that he had given her the last of her things. There was a photograph of his mother on the bookcase—a black- and-white picture in a little silver frame of a smiling young woman whose hair was barely darker than her skin. Because he kept the picture, she assumed that he worshiped his mother. One night he corrected that impression by saying that his mother had always tried to sing in her youth, when she had no voice, which had embarrassed everyone.
He said that she was a silent person; in the end, he said, you would have to say that she had done and said very little. He told Sharon that a few days after her death he and his father had gone through her possessions together, and in one of her drawers they came upon a small wooden box shaped like a heart. Inside the box were two pieces of jewelry—the ring and the chain and sapphire. “So she kept some token, then,” his father had said, staring down into the little box. “You gave them to her as presents?” he asked his father. “No,” his father said apologetically. “They weren’t from me.” And then the two of them had stood there looking at each other, both understanding perfectly.
She said, “But what did you finally say to break the silence?”
“Something pointless, I’m sure,” he said.
She thought to herself that that might explain why he had not backed down, on Tenth Street, when the man offering the puppies took a stance as though he wanted to fight. Jack was used to hearing bad things—things that took him by surprise. He had learned to react coolly. Later that winter, when she told him that she loved him, his face had stayed expressionless a split second too long, and then he smiled his slow smile and gave her a kiss.
The dog grew. He took to training quickly and walked at heel, and she was glad that they had saved him. She took him to the veterinarian to ask why he was so thin. She was told that the dog was growing fast, and that eventually he would start filling out. She did not tell Jack that she had taken the dog to the veterinarian, because he thought she doted on him too much. She wondered if he might not be a little jealous of the dog.
Slowly, things began to happen with his music. A band on the West Coast that played a song that he and Gus had written was getting a big name, and they had not dropped the song from their repertoire. In February he got a call from the band’s agent, who said that they wanted more songs. He and Gus shut themselves in the basement apartment, and she went walking with Sam, the dog. She went to the park, until she ran into the crippled man too many times. He was a young man, rather handsome, who walked with two metal crutches and had a radio that hung from a strap around his neck and rested on his chest, playing loudly. The man always seemed to be walking in the direction she walked in, and she had to walk awkwardly to keep in line with him so they could talk. She really had nothing to talk to the man about, and he helped very little, and the dog was confused by the crutches and made little leaps toward the man, as though they were all three playing a game. She stayed away from the park for a while, and when she went back he was not there. One day in March the park was more crowded than usual because it was an unusually warm, springlike afternoon, and walking with Sam, half dreaming, she passed a heavily made-up woman on a bench who was wearing a polka-dot turban, with a hand-lettered sign propped against her legs announcing that she was Miss Sydney, a fortuneteller. There was a young boy sitting next to Miss Sydney, and he called out to her, “Come on!” She smiled slightly and shook her head no. The boy was Italian, she thought, but the woman was hard to place. “Miss Sydney’s gonna tell you about fire and famine and early death,” the boy said. He laughed, and she hurried on, thinking it was odd that the boy would know the word “famine.”
She was still alone with Jack most of every weekend, but much of his talk now was about technical problems he was having with scoring, and she had trouble following him. Once, he became enraged and said that she had no interest in his career. He said it because he wanted to move to Los Angeles and she said she was staying in New York. She said it assuming at once that he would go anyhow. When he made it clear that he would not leave without her, she started to cry because she was so grateful that he was staying. He thought she was crying because he had yelled at her and said that she had no interest in his career. He took back what he had said; he told her that she was very tolerant and that she often gave good advice. She had a good ear, even if she didn’t express her opinions in complex technical terms. She cried again, and this time even she did not realize at first why. Later she knew that it was because he had never said so many kind things to her at once. Actually, very few people in her life had ever gone out of their way to say something kind, and it had just been too much. She began to wonder if her nerves were getting bad. Once, she woke up in the night disoriented and sweating, having dreamed that she was out in the sun, with all her energy gone. It was stifling hot and she couldn’t move. “The sun’s a good thing,” he said to her when she told him the dream. “Think about the bright beautiful sun in Los Angeles. Think about stretching out on a warm day with a warm breeze.” Trembling, she left him and went into the kitchen for water. He did not know that if he had really set out for California, she would have followed.
In June, when the air pollution got very bad and the air carried the smell that sidewalks get when they are baked through every day, he began to complain that it was her fault that they were in New York and not in California. “But I just don’t like that way of life,” she said. “If I went there, I wouldn’t be happy.”
“What’s so appealing about this uptight New York scene?” he said. “You wake up in the night in a sweat. You won’t even walk through Washington Square Park anymore.”
“It’s because of that man with the crutches,” she said. “People like that. I told you it was only because of him.”
“So let’s get away from all that. Let’s go somewhere.”
“You think there aren’t people like that in California?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter what I think about California if I’m not going.” He clamped earphones on his head.
That same month, while she and Jack and Gus were sharing a pot of cheese fondue, she found out that Jack had a wife. They were at Gus’s apartment when Gus casually said something about Myra. “Who’s Myra?” she asked, and he said, “You know—Jack’s wife, Myra.” It seemed unreal to her—even more so because Gus’s apartment was such an odd place; that night Gus had plugged a defective lamp into an outlet and blown out a fuse. Then he plugged in his only other lamp, which was a sunlamp. It glowed so brightly that he had to turn it, in its wire enclosure, to face the wall. As they sat on the floor eating, their three shadows were thrown up against the opposite wall. She had been looking at that—detached, the way you would stand back to appreciate a picture —when she tuned in on the conversation and heard them talking about someone named Myra.
“You didn’t know?” Gus said to her. “Okay, I want you both out. I don’t want any heavy scene in my place. I couldn’t take it. Come on—I really mean it. I want you out. Please don’t talk about it here.”
On the street, walking beside Jack, it occurred to her that Gus’s outburst was very strange, almost as strange as Jack’s not telling her about his wife.
“I didn’t see what would be gained by telling you,” Jack said.
They crossed the street. They passed the Riviera Cafe. She had once counted the number of panes of glass across the Riviera’s front.
“Did you ever think about us getting married?” he said. “I thought about it. I thought that if you didn’t want to
