"The letter!" I said.

"I know, and I'm so sorry, Artichoke. Come back here," she said, pulling at my shoulders. "I can't even remember what I wrote. I know it must've been pretty silly."

"No!"

"You didn't think so?"

"No, I-well." I stood, ashamed, looking around and around for the shirt that I'd thrown off. I took a deep breath. "I lost it."

"Art!"

"No, I mean, Cleveland has it." The shirt was halfway across the room, my cigarettes in its pocket, and I tore for a while at the almost empty pack. Anything but meet her gaze.

" Cleveland! Why does he have my letter?"

"I'll get it back, don't worry. He picked it up by mistake. " The match flowered. "And lately I haven't seen him; he's been, ah, busy."

"I saw him the other day," she said, slowly. "He didn't say anything about it."

Now I turned to face her. "You did? Where?"

"But he was very strange. Art. He didn't read my letter?"

"Strange? What did he do?"

"Art, did Cleveland read my extremely private and personal letter?" She stood up now, hands on her naked hips, tossed her flyaway hair. Nearly all the light had drained from the room.

"No," I said. "Of course not."

"Well." She came over, took me in her arms, kissed me; I'd just inhaled a lungful of smoke; we parted and I exhaled gratefully, hating myself for having lied, and for having waited impatiently for the kiss to end. "I don't suppose it would really have mattered if he did, " she said.

"And he might have, you know, by now," I said lamely. "Knowing Cleveland."

"It doesn't matter." She kissed me again, a happy, dismissive peck. "I'm starved. Let's get a pizza delivered, how about?"

We half-dressed and sat on separate sides of the win-dowsill, legs entwined, watching the street for the appearance of the pizza man.

"I've been walking a lot, Art," she said, running a finger down my shin. "Very long walks, since-since our problems. Sometimes it helps me figure things out. Sometimes I just go and go without a single thought in my head."

"Alone?" I said. It was difficult to imagine Phlox setting out for a long excursion, or for anything at all, all by herself.

"Yes, alone. I've gotten much better at being alone lately."

"It's only been ten days, Phlox. You keep making it sound like I've been off sailing around the Horn."

"Well, I'm not good at being alone. It was a long ten days."

She looked away, pretending to watch two hopping robins down on the little lawn, though at first I didn't see that she was just pretending. At first I saw only her profile, that outline I knew so well, and the dim light falling past it to her ear, the mass of familiar shadows and glints, the darkness along the side of her straight nose, the tiny lights in the hairs of her upper lip, and it pleased me, as it always did, her profile, so that I was impelled now to look more closely, to toss my gaze quickly across it as across a painting reproduced in an artbook, to try to see the whole and its parts at the same time, to bear in mind the regular profile but remark the Egyptian effect of her slightly pointed chin, the fine join of earlobe and jaw, the bone beneath her eye, and as I looked, it was no longer a profile, for profiles, really, don't exist; it was Phlox's face; and I had loved it. And then, suddenly, I saw motion, the tightening of her lower lip, the flaring of her nostril, the tears that dwindled down her cheek, and I saw that she pretended to look down at the birds in the grass.

When we went to bed that night it was loud and fast again, again she took control, and I found myself, inevitably perhaps, crouching on my elbows and knees-that way; I twisted and buried my face. She said, then, in an odd, clear voice which cut through everything, that she wished she could fuck me, that there must be a way, and something very primitive deep inside me awoke with a start. I rolled over, panting, but came to a definite halt. Phlox began to sob, and I wondered, unclenching my fists, if she was crying because the thing she'd wished for had frightened her, or because she could not have it, or if it was because she knew, now, that she could have it, because somehow I had been changed.

"I didn't mean it," she said, tumbling over onto the bed.

"All right," I said. I knelt beside her, ran my fingers through her faded hair. I said things that I forgot as soon as I said them. In ten minutes we were going at it again, and although I'd wanted it to be more gentle this time, had wanted to embrace, to linger, in no time at all it was exactly like wrestling; we bit and exclaimed, and I found myself twisting her into the pose I'd held just a little while before. I stared all the way down her glistening back to the tangle of her distant head.

"Can I?" I said.

"Do you want to?"

"Can I?"

"Yes," she said. "You'd better. Now."

I went to her cluttered vanity and scooped out a dollop of cold petroleum jelly, prepared everything Arthur had trained me so well to prepare, but immediately on entering that pinched, plain orifice of so little character, I lost heart, because I simply could not understand what I was about to do; it was neither backward nor forward, or else it was both at the same time, but it was too confusing for me to desire it anymore, and I said, "It's all a mistake."

"It is not," she said. "Go, ah! go. Slow, baby." When we were through, and we'd collapsed, she said that it had hurt and it had felt all right, that it was frightening as sex could be, and I said that I knew it. We stopped talking. I felt her grow heavy, heard the slow gathering of her breath. I slipped out of bed and went to find my clothes. Dressing furtively in the darkness, pulling on each sock, I felt very happy, for one instant, as though I were rising at three in the morning for a fishing trip, and there were sandwiches and apples to be packed away. I decided not to leave a note.

Halfway home under the clear, starry sky and the un-haloed streetlamps, I had yet to form a single coherent thought, a plan of action, when it came to me that I'd forgotten to ask Phlox about Cleveland and the thing he'd said or done that was strange, and I saw then that I didn't really care. Like that, like a spasm, I spat and wished that the summer were over. Immediately afterward I felt ashamed; I covered my mouth as though I'd blasphemed or something. But a strong desire overtook me to go away, to take a plane out that morning, to go to Mexico, as Arthur had done once, and live irresponsibly in a little pink hotel; or to Italy, to sleep through blinding afternoons in a half-fallen villa; or to vanish into the railroad wastes of North America. My only commerce would be with prostitutes and bartenders. I would send postcards without a return address.

"No," I said aloud, "don't give up." But I was still fantasizing halfheartedly about the places I might visit, and the simple life that I would lead in them, when I reached my front door and heard the telephone ringing inside.

"How was Latrobe?" I said.

"Been out?"

"Yes, I've been-" I was on the point of lying, but I saw, for once and with disheartening clarity, the outcome of whatever stupid lie I might manage. I would only involve myself over again in all the tedious nonsense of juggling Arthur and Phlox. I looked at my watch, exhaled, and told him he'd better come over.

"No," he said, "I'll meet you."

Arthur house-sat now for a poli-sci professor who lived up in the hills of north Oakland, and so we met roughly halfway, at the statue of Johann Sebastian Bach in front of the Carnegie Institute, not far from the Cloud Factory. It was cool for a summer night; I shivered, sorry I'd worn only a sweatshirt, sorry that we stood so far apart, on the sidewalk beneath the giant green Bach. I was sorry, too, that the air was cold between us, that even under the best of circumstances he could not just put his arm around me and hold me to him, because this was Pittsburgh and J.S. or somebody might see, and so we stood with our hands in our pockets, two young men struggling to be in love and about to have it out.