I freshened up the onion dips and chips and guacamole and went out on the steps. No one else was outside, and I was too depressed to call anybody to come see the unbelievable sunset. Is there a word opposite of déjà vu? Or a word to describe how I saw my whole future flash before my eyes? I saw that I’d stay at the Albuquerque National Bank and Bernie would get his doctorate and keep on painting bad paintings and making muddy pottery and would get tenure. We would have two daughters and one would be a dentist and the other a cocaine addict. Well, of course I didn’t know all that, but I saw how things would be hard. And I knew that years and years from then Bernie would probably leave me for one of his students and I’d be devastated but then would go back to school and when I was fifty I’d finally do things I wanted to do, but I would be tired.

He wasn’t handsome. Big. Red-haired with sort of buckteeth and a weak chin, a jutting brow over piercing beady eyes. Thick glasses, potbelly, beautiful hands. He was the sexiest man I ever knew. Women fell for him in a second; he’d slept with the entire Art Department. It was power and energy and vision. Not like a forward-looking vision, although he had that too. He saw everything. Details, light on a bottle. He loved seeing things, looking. And he made you look, made you go see a painting, read a book. Made you touch the eggplant, warm in the sun. Well, of course I had a wild crush on him too, who didn’t?

It wasn’t just that she was young. She had moved around all her life. Her father was a mining engineer; her mother had been ill, or crazy. She didn’t speak about them, except to say they had disowned her when she got married, wouldn’t answer her letters. You got the feeling no one had ever told her or shown her about growing up, about being part of a family or being a wife. That one reason she was so quiet was that she was watching, to see how it was all done.