When the taxi reached my apartment, the night we first met, I still had not decided to kiss her. “Are you going to invite me in?” she asked.

In the morning when she left, I felt it had been a fine evening, but that would be the end of it. She was the kind of girl who went home with a man she had just met. I was the kind of man who had taken a strange woman home. There it ought to remain.

I called the next day out of a sense of consideration, not intending to signal anything more than fondness, and to keep from adding to anyone’s negative experience of the world.

She was careful as well. Telling me she had had fun without regret. We chatted awhile, until she seemed confident again, as she had been the night before. As we talked my interest in her was rekindled. She was not as boring as most doctors, who, because of the way they are trained, usually develop only one part of the mind. Before the call ended I asked her to dinner the following Saturday.

She told me she had to work. “It’s not that I don’t want to see you. It’s just. that is when the world goes all to hell and people fall apart. Whatever holds them together during the week dematerializes, then they slip. They spill out of themselves. They crash. They burn. They overdose, or else go into withdrawal. They stab and shoot the people who love them, and generally rage and bleed and come undone all over the place. Afterwards they show up in the emergency room with their regrets, shame, anger, and sad confusion exposed for the whole goddamn world to see. If it wasn’t my job I would not look, but it is just as wrong not to do something, so I try to stitch them back together into some human shape as best I can, but what’s really the matter is always deeper than whatever wound I am suturing. But it is only an emergency room, so a temporary fix-up is all I can do.”

She was beginning to have what sounded like a panic attack, which she managed to prevent. I was not afflicted by them myself, but I was sympathetic to people who were. It was dinnertime by then, and neither of us wished to dine alone.

The next morning we made plans for the following week, setting the frequency to follow, although we were careful never to assume anything, and limited our communication, from one date to the next. Three months into what had become an unspoken understanding, we permitted ourselves to grow genuinely intimate in certain moments, but never beyond the moment itself. An animal baying in the nighttime, that never ventured any closer.

I did not ask what she did the other days of the week, nor open to what she called the box of things that haunted me. I still thought of it as a passing affair, in fact, until one of my friends referred to her as my girlfriend. She was not in the usual sense, but fixed in a state where neither of us wanted to push the other for definition, or press ourselves for clarity. We were simply sliding along in that way that happens in the city.

Whatever we named it or did not, though, after eight months it had grown more intricate, tendrils of expectation, obligation, questions poking forth and hanging in the air. It was this lingering doubt that multiplied our time together, though we knew that was not an acceptable standard. The diffuse, unsatisfied energy of the relationship also kept us from any clarity, and kept us from knowing what our true desire was. It was only abject fear of a muddled, false life that finally stirred me awake.

That Thursday we had tickets to a performance at Lincoln Center, and met at a bar down the street from the hospital where she worked. When we finished our drinks, the early spring weather was alluring and we decided to walk to the theater, chatting idly as we made our way down the rich Westside streets, full of lighthearted ease.

After the show Devi had made reservations for us at a restaurant near Gramercy Park, where we sat out in the garden, which had just opened for the season. The tables had been artificially distressed to look like antique farm tables from the country, and we enjoyed a seasonal meal among the heirloom plants that had provided our salads.

At the end of the meal she suggested a nightcap on the Lower East Side. I still had not unburdened my mind, because I did not like having intimate conversations in public. The weather was still fair, and the food had been satisfying, and her beauty was intoxicating in the candlelight, and I was divided. Wondering if I could will myself to love her. We went for one more drink.

“What is it?” she prodded, testing my drifting thoughts as we walked past a happy young couple, wheeling a stroller.

When I grew pensive, she knifed the silence. “I see where this is headed,” she divined, following my eyes after the family.

“What do you see?” I asked, as we floated past the bar and hit Canal Street, where the stench of trash from the fishmongers, piled up curbside, was overwhelming.

“We should break up. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” She tried to sound clinical and matter of fact, taking a cigarette from her handbag and lighting it. As she exhaled with detached coldness, the emotion it masked made me retreat further into my own doubt. My emotions were at odds, and I still did not understand which to trust.

“I think we should decide if we want to have a serious relationship,” I said. “I’m not comfortable with casual anymore.”

“You think we should decide,” she said tentatively, parsing each word. “Don’t you know what you want?”

“We are not in love,” I blurted. It sounded awful even to my own ear, and I immediately began trying to reclaim the words from the air and put forth something more decent in their place. “Maybe we can be.”

“No, we are not, and no, we cannot. But we are having fun.”

“I don’t want to have fun. I want to have a relationship.”

She laughed, then we both did. The temperature had dropped and she wrapped her arms around her shoulders.

“I did not think you wanted a relationship,” she said. “I don’t want a relationship. I want to enjoy my youth.”

“Alone?” I asked. “You know, serious people have serious relationships. They choose intimacy, and give themselves fully to a passionate connection with another being, even if they make commitments.”

“My mother married young,” she said. “I’ve seen what that’s like. I’ll do it when I am thirty-three,” she calculated. “I’ll get married at thirty-five and have children at thirty-seven. Until then, what’s wrong with this?”

I thought to protest, to pour out the contents of my heart, but I did not wish to turn it into a conflict or risk rejection. I took off my jacket and placed it over her bare shoulders.

“Why now?” Devi asked again, pulling the lapels of the jacket tight.

“No reason. Only that it has been eight months, and I do not think we should continue like this anymore.”

“We have a good time together.”

“I want more than just a good time.”

“Call me in two years.”

“What are you going to do if it doesn’t work out the way you have planned?”

“I froze my eggs,” she looked up at me. It was as much emotion as had ever flowed between us. “I refuse to let my life be circumscribed by anything, including my body. Know what I mean?”

I nodded. “I guess so. But we both know it’s not that. I mean, it’s not like we fell head over heels for each other.”

“Is that what you want? Head-over-heels madness? That is just the brain producing chemicals. You don’t let your brain lead you around randomly. You decide. Someone makes sense for you, and what you want in life at that time. The other thing is crazy and frightening.”

She touched my arm lightly. “If it took you this long to realize you really want me, maybe it’s a sign you really don’t.” She had warmed enough from walking to turn down the lapels again, and took off the jacket, handing it back to me.

“I thought we would find out,” I shook my head, declining the blazer.