My anger spiked. C+? How dare she! I whirled around on the stool and rushed out of the bar, where I found her leaning casually against the little wrought-iron fence that surrounded it.

I waved the note in front of her. "What"s this supposed to mean?" I demanded.

She smiled and offered me a cigarette. "I"ve read your books. They"re really dreadful."

I don"t smoke, but I took the cigarette anyway. "So, you"re a critic?"

She gave no notice to what I"d just said. "The writing is beautiful," she said as she lit my cigarette with a red plastic lighter. "But the idea is really bad."

"Which idea is that?"

"You only have one," she said with total confidence. "That everything ends badly, no matter what we do." Her face tightened. "So, here"s the deal. When I wrote, I know what you know about life, that wasn"t exactly true. I know more."

I took a long drag on the cigarette. "So," I asked lightly. "Is this a date?"

She shook her head, and suddenly her eyes grew dark and somber. "No," she said, "this is a love affair."

I started to speak, but she lifted her hand and stopped me.

"I could do it with you, you know," she whispered, her voice now very grave. "Because you know almost as much as I do, and I want to do it with someone who knows that much."

From the look in her eyes I knew exactly what she wanted to "do" with me. "We"d need a gun," I told her with a dismissive grin.

She shook her head. "I"d never use a gun. It would be pills." She let her cigarette drop from her fingers. "And we"d need to be in bed together," she added matter-of-factly. "Naked and in each other"s arms."

"Why is that?"

Her smile was soft as light. "To show the world that you were wrong." The smile widened, almost playfully. "That something can end well."

"Suicide?" I asked. "You call that ending well?"

She laughed and tossed her hair slightly. "It"s the only way to end well," she said.

And I thought, she"s nuts, but for the first time in years, I wanted to hear more.

"A suicide pact," my friend whispered.

"That"s what she offered, yes," I told him. "But not right away. She said that there was something I needed to do first."

"What?"

"Fall in love with her," I answered quietly.

"And she knew you would?" my friend asked. "Fall in love with her, I mean?"

"Yes, she did," I told him.

But she also knew that the usual process was fraught with trials, a road scattered with pits and snares. So she"d decided to forgo courtship, the tedious business of exchanging mounds of trivial biographical information. Physical intimacy would come first, she said. It was the gate through which we would enter each other.

"So, we should go to my place now," she concluded, after offering her brief explanation of all this. "We need to f.u.c.k."

"f.u.c.k?" I laughed. "You"re not exactly the romantic type, are you?"

"You can undress me if you want to," she said. "Or, if not, I"ll do it myself."

"Maybe you should do it," I said jokingly. "That way I won"t dislocate your shoulder."

She laughed. "I get suspicious if a man does it really well. It makes me think that he"s a bit too familiar with all those female clasps and snaps and zippers. It makes me wonder if perhaps he"s ... worn it all himself."

"Jesus," I moaned. "You actually think about things like that?"

Her gaze and tone became deadly serious. "I can"t handle every need," she said.

There was a question in her eyes, and I knew what the question was. She wanted to know if I had any secret cravings or odd s.e.xual quirks, any "needs" she could not "handle."

"I"m strictly double-vanilla," I a.s.sured her. "No odd flavors."

She appeared slightly relieved. "My name is Veronica," she said.

"I was afraid you weren"t going to tell me," I said. "That it was going to be one of those things where I never know who you are and vice versa. You know, ships that pa.s.s in the night."

"How ba.n.a.l that would be," she said.

"Yes, it would."

"Besides," she added, "I already knew who you were."

"Yes, of course."

"My apartment is just down the block," she said, then offered to take me there.

As it turned out, her place was a bit farther than just down the block, but it didn"t matter. It was after two in the morning and the streets were pretty much deserted. Even in New York, certain streets, especially certain Greenwich Village streets, are never all that busy, and once people have gone to and from work, they become little more than country lanes. That night the trees that lined Jane Street swayed gently in the cool autumn air, and I let myself accept what I thought she"d offered, which, for all the "dangerous" talk, would probably be no more than a brief erotic episode, maybe breakfast in the morning, a little light conversation over coffee and scones. Then she would go her way and I would go mine because one of us would want it that way and the other wouldn"t care enough to argue the point.

"The vodka"s in the freezer," she said as she opened the door to her apartment, stepped inside and switched on the light.

I walked into the kitchen while Veronica headed down a nearby corridor. The refrigerator was at the far end of the room, its freezer door festooned with pictures of Veronica and a short, bald little man who looked to be in his late forties.

"That"s Douglas," Veronica called from somewhere down the hall. "My husband."

I felt a pinch of apprehension.

"He"s away," she added.

The apprehension fled.

"I should hope so," I said as I opened the freezer door.

Veronica"s husband faced me again when I closed it, the ice-encrusted vodka bottle now securely in my right hand. Now I noticed that Douglas was somewhat portly, deep lines around his eyes, graying at the temples. Okay, I thought, maybe mid-fifties. And yet, for all that, he had a boyish face. In the pictures, Veronica towered over him, his bald head barely reaching her broad shoulders. She was in every photograph, his arm always wrapped affectionately around her waist. And in every photograph Douglas was smiling with such unenc.u.mbered joy that I knew that all his happiness came from her, from being with her, being her husband, that when he was with her he felt tall and dark and handsome, witty and smart and perhaps even a bit elegant. That was what she offered him, I supposed, the illusion that he deserved her.

