“You’re not going to give me your black cock, baby?” I thought I heard her say. I chose to hear, You’re not going to call me a black car, baby?

“You’ll have to get a yellow cab on the street.”

“What?” she asked sharply.

“I thought you asked me to call you a car.” Some people belong to you, and you to them — as relatives, lovers, friends, or only kindred passengers enjoying a romp below decks when the ship is in the middle of the ocean and land infinitely far away. You realize how unnatural it is to be there adrift, but the crossing, the defying of what is natural, is what people do, and the holding each other is what delivers you back to the harmony of yourself.

There are people who do not belong to you as well, but sometimes your inborn sense of orientation is dampened, or you think to ignore it. I handed her the rest of her clothes.

“I’ll take the subway,” she said.

“It is too late.”

“Then I’ll go down, and wait on the street.” She stormed angrily out of the apartment into the hall, looking thwarted and humiliated.

I followed her to the elevator, and rode down with her to the lobby. I had brought her home through some fault in my instinct I was nonetheless responsible to. She refused to meet my eye, and when we reached the street she began walking away in the pale morning light. I went after her, wondering how I found myself in such a situation, until she stopped at last, and a taxi pulled up to the curb.

“Goodnight,” I told her, as she ducked in. “Get home safely.”

She glowered a moment, refusing to speak, and radiating a look of utter contempt as she closed the door.

I went to the deli for breakfast, hoping Mr. Lee might be there to make light of my troubles. He had not arrived yet, no doubt he was home with his family. I took my egg sandwich and ate as I walked the deserted morning streets back to my apartment, empty but for the pigeons in their nooks, seagulls fishing over the river, and, high above them, a pair of red-tailed hawks, arcing and diving together upon their prey.

I was surprised when she tried to reach me the next day, and did not answer her call. I did not know what to say to her, and preferred to forget the entire encounter. I was nagged only by the question of what we owe those with whom we have shared intimate space, even if it’s haphazard or ill-advised. Minutes later, she sent a text saying she wished to apologize, and I told her it was not necessary. When she called again I relented, thinking she deserved the opportunity to be heard and unburden herself. The feeling of closure and possibility of atonement.

I had an appointment near Union Square that afternoon, and offered to meet for an early evening drink, thinking it better to handle the matter face to face. She agreed, and asked to meet at the Boathouse in Central Park, at six thirty.

It was eleven o’clock already, and my head pulsed with a self-reproaching hangover, making it impossible to concentrate and get any work done. I browbeat myself to the gym, and afterward went to meet my former editor, Bea, for coffee.

Bea was seated in a booth near the window when I arrived. Her white hair fashionably cut, her dark eyes awake and focused as ever. She looked older than I last remembered, but radiated the same keen presence that struck me each time I saw her. It was an alertness that inspired confidence in whomever she gave her attention to, not merely in her but in a world that could produce such a magnificent person. It was reassuring just to be near her.

She saw me enter, and waved me over to the same table we had sat at when we first met, where she had appraised each new arrival, weighing their merits and defects without seeming judgment, like some wise, ancient elder who had seen all the spectrum of experience. The conversation that first evening went on into the small hours, as we discussed the best of what had been written and said, thought and acted upon. I was twenty-eight at the time, working as a stringer for the Associated Press, and more than a career opportunity it seemed to me the chance to learn from someone I respected.

She had dedicated herself to the same long conversation I joined that night since the sixties, and had never wavered in her seriousness of purpose or way of being, even if that way of being was esteemed differently in the current moment. It was right, I thought, the one, true way, even if by the time I met her it was already clear New York was in the depths of a gilded nadir, from which her kind of questioning, or seeking, had been banished. She wanted to speak “truth to power.” It seemed quaint, now. And I saw her for the old hippie she was, the product of another time. Still I respected her as much as anyone I had ever met, because I had learned more from her than I had in my entire educational experience up until the moment we met, loved her in the unique way we love those we admire in our youth, when I thought if civilization ever needed to be remade from the first brick, hers was the hand I would want on the compass.

I knew she was dedicated to a cause she was too old to know had been vanquished, a fact that made me appreciate sitting there again that much more, because even if it was untenable it had been a beautiful, well-meaning vision, from a different time in America, and as a young man it had spoken to me as the only wisdom I needed. She was, I finally realized the day I quit and stunned her into a taciturn silence, my intellectual mother figure.

“So?” Bea asked, her gentle, unassuming voice carefully calibrated to a point midway between professional and personal familiarity. “How are you?”

“Everything is fine,” I said.

“Really and truly?” She looked appraisingly at the remnant signs of my hangover. I felt naked and ashamed.

“Yes. I just had a late night.”

“You should enjoy your youth.” She nodded and waved it off, as we eventually came to what was on her mind, an assignment somewhere awful I had once been before.

“Not on your life,” I answered, without thinking to soften it. I had kept abreast of the story, but I did not wish to go back. Witnessing such things did not prevent slavery, or the last war, or the next one; to say nothing of the genocides that did not affect the interests of anyone with the power to stop them. No one was interested in political murder, let alone the soul murder that happened every day. Nothing I had ever done and nothing I could ever do would prevent the massacre she wanted me to report from continuing. The only people who would read such a report in any case were those already constitutionally against such things, and they had no power. Nor did I, so it would only make me suffer, which is what I told her.

She was not the kind of person you refused lightly. I had never heard anyone tell her no, in fact, unless it was someone with something to hide. But she merely smiled at me indulgently so that I immediately understood my own foolishness.

“You’re in pain,” she nodded, “and world weary. I suppose I should have known. I feel horrible about what happened.”

“Things happen all the time. Life moves on,” I said.

“Yes and other platitudes.” She held me in her eye a moment, then closed her eyelids in sympathy, as a car passed on the street blasting music loud enough to come through the windows. “Why do people listen to that?” she asked.

“It connects with them,” I answered.

“Don’t they know they are just selling every kind of falsehood?”

“They would say they are winning at America.”

“A lie is a lie. All that talent, all that energy. People like that are supposed to be leaders, if I may comment on it. But maybe I’m too old to understand.” She turned her thoughts back to the assignment.

I wanted to say yes, and I needed the work, but I simply could not bring myself to agree. I respected her, but felt then she only saw a portion of what we were talking about, and because of that a chasm opened between us, and also another, between what I knew and what I could say.