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screen was a sort of anchor that allowed my thoughts to go in some very gloomy directions. I was afraid it would show on my face or that my grandfather would hear it in my responses. He liked to talk during television shows, but that night it was driving me crazy, as though I had something important to figure out and he was interrupting me from it with his chatter.
    â€œSo I went to bed. But here’s something odd. Sometime near morning, it was just getting light, I found myself on the floor. I was soaked in sweat, I was menstruating, I thought I was dying. Dying of a broken heart. But then I thought about Terry Blanchard, about that night he came tumbling into my bed, and I didn’t feel anything. And then, like sticking your hand in a basin of hot water to test it, I thought about him again. Nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing. Gone. I thought, I’m free of him! This is how you do it, this is how you recover from love. And little by little, I started to notice things in the world—a snowbank, a name written on the washroom wall—without all of it leading back to him.
    â€œIt must have been the next summer—I was seventeen—when a beat-up white car pulled into the driveway and a man with small ears and an acne-scarred complexion shambled up to the house. He was lost, he said. Was there an asbestos factory near here? He was late for a pickup. Could he use the phone? It was Bruce Sanders. Eight months later, I married him.”
    â€œEight months?”
    â€œThe details don’t matter. Not now, not at this stage. But he was a great lover. A mind reader. You’re surprised?”
    â€œWhy, yes. Yes, I am.” A childhood memory of Bruce slouching through our living room at a Christmas party turned over in my memory like a playing card.
    â€œSo was I,” she said, her eyebrows poised on a deadpan face. In that moment, in that light, she looked Asian. “Anyway,” Sally said, “I’m through with that stuff. I have been for a while. It all seems just so messy.”
    I wasn’t sure how to answer and looked into my glass. A car honked three times eighteen floors down. I heard a jet passing over. “I didn’t know we were so close to the airport,” I said.
    Picking up on my discomfort, and probably sorry she’d thrown that in, Sally went on. “Bruce Sanders was certainly nothing to look at, on the surface anyway. He wore a kind of military brush cut that stuck up like a raccoon’s pelt. But he had a wiry little body with deep tan lines from working outside. He was very strong, deceptively so. There was a lot of dangerous leverage in those arms. I saw him lay his forearm across the throat of some local lacrosse hero one night and lift him up the wall, right off the ground.
    â€œThere was something about Bruce I admired, some old-fashioned, tight-lipped masculinity. They are a rare thing these days, real men. Too many sissies eager to get on the right side of women.” Pause. “What women like about men is that they’re
not
women. And they don’t think like women.”
    â€œWe’re simple creatures,” I said, and we both laughed. We were having a preposterous time. I caught myself thinking, Should we be doing this? Or should we be doing something else? We are talking about what we’re talking about because that’s what she wants to talk about. But is this really going to happen? Now that we’re here? Is she waiting for me to say stop, or am I waiting for her? Is this going to happen because we’re both waiting for the other to say something? And if I were to say something, what would it be? What would I
mean
? If I were in her place, what would
I
want?
    â€œSally . . .” I began, but her hand fluttered me to silence. I had not considered this part, at least not the way it now presented itself.
    She went on: “That said, Bruce was not very socially
able.
Sulked in public gatherings. I think he