During the day I would call places like Alaska and ask distant-voiced scientists about the mating habits of the musk-ox. I was good at my job because I had too much time on my hands and didn't mind putting in extra hours, asking a million extra questions and making perfect copies of my research reports.

I dated a bunch of men with names like Richard and Christopher (multisyllable names were «in» again) who, when taken together, didn't add up to one Danny James. His letters from Italy were full of freshness and life. The guys I was seeing were trying their damnedest to be cool and wise and infallible. They took me to grim Bulgarian movies (in the original language) and then explained the story to me afterward in lousy coffeehouses. Danny liked to talk about the funny mistakes he'd made and how silly he'd looked or felt as a result. He would write a whole letter about a meal of bad pasta that would make me laugh out loud. So many of the sentences had his face. Unfortunately for the Richards and Christophers, I would inevitably receive one of these treasured letters a few hours before a date with one of them and, as a result, I'd be a grump all night.

Yet, just before summer arrived that year, I did something incredibly stupid. Tired of being efficient by day and lonely by night, I went to bed with a beautiful German photographer named Peter (pronounced «Pay-ter») who made me swoon in my seat the first time he entered the office. Casual affairs had always repelled me, but I had never really experienced lust at first sight. I slept with him on our second date. He took me out for dinner in a very tall building that had a view over all of Manhattan. We ate the most delicious things on the menu and he talked about the ruins of Petra, the game the Afghanis play called _bushkhazi_, an evening he'd spent at a cafй in Alexandria with Lawrence Durrell.

He never looked me in the eye once in all the times we went to bed in the next months. He preferred to rest his handsome chin on my shoulder every time we «made love.» He wasn't good and he wasn't bad: he was just «Pay-ter» who told wonderful stories and expected you to do more than he did once you were in bed. Since there was little else in my life then besides letters from the distant Danny James, I convinced myself I was in love with Peter.

Psychologists say you should never go food shopping when you're hungry, because at that point everything you see looks delicious and you buy strictly on impulse. Popcorn, oysters . . . it doesn't make any sense because your stomach is saying yes to everything, whether it's logical or nutritious or just junk. I met Peter when I was hungry and everything he was looked like a feast.

When I found out I was pregnant, it took me three days to get up the nerve to tell Peter. He told me I was lovely and a wonder, but it wasn't love; he said he had a friend who knew a good abortionist. I said I would do my own shopping around and did. I was too young and sure of my wonderful future to think about losing the child. Somewhere far-off in my mind I knew I wanted to have children later in life, but not now. Not with a man who didn't love me – and not with my mind full of fear and anger and blinking red lights.

What I remember most about the whole experience was the serene sense of comfort and soft calm I felt when I woke up in a hospital bed late one August afternoon, childless again. I never wanted to leave that bed with its crunchy-white sheets and buttery light pouring in through the window.

I went back to my small apartment and opened a magazine. The first thing I saw was a photograph of a family having a picnic in a bright green meadow. I think I looked at that picture for ten minutes. I had left a child in that hospital. I didn't want the child, even with that photograph in my aching lap, but that didn't matter. I felt like there was nothing left – not someone I loved, not a child of that love, nothing.

I didn't go mad or anything so dramatic, but I did fall into a depression as deep and dark as the sea at night. I became even more efficient at my job and started reading books on advanced mathematics and architecture when I went home at night. I wanted to keep my mind filled with things that were clean and sharp and logical: pictures of buildings that rose straight off the earth like rockets.

I went to a woman analyst who told me I was beautiful and witty and absolutely right to abort because my body was my own. But her feminist pep-talks only made me sadder and less sure of myself than before. I didn't want to be independent; I wanted to love someone and feel comfortable with my life.

One night I realized that the only person I knew who could come close to understanding my confusion was Danny. So I sat down and wrote him a ten-page, single-spaced letter telling him about my relationship with Peter and the abortion and how it was affecting me. I so vividly remember going to the post office the next day to mail it. After I'd slipped it into the box, I closed my eyes very tightly and said, «Please, please, please.»

A week later I received a telegram from Milan saying:

WHY DID YOU WAIT TO TELL ME? THE FIRST THING

I'M GOING TO DO IS PUNCH YOU IN THE NOSE.

ARRIVING TUESDAY FLIGHT 60/TWA/KENNEDY.

I spent the entire weekend rushing around shopping, cleaning my apartment (twice), shaking my head in disbelief that Danny was actually arriving in a few days. What was even more unbelievable was that from all accounts, his trip was in response to my confused letter. Did people still rush to another's side to help and comfort? My whole spirit clapped its hands at the thought.

Riding out to the airport on the bus, I kept smoothing the wrinkles in my new dress and said again and again under my breath, «Flight 60 TWA. Flight 60 TWA.»

The plane was forty-five minutes late in arriving and by the time people started emerging through the gate, I think I'd gone to the bathroom three times. I waited and waited; had gone up and down on my tiptoes a hundred times before I saw this wonderful, familiar giant emerge behind all the other pygmy passengers.

He bent down and gave me a big kiss on the lips. His smile was like sitting by a warm fire with the best book you've ever read.

«That's the first time I ever kissed you like that, isn't it? How come I waited so long?»

«And how come you're so tall? I forgot, sort of.»

We walked toward the exit and I had to take two steps to match his every one. I kept looking up at him to make sure he was really there and not just in my best dreams. I envied no one else in the world.

Outside, waiting for a cab to take us back to the city, he towered over everyone with both his height and his pure calm. People screeched and ran by, buses blatted smoke thick as lead, planes carved the air overhead. Danny stood there and smiled at it all.

«You know, it's nice to be back in horrible old New York, Cullen.»

I got up on tiptoes and gave him a big smooch on his sandy cheek. «Only you would get a kick out of this mess.»

A shabby Checker cab rambled up and the driver came out so fast I thought he'd been catapulted.

«The city? You goin' inna city? Hah?»

«How much?»

«We go the meter! What, you think I'm a crook or somethin'? «

Cabdrivers in New York are either autistic or philosophers; there's rarely an in-between. We'd happened on a philosopher-complainer who kept yakking the whole forty minutes into town. That was nothing new, but Danny yakked right back. The driver's name was Milton Stiller and by the time we were shimmying over the Tri-Borough Bridge, Danny was calling him «Milt» and asking pertinent questions about his wife, Sylvia.

There are people who will talk to anyone and find something interesting in them. I'm not one of them, but I learned fast that Danny was. People felt comfortable and at home with him, innately sensing he'd neither judge nor betray their confidences, no matter what they were. Our new friend Milton had probably been griping his woes at captive customers for twenty years. But Danny listened and talked and was the kind of human being we all want to kidnap and take home forever and never share with anyone else. Milt invited us over to dinner just before we got out in front of our apartment house. He said he knew Sylvia would love us.