"In part."

"Your work takes you away. How is that different?"

"When I leave, I leave because I must," I said. "You could have stayed in Boston." Susan started to speak. I made a stop sign with my hand. "It's more than that. You went willingly, you aren't…" The more I talked the more churlish it sounded. It wasn't churlish inside. "You aren't sorry. You're having a good time."

"And you'd like it better if I weren't?"

When I had been a small boy someone told me that the blood in your veins was blue, the way it looked through the skin, and that it only turned red when you exposed it to air. What I felt was one thing when I kept it in. It changed color entirely when I exposed it.

"I would like it better if you seemed to be missing me more."

Susan drank some of her wine and put the glass down very carefully, as if the table were shaky. She looked at the glass for a time, as if it were something she'd suddenly discovered. Then she raised her eyes and looked at me.

"Until I was twenty I was my father's princess, his little JAP. And then I was my husband's wife, the ornament of his career, and after the divorce, not very long after, I met you and became your"-she made a wiffling gesture with her hand-"friend. Always me was perceived through you- you my father,you my husband, you my friend."

"By whom?" I said. When I was serious my English was good.

"By all of us. By me and by you, all of you. Down here there's no intermediary lens, no you through which me is seen. Here I am what I am and a great many people are very much taken with me because of what I am and they never even heard of you. Yes, I love that. And yes, I miss you. But missing you is a price I have to pay in order to become completely me. At least for a while. And goddamn it, it's a price I am glad to pay. I sort of expected you'd understand better."

"I kind of hoped I would too," I said. "I'm doing the best I can."

"So," Susan said with emphasis, "am I."

I drank some wine. The truth kept turning to confusion as I tried to speak it. "I think what you're saying I can handle," I said. "But I think you've overcommitted. You are becoming your work. You don't talk the same. You use the jargon of the profession, you drink the drink of the profession, you know who the important people are and get next to them. You've begun to believe in potluck suppers to boost morale. I'm not sure how much you're becoming yourself."

"I'm not becoming myself," Susan said. "I'm trying out selves, I'm working up a self. That's part of the problem. I never had a center, a core full of self-certainty and conviction. I've merely picked up the colorations of the yous: my father, my husband, my…"-she smiled a little- "… friend. Of course I'm becoming more shrink-y than the shrinks. I'm like a kid in her first year at college. And if it helps you any, you might think of me that way, leaving the nest. Even explaining myself limits me, it's intrusive, it compromises me. I want to do what I want to do."

"Unless your supervisor tells you not to," I said.

"That's not fair. It's not… it's not even insightful. You still can't get outside your own view. You can't understand someone without a goddamned code. You don't see that for millions of people, male and female, the workplace is the code."

I shook my head. "You have committed yourself to everything I've worked all my life to stay free of."

"I know," Susan said.

"You endorse a way of life I find not only uninviting, I… I disapprove of it."

Susan nodded.

"I always assumed," I said, and twiddled with my-wineglass as I said it, "I always assumed that someone who found his or her identity the way you're finding yours was…"-I spun the stem of the wineglass slowly between my fingers and watched the round bottom circle slowly on the table linen-"shallow."

Susan's gaze on me was steady. "It's a view you tend to impose on anyone close to you. You believe things very strongly. It burdens people."

I nodded. "A person might need to get away from me," I said. "To develop her own views." I stopped twirling the wineglass and picked it up and drank some wine. Then I took the wine bottle from the bucket and poured some more into Susan's glass and mine.

"The thing is, you're not shallow," I said. "And if you were, it wouldn't matter. Not only would I follow you into hell. I'd follow you into AT amp;T."

Susan sampled some of her sole.

"So I was wrong about that," I said. "Makes me wonder what else I was wrong about. Makes me doubt myself. Screws up my autonomy."

I took a bite of my squab. It was delicious. I tried the cabbage; it had a magnificent smoky taste.

"How come I'm still hungry when my heart is breaking?" I said.

Susan smiled. "Old habits are hard to shake," she said.

"The other thing that's killing me," I said, "is, I suppose, a problem of excessive self-concern. But I have offered you what I had always thought was the most desirable thing in the world. I have loved you absolutely, and completely, and without reservation. And I still do. I guess I'm feeling that you are not grateful."

"Good heavens," Susan said. "You're human after all."

"But that's not your problem, is it? That's mine."

"Yes," Susan said. "It would be worth your while to think about whether you love me for my sake or yours."

"I don't want to do that," I said.

"Why not?"

"Everybody needs one pipe dream," I said.

"Love?"

"Romantic love," I said. "I won't give it up."

I followed Gerry Broz around the next day while Washington dug out from what they seemed to think had been Armageddon. In Boston we would have said the storm missed us. Gerry didn't do anything more remarkable than go to class and then go to the library and then go back to his apartment.

I wandered along behind him and looked at the Georgetown campus. It was a big one, spreading down from the Georgetown Medical Center on Reservoir Road to the low bluff above the river. The older buildings were fieldstone Gothic and the new ones were brick.

In the evening Gerry went up to the library and did more research. While I browsed nearby, three coeds stopped to chat with him. Twice he went outside and smoked a cigarette, and at 9:15 he folded up his notebooks and went back to his apartment. I watched the light in his bedroom window until it went off at 11:30, then I dragged back to the Hay Adams and went to bed exhausted. Sometimes the excitement of an archcriminal is more than a man can manage.

Next morning I was back at it, a thrill a minute. This time we didn't go to class. We strolled briskly down M Street to a coffee shop where Gerry talked with two very young girls, high school age at best, sitting in a booth, for maybe a half hour. Then we set out on a walking tour of Georgetown, stopping at five homes along the way. I noted the address each time. No novice I.

Broz wasn't in any of the homes for more than five minutes. Then he returned briskly to his apartment, opened up the garage, got out a red Datsun 280-Z with a T-roof and headed downtown. I followed him in the rental car. He went straight down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, around it on one of the circumference roads, and back onto Pennsylvania on the hill, southeast of the Capitol. He parked about two blocks along, got out, and made another series of visits like the ones he'd made in Georgetown. Then he got back into the car and drove to F Street just east of the White House and went into the Old Ebbitt Grill where he had lunch with three other guys his age, one of whom wore a Georgetown warm-up jacket.

The restaurant was narrow and antique-looking, rising three stories, and divided into several small dining rooms. I had a beer and a hamburger at the bar while Gerry and his associates feasted on the next floor up.