The Book of V.

in until the girls somehow go to sleep. Hal and Jace’s place is close, on Seventh Street, a garden-/parlor-floor arrangement in a building they seem to own. But Jace is not there, only the chili. Jace has a late meeting, too. So after the chili has been eaten and the children dispatched somewhere downstairs to watch a show, Lily finds herself standing in Jace’s kitchen with Hal, who has handed her a can of beer. The beer is cold. A long silence passes between them. Hal leans against the sink in his canvas pants and T-shirt while Lily stares into a middle distance so as not to look at the photos on the fridge. She tries to think. She gets as far as, Oh please, I am not going to be that woman; it’s too predictable, too depressing in its predictability; hello midlife, hello grief, hello lust, hello there was not supposed to be this kind of wanting on the heels of death … but now a line is being drawn in her ear. A finger is following the curve there, slipping down the side of her neck, curling forward into the hollow, where it rests, on her pulse. Her hand stays on the beer, her other in her jeans pocket, but she waits for his mouth, opens to it, feels a silent, trembling wail fill her throat, falls in. Their kissing is a kind of kissing she once did with some regularity, sloppy and urgent and wet, a kind of dredging each other with their tongues and teeth. His hand is under her shirt. Her breast is out of her bra. Her hand is out of her pocket, feeling for him. And it keeps going like this, like they are teenagers in a field, pushing and pressing and pawing but with minimal contact so that the contact, where it is made, sears and enflames. There is no looking, it’s always dark in the field, there is only touching, and there is no noise, there are children nearby, and then it’s done, because the children are done, and clomping up the stairs, begging for dessert.

5B, the doorman tells her the next day. Then, This way. Then, Ma’am? Lily nods, and moves toward the elevator. She knows she wants to be here. She has made a great effort to be here. But the emptiness is bad today. It climbs into her sternum. It says, Retreat. Slump back down Vivian Barr’s Upper West Side block with its cabbagelike plants blooming between the trees and their little fences. Get back on the train. Go back to bed.

Still, she pushes the buttons. She rises.

“Welcome.”

To Lily’s right, Vivian Barr stands in an open doorway, wearing a belted dress and a pair of orange-velvet pumps, and Lily feels immediate regret at her own choices: a wool skirt and cowl-neck sweater, both nice, but still. One of her friends calls cowl-necks “the new aging woman’s cardigan,” and here Lily is wearing one to visit a woman decades her senior who is pulling off a V-neck dress and heels.

“Come, Georgie,” says Vivian Barr, and for a moment Lily worries she is confused. Then a small dog trots out and begins to sniff at Lily’s boots. “Shall we let her in?” Vivian Barr asks.

And the dog, though it seems impossible, nods.

The apartment is stately, as Lily expected, but not large. High ceilings, substantial moldings. A living room into which they do not go, a hall lined with art, a galley kitchen connected by an archway to a dining room painted in a dark hue that some decorator in Brooklyn would probably call tarnished pewter. Here it does not seem false, though. A mahogany table is set with two woven placemats, each laid with a dessert plate, saucer, and tea cup. A massive plant fills the window, catching what little light reaches a midfloor apartment at noon. Lily understands that it’s a lovely scene, one that in another era of her life would make her feel serene, but in this era, today, she wishes Vivian Barr would turn on the chandelier. She wishes there were lunch instead of tea, music instead of silence. Vivian Barr has gone into the kitchen, where a kettle is boiling, leaving Lily to arrange herself awkwardly in the arch, neither in nor out of the space. She watches as the older woman attends to various tasks, moving with striking efficacy. She dons an apron, seizes tongs from a drawer, shuts the drawer, opens her oven. She is reaching for the lowest rack when she teeters and begins to tip forward.

It’s possible that Lily is wrong about this, that the habit of bracing for Ruth to fall is distorting her perception. But her hand is on Vivian Barr’s shoulder before she can stop herself, and even as she recants internally she continues to hold on, as if she might prevent Vivian Barr from falling headfirst into the oven and at the same time pretend she’s not touching her.

Vivian Barr does not fall. She stands, removes her slight, sharp shoulder from beneath Lily’s palm, and arranges two scones on a dish.

“I pick up Georgie’s doo every day,” she says, without looking at Lily.

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

Vivian Barr hands the dish to Lily, fills a teapot with boiling water, takes a trivet from a drawer, and leaves the room. “It is possibly true that I should wear more sensible shoes,” she says.

“Oh!” Lily cries, following. Her fear has woken her up, shaken the emptiness from her scales. “No! I love your shoes.”

Vivian Barr pours tea. Everything matches, from the teapot to the sugar dish. “I hope you like Darjeeling,” she says, and Lily, feeling certain that she has insulted the woman by seeming obsequious or condescending or both, says, “You know, I found a beautiful pair of heels in my mother’s closet. Black. Gold heels. I had no idea.”

“The Roger Viviers?” asks Vivian Barr, spreading her napkin across her lap.

“I don’t know.”

“I remember a pair of Roger Viviers. You