'It won't do any good,' Joseph said. 'Really, I'm untemptable.'

'I consider that a challenge.'

Even at ten a.m., the jogging track off the wooded park next to the East River was crowded. The absence of commuter traffic freed the air of smog and exposed an unfamiliar glorious sky. Senior citizens sat on benches, enjoying the weekend's peace. On the left, in a court past a waist-high wrought- iron fence, teenagers played basketball.

Sunbathers spread blankets on grass, enjoying the unusually intense June sun. People walked dogs through the trees. What a gift, Tess thought. What a beautiful day. How rare.

She'd worn a blue jogging suit that complemented the turquoise color of her eyes. Although loose, it managed to reveal her figure, her lean, lithe body and firm, upwardly tilted breasts. A red sweatband encircled her forehead, emphasizing her short blond hair. She leaned her taut hips against the railing that separated the jogging track from the river and studied the runners surging past, many of whom listened to earphones attached to miniature radios strapped to their waists. Her own preference was not to be distracted by music but instead to devote herself exclusively to the high she gained from prolonged exercise. The Zen-like pleasure on the runners' sweating faces made her eager to join them. Soon, she thought. Joseph will be here anytime.

As she waited, she continued to be amazed by her irresistible attraction to him. Certainly he was good-looking, but Tess had gone out with many good-looking men and had never felt so intense an identification with them. Most had been so aware of their looks that she couldn't bear their egos. She'd discovered that one had been seeing three other women while pretending that Tess was the only woman he cared about. Another had been an up-and-coming TV executive whose primary interest in Tess was having someone to tell him how great he was while he gained power.

For the past six months, she hadn't gone out with anyone. Maybe that explained her attraction to Joseph, Tess thought. A combination of overwork and loneliness. But the more she considered that explanation, the more she dismissed it. There was something – she couldn't find the proper words – different about him. A handsome man who wasn't in love with his handsomeness, who treated her with deference, who was easy to talk to, who related to her as a human being, not a potential sexual conquest. All of that certainly counted. Even so, she'd never before been this insistent and candid to a man about her interest in him. Why? There was something else about him. What was it? The unfamiliar sensation not only puzzled but disturbed her.

She didn't know which direction Joseph would come from, right or left, or straight ahead through the wooded park, so she turned her gaze often, watching for him. We should have chosen a specific spot to meet, she decided and continued to scan the crowd. Still, there's no one nearby on either side of me. Joseph shouldn't have any trouble noticing where I am.

Because she'd looked forward to spending time with him, Tess had arrived here early, at quarter to ten, but now as she glanced at her jogger's watch, she was troubled to see that it was quarter after ten.

Had they failed to see each other?

She studied the crowd more intensely. Then her watch showed half-past ten and with frustrating slowness eleven o'clock, and she told herself that something important must have delayed him.

But when her watch showed eleven-thirty, then noon, she angrily understood the explanation for his absence.

This had happened to her only once, in her junior year of college, her date having gotten so drunk at a Saturday afternoon frat party that he'd become too sick to take her to a movie that night and hadn't bothered to phone to explain he wasn't coming. That had been the end of that relationship.

And now Joseph, too, had stood her up. She couldn't believe it. Disappointment fought with fury. Fury won.

The son of a…! He'd seemed too good to be true, and that's exactly what he was. Tess, we can only be friends? Well, buddy, you blew it. We're not friends.

Seething, Tess joined the stream of joggers, too distraught to bother with the preliminary ritual of stretch-and-warm-up exercises, her anger so fueling her long urgent stride that she outdistanced the fastest runners.

Bastard.

Sunday was dreary. A dismal rain reinforced Tess's depression. Bare-footed, wearing the shorts and rumpled T-shirt that she'd slept in, she sipped from a steaming cup of strong black coffee and scowled from a window of her loft in SoHo. Three floors down, across the street, a drenched pathetic cat found shelter under a seesaw in a small playground.

Behind her, the TV was on, a Cable News Network anchor-woman somberly reporting the latest environmental disaster. In Tennessee, a train pulling twenty cars of anhydrous ammonia, a toxic gas shipped in the form of pressurized liquid and used in the manufacture of fertilizer, had reached a rural section of ill-maintained tracks and toppled down an embankment. The tanks had burst, and the cargo had vaporized, spewing a massive poisonous cloud that so far had killed the entire train crew, sixteen members of families on local farms, dozens of livestock, hundreds of wild animals, and thousands of birds. A northeastern wind was directing the dense white cloud toward a nearby town of fifteen thousand people, all of whom were fleeing in panic. Emergency workers were powerless to stop the cloud and unprepared to organize so huge an evacuation. At last count, eight motorists had been killed and another sixteen critically injured in car accidents due to the chaos of the town's frantic attempt to escape. Eventually, the anchorwoman reported, the heavy gas would settle to the ground, but paradoxically, although anhydrous ammonia was used to make fertilizer, it wouldn't benefit the land. Not unless diluted. Instead its present, extremely concentrated nitrogen level (eighty-two percent) would sear hundreds of acres of woodland as well as destroy crops and become absorbed into streams, wells, ponds, and reservoirs, poisoning the town's water supply.

Tess drooped her shoulders, turned off the TV, and frowned up toward the monotonous unnerving gusts of rain on her skylight. She shuddered with the realization of how even more disastrous, almost unimaginably so, the accident would have been if it had happened near a major urban area. One day, though, that's exactly where it will happen, she knew. Because of carelessness, poor planning, badly maintained equipment, government lethargy, greed, stupidity, overpopulation, and… Tess shook her head. So many reasons. Too many. Piece by piece, the earth was dying, and there didn't seem any way to stop it.

A line from one of Yeats's poems occurred to her.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

She felt exhausted. Abandoning her plan to go to her health club this morning, she decided she needed a long hot bath. I've been pushing myself too hard. What I ought to do is curl up in bed and read the Sunday Times.

But the news would only depress her further, she knew.

Then watch some old movies, she told herself. Rent some Cary Grant screwball comedies.

But she doubted that she'd do much laughing. How could she laugh when…? Without minimizing the gravity of what had happened in Tennessee, she admitted, reluctantly, that part of her depression was the consequence of her bitterness that Joseph had failed to meet her yesterday.

Her anger still smoldered. Why would he-?

Joseph hadn't seemed the type to be rude. Okay, I admit, I came on awfully strong. I kept trying to get him to say that we could be more than friends. I overreacted. I probably scared him away.