"He was a bartender when I met him," she said as she swept into the kitchen. "Now he sells software." She lifted an impossibly long and graceful right arm to the cabinet at her side, opened its plain wooden doors and retrieved two decidedly ordinary gla.s.ses, which she placed squarely on the plain Formica counter before turning to face me. "From the beginning, I was always completely comfortable with Douglas," she said.

She could not have said it more clearly. Douglas was the man she had chosen to marry because he possessed whatever characteristics she required to feel absolutely at home when she was at home, utterly herself when she was with him. If there had been some great love in her life, she had chosen Douglas over him because with Douglas she could live without change or alteration, without applying makeup to her soul. Because of that, I suddenly found myself feeling vaguely envious of this squat little man, of the peace he gave her, the way she could no doubt rest in the crook of his arm, breathing slowly, falling asleep.

"He seems ... nice," I said.

Veronica gave no indication that she"d heard me. "You take it straight," she said, referring to the way I took my drink, which was clearly something she"d noticed in the bar.

I nodded.

"Me, too."

She poured our drinks and directed me into the living room. The curtains were drawn tightly together and looked a bit dusty. The furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than style. There were a few potted plants, most of them brown at the edges. You could almost hear them begging for water. No dogs. No cats. No goldfish or hamsters or snakes or white mice. When Douglas was away, it appeared, Veronica lived alone.

Except for books, but they were everywhere. They filled shelf after towering shelf, or lay stacked to the point of toppling along the room"s four walls. The authors ran the gamut, from the oldest cla.s.sics to the most recent bestsellers. Stendahl and Dostoyevsky rested shoulder to shoulder with Anne Rice and Michael Crichton. A few of my own stark t.i.tles were lined up between Robert Stone and Patrick O"Brian. There was no history or social science in her collection, and no poetry. It was all fiction, as Veronica herself seemed to be, a character she"d made up and was determined to play to the end. What she offered, I believed at that moment, was a well-rounded performance of a New York eccentric.

She touched her gla.s.s to mine, her eyes very still. "To what we"re going to do," she said.

"Are we still talking about committing suicide together?" I scoffed as I lowered my gla.s.s without drinking. "What is this, Veronica? Some kind of Sweet November rewrite?"

"I don"t know what you mean," she said.

"You know, that stupid movie where the dying girl takes this guy and lives with him for a month and-"

"I would never live with you," Veronica interrupted.

"That"s not my point."

"And I"m not dying," Veronica added. She took a quick sip of vodka, placed her gla.s.s onto the small table beside the sofa, then, as if suddenly called by an invisible voice, offered her hand to me. "Time for bed," she said.

"Just like that?" my friend asked.

"Just like that."

He looked at me warily. "This is a fantasy, right?" he asked. "This is something you made up."

"What happened next no one could make up."

"And what was that?"

She led me to the bedroom. We undressed silently. She crawled beneath the single sheet and patted the mattress. "This side is yours."

"Until Douglas gets back," I said as I drew in beside her.

"Douglas isn"t coming back," she said, then leaned over and kissed me very softly.

"Why not?"

"Because he"s dead," she answered lightly. "He"s been dead for over three years."

And thus I learned of her husband"s slow decline, the cancer that began in his intestines and migrated to his liver and pancreas. It had taken six months, and each day Veronica had attended him. She would look in on him on her way to work every morning, then return to him at night, stay at his bedside until she was sure he would not awaken, then, at last, return here, to this very bed, to sleep for an hour or two, three at the most, before beginning the routine again.

"Six months," I said. "That"s a long time."

"A dying person is a lot of work," she said.

"Yes, I know," I told her. "I was with my father when he died. I was exhausted by the time he finally went."

"Oh, I don"t mean that," she said. "The physical part. The lack of sleep. That wasn"t the hardest part when it came to Douglas."

"What was?"

"Making him believe I loved him."

"You didn"t?"

"No," she said, then kissed me again, a kiss that lingered a bit longer than the first, and gave me time to remember that just a few minutes before she"d told me that Douglas was currently selling software.

"Software," I said, drawing my lips from hers. "You said he sold software now."

She nodded. "Yes, he does."

"To other dead people?" I lifted myself up and propped my head in my hand. "I can"t wait for an explanation."

"There is no explanation," she said. "Douglas always wanted to sell software. So, instead of saying that he"s in the ground or in heaven, I just say he"s selling software."

"So you give death a cute name," I said. "And that way you don"t have to face it."

"I say he"s selling software because I don"t want the conversation that would follow if I told you he was dead," Veronica said sharply. "I hate consolation."

"Then why did you tell me at all?"

"Because you need to know that I"m like you," she answered. "Alone. That no one will mourn."

"So we"re back to suicide again," I said. "Do you always circle back to death?"

She smiled. "Do you know what La Rochefoucauld said about death?"

"It"s not on the tip of my tongue, no."

"He said that it was like the sun. You couldn"t look at it for very long without going blind." She shrugged. "But I think that if you look at it all the time, measure it against living, then you can choose."

I drew her into my arms. "You"re a bit quirky, Veronica," I said playfully.

She shook her head, her voice self-a.s.sured. "No," she insisted. "I"m the sanest person you"ve ever met."

"And she was," I told my friend.

"What do you mean?"