Now, of course, the evidence is weighing heavily against me. This man and I had met at a journalists’ conference. Desire had flared quickly, and then happiness had taken us both by surprise. We had spent a month together. Now we had separated, I back to New York, he to the Midwest to finish an assignment. Our plan had been to meet in New York in six weeks. Meanwhile, he was to call the day after I got home. Two weeks have now passed: no phone call. He’s on the road. I have no way of reaching him. It’s been two weeks of concentrated misery. It’s the first thing I’m aware of when I wake, the last thing before I sleep. I sleep so badly that often I’m awake in the night, whereupon I remember and the pain is dazzling. By now I’m not a character in a Doris Lessing story, I am a Doris Lessing story. The world is a framed space filled in by obsession. I move through the space grim and staring-eyed, a modern woman condemned to the knowledge that the experience of love will be played out repeatedly on an ever-diminishing scale, but always with a full complement of fever and sickness, intensity and denial.