Frank hadn’t seen Carolyn in five years. He should have looked first at her face, but he didn’t because of the way she leaned on a black wooden cane. Its mother of pearl inlay depicted a tangle of vines and blossoms. If left alone, he’d like to pick the stick up and touch it. She invited him inside and hobbled toward the wine rack. Frank leaned against her chipped marble countertop. It had not always been this way. Same about the farmer’s sink, the stained porcelain. Maybe, Frank thought, someone else had ruined them—a previous owner, a renter, or the sort of person who would install these kinds of fixtures in a Los Angeles loft apartment. Maybe Carolyn was that person. He had to ask himself that particular question because she had not always been this way either.

During the flight from Boston he’d carried an apple pie in his lap, and now he could leave it. Though without the cardboard box in his hands, he almost felt he wasn’t offering anything; he almost wanted to pick it back up.

She asked if she could take the parka still folded over his arms. It seemed like embarrassing evidence of his life at home. Carolyn said, “You come here unannounced, but I can still be polite,” and suggested he leave his bag by the table. “Though I won’t let you in my room. The loo is there,” she said, pointing to a closet behind the refrigerator. Maybe her boyfriend Trent was in the room. Waiting, reading, sleeping. “It’s just that I don’t clean,” she said. “Wine?”

“No thanks.”

“Don’t tell me you won’t take a seat?” The way she spoke was so ordinary, so natural, so incongruous with Frank’s own nervous anticipation of what might come next.

“Am I being like that?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“Maybe I am. How about tea? You want me to sit here? On this couch?” He meant the white leather one facing the sort of expansive window you only find in a loft apartment, a massive glimpse out from where you are inside.

Carolyn moved like a three-legged animal, with a lopsided bounce that showed clear determination.

“You do well with that. That cane. Is that what it is?”

“It’s the deluxe. I mail ordered it. From a catalogue for old folks. I guess that’s what we are now, Frank. Old folks. You used to be a revolutionary. I was a bunhead. And now we’re old folk.” She finished brewing his tea and they sat together on the couch. Outside, across the way, Frank noticed birders watching with binoculars. Carolyn told him about a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on the roof. She said that if he watched long enough, he’d see one of them. The male was known to swoop into the grass for pigeons and rats. “You can see the hawk’s prey—it’s like a thrashing blotch—in the bird’s up swoop.”

“Up swoop?” he asked.

“You know. As it flies back up. You really are relentless.”

“I am. I’m relentless,” Frank said. He turned his head right and left, to work out a kink. There she was, to the left of him, a million soft lint fibers clinging to her sweater. And then she was up again, entering her room. She closed the door behind her, leaving Frank to read the take-out menu of the closest restaurant. She said she had trouble in the straight-backed chairs, the wooden seats. She called them back breakers. She’d said, “Get take-out.” So Frank phoned the restaurant and before leaving, knocked on her door. Carolyn said, “Keys are on the counter.” Frank thanked her, said goodbye, but she didn’t reply. Alone in the lobby, it almost felt like he hadn’t seen her, like he wasn’t seeing her, but not like he’d never see her again. The keys in his pocket, he went to the restaurant, and came back once again with the weight of an offering in his arms. She reached for the bag.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“You can sit down,” she said.

“You don’t need anything? Can I carry anything?”

“I may be a cripple, but I’m not a cripple. Still, since you insist on being useful, just bring the bag to the table.” It didn’t make him feel useful; it made him feel worse than useless.

Carolyn leaned her cane against the couch cushion and worked to arrange the take-out containers on the table. As they ate, the city lights turned on. She wasn’t the sort of person to rush to clean up either. Instead, they lounged on the couch a while before she said, “Trent can be a real shit. I spend a lot of time pretending I’m somewhere else with someone else.” Shadows moved over her complexion. “Does she know you’re here?”

He shook his head. “But I know what you mean about Trent,” he said. This whole time he had been trying to imagine Carolyn dancing, trying to imagine her costumed for the Firebird ballet, but all he could visualize clearly were the velcro constraints hanging from the scoop stretcher backstage. He wished she was thinking of him as the prince, entering the castle against her advice. “Can I ask you a question?”

“As if we’re not already talking. You know, though, I don’t really want to talk.” But Frank knew she did; what she didn’t want was for him to talk. “You could have asked. Said, ‘Hey, I’d like to visit.’ But you fly out here when I’m in the middle of my life. You already have a baby, you say. I don’t mean that you should pity me, but just look at me.”

“I made a mistake,” Frank said.

“You need finality. Closure.” Carolyn tapped a cigarette on the table, packing the tobacco till it was tight inside. “I have a dream sometimes. You’re at the foot of my parent’s stairs, leaning into a corner. The stairs creak, and I go to you. And you switch us around, so that I’m leaning into the corner. And you lift my leg. I’m wearing a skirt. And my leg goes up over your waist. And you unzip. And we do it like that. It got to the point where I was thinking about the dream during the day, during waking life. And, the thing is, I couldn’t do it that way now, not standing, not with my body all crooked. I don’t mean to sound a certain way. Trent’s a shit, but he’s my shit.” She lit her cigarette and leaned back.

The airport—vacuous Logan Airport—came to mind. The wet tarmac. A headache. The question he would have asked: What if I’d stayed? But he knew the answer. Frank knew.

“New York is a four-hour trip, by bus,” she said. “Three years I was there.”

Frank had been to the city once. Indeed, he’d taken the four-hour bus trip just last year while his classmates celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday. He’d picked the bus up in Chinatown, Boston and been dropped off in Chinatown, New York City. They called it the Chinatown Express. And he’d forgotten his duffel bag in the under-bus storage. Because, not two months earlier, he’d read in the newspaper a ballet review mentioning Carolyn, as he crossed the street into the chilly afternoon, weaving through tourists, he looked for her in the faces of complicated women. He’d stayed in a sullied walk-up hotel, kicking off the blanket when he found it woven through with the pubic hair of previous guests. He’d eaten three meals in three public venues. Been to the steps of the Public Library. Gotten a headache at Times Square. And still not seen her, not exactly. Then he’d returned to Chinatown the next day to find his duffel bag beneath the desk of the ticketer. He’d drank too much coffee and could hardly sit during the ride home.

“Do you remember the irises at the farm we visited? How they filled the field?” he asked.

“I guess I’m just not nostalgic like that,” Carolyn said. “But you are. That’s okay, Frank. You can remember it however you want. You can remember me however you want.” She relied on the strength of one side of her, the left side, to rise from the couch. She moved to the wall and turned off all the lights but for the low lamp on the table. She said, “You can remember me better than real life if that’s what you want.” And she returned to the couch, sitting beside him, instead of opposite. And she took his hand. “And I’ll keep having that dream.”

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