I am alone here in New York, no longer a we. Years, decades even, passed. Then one is out of the commonest of plurals, out of the strange partnership that begins as a flat, empty plain and soon turns into a town of rooms and garages, little grocery stores in the pantry, dress shops in the closets, and a bank with your names printed together for the transaction of business.

I was honored when he allowed me to go to bed with him and dishonored when I felt my imaginative, anxious, exhausting efforts were not what he wanted. His handsomeness created anxiety in me; his snobbery was detailed and full of quirks, like that of people living in provincial capitals, or foreigners living in Florence or Cairo. Worst of all was my ambivalence over what I took to be the inauthenticity of his Marxism. In my heart I was weasel-like, hungry, hunting with blazing eyes for innocent contradictions, given to predatory chewings on the difference between theory and practice. That is what I had brought from home in Kentucky to New York, this large bounty of polemicism, stored away behind light, limp Southern hair and not-quite-blue eyes.

In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me—a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discolored blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicion and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet.

The man whose wife died, died just as they were making a new life, setting themselves in order. They had planned to go from the good to the better; they had retired to the loved summer house. With an improvident madness quite unlike their usual way, this couple, not knowing death was in the garden, raced after perfection. I would rather cook looking toward the south, she said, and so the kitchen was moved from the north. He fell in love with porches in the summer and determined that his heart’s wish was to sit on the porch all winter, and so foundations were laid, great glass windows lay glistening on the lawn and were finally set in place, long evenings over catalogues produced a beautiful Swedish stove, and the splendid new porch changed the shape of the old house, making it and the couple new and daring and full of light.

They were not alone. All the retired people labored and labored for perfection. Additions, new wings, roofs sliced off, stairways turned around, bedrooms on the first floor, trees cut down, trees planted. Profoundly difficult renovations undertaken to make life easier. The children’s inheritance was used up, but one day there would be the house, reshaped often out of childhood dreams and wounds of six decades ago.

And then the wife died, just when all was ready and in harmony.

The large, lonely house in the lovely, lonely northern town. The cold nights and the copper bottoms of the pans slowly losing their sheen. Nothing to smile about in the afternoons on the improvident sun porch. Bachelors again, in their depopulated settings, like large animals in their cages in the zoo, with the name of their species on the door.

Mason at least knew one pure, perfect joy. That was to go to the polling station near the courthouse and to write in the names of Communist Party candidates on election day.

Sometimes when I am up in Maine and the men come to fix things—handsome, attractive people that they are, coming to fix a pipe, to measure, to take apart a motor, to drag a car to the garage—often then I find myself falling into a flirtatiousness, a sort of love for their look, their sunburned faces, their fine oiled workshoes, their way at the wheel of a truck, their jokes about the bill, their ways with other men, down-town drinking coffee, or inside a house under construction, or at the ravaged shed of the boatbuilder, their strong fingers yellowed from nicotine.

Then I think of my father, of Papa, and wonder what it would be like to be married to such a man, to see him coming out of the shower, to sit at dinner at six o’clock, turn off the lights at nine, embrace, make love frequently in honor of a long day of working, get up at five, visit with the relations on Sunday, never leave town.

Love affairs with their energy and hope do not arrive again and again, forever. So, you no longer play tennis, no longer move from place to place in the summer, no longer understand what use you can make of the sight of the Andes or the columns of Luxor.

We sat in a dark booth and Madame Z. ordered a martini. An American martini, she said twice. The doctor crumpled and sagged over a beer, a Heineken. Supporting home industries, his wife said.

A brilliant night outside in New York City. It is Saturday and people with debts are going to restaurants, jumping in taxicabs, careening from West to East by way of the underpass through the Park. What difference does it make to be here alone? Even now, just after eight in the evening, the trucks are starting their delivery of the Sunday Times.