We went to a movie. He held my hand all through the show. Afterwards he waited for me outside the ladies' room. When I walked back out into the lobby, there was Brian leaning against a wall, with all the other boyfriends. I felt strangely pleased at the sight of him, at his highschoolish, date-night good manners. It wasn't nostalgia- I had been a sullen, rebellious girl who drove off any boy who tried to get within a foot of me. No, it wasn't memory but the brief idea of some other life entirely. As he put his arm around me to make our way out, I had time to regret the morose young woman I'd been; to wish I had let a few more boys into my life to hold my hand at the movies and wait for me outside the ladies' .

Before I finally fell asleep, I remembered a conversation I'd had with an old friend , the one who recruited me into the communist party. We had both been pretty wild in our youth. I used to kid her that she'd slept with everybody-and she practically had. "How did we do it?" I asked her. "How did have so many lovers? And how did we go so blithely from one to the next?"

"You have it wrong," she said. "We weren't blithe. We suffered. We fell in love with all of them."

"Oh, right," I said. "I remember now."