient over billing-so when she entered, shaking her umbrella, and told him the matter at hand was personal, he was surprised, and interested; he wondered what it could be. There was some money, she explained, that she’d inherited from an aunt-not much, just $60,000-that she wanted to put away for the boys. Could he draw up some kind of… well. What did one call it? A trust? She said the word as if she’d only just learned it, though of course she knew just what she was asking. There were beads of rain in her hair, which she wore short, in neat layers, making a dark frame around her face. She liked the sound of it, she said, smiling at him: a trust.

He offered her a seat and set to work. And how was she? And the boys? (He remembered two: Josh, the younger but a strong kid like his father; his older brother, Leo, the more delicate, a boy who liked to read and taught swimming at the Y.) He drew up the papers at his desk. It was easy work, pure boilerplate, though just the kind of work he liked-putting money aside for children. Dora named her brother, a surgeon in San Francisco, as one trustee, herself as the other; she had already visited her broker and invested the money in a sensible mixture of zero-coupon bonds and blue-chip stocks. Her will was up to date, she thought, she’d taken care of that right after Sam had died-she said this last phrase quickly, almost as one word-though if it was not too much trouble would Arthur mind having a look at it? A thick envelope, full of folded paper: she had brought it in her bag.

And so on, through that afternoon and part of another, when the papers were ready to sign. He would call her, he said, when the documents came back from the brother in California; he could mail her a copy, or else she could come to pick it up, and of course he would keep one in his office, on file, her file. Fine, she said. Fine.

They looked at one another. Their time together was through. It’s funny, she said then, buttoning her coat-and was she blushing? And was he?-it’s funny how you can enjoy doing something like this, something so mundane, with someone whom you like. Did he know that sometimes-well, once or twice-she had thought that the two of them should have lunch? She liked what he’d said in reading group about that book-Mrs. Dalloway, that was it-about how every character in the story was alone, and either succeeded at it or failed. She’d thought it right then; the two of them could be friends, real friends who did things together. But how could he have known? She’d only just told him, of course.