She was a good-natured woman, with a nice dimpled smile, and on the plane she began to tell me about her life—how she had gone to Antioch, studied history, played field hockey, marched in peace marches, written poems. She told me about her parents who were Swedish immigrants—a fact that had always embarrassed her; that she dreamed sometimes of huge trucks going over cliffs and woke up terrified; about writing poems that she showed to her husband, Van, then hearing him laugh at them, though he later told her he was proud of her. She told me she had been a sexpot in college, and had married Van, who was from Miami of Ohio, because she loved him, but that they weren’t on the same level educationally, which hadn’t mattered then, but did now, which was why she felt she was leaving him.

When we got off the plane she asked me, standing in the concourse, where I was staying, and when I told her the Ramada, she said she could just as easily stay there and that maybe we could have dinner together because she liked talking to me. And since I had nothing else to do, I said okay.

In the next five hours we had a buffet dinner, then after that went down to my room to drink a bottle of German wine she had bought for her sister, and she talked some more, with me just adding a word here and there. She told me about her break with Lutheranism, about her philosophy of child-rearing, about her theories of Abstract Expressionism, the global village, and a Great Books course she’d built up to teach somewhere if the chance ever came along.

At eleven-fifteen, she stopped talking, looked down at her pudgy hands and smiled. “Frank,” she said, “I just want to tell you that I’ve been thinking about sleeping with you this whole time. But I don’t really think I should.” She shook her head. “I know we’re supposed to do what our senses dictate, and I’m very attracted to you, but I just don’t think it would be right, do you?”

Her face looked troubled by this, but when she looked at me a big hopeful smile came on her lips. And what I felt for her then was a great and comprehending nostalgia, because for some reason I thought I knew just exactly how she felt, alone and at the world’s mercy, the same way I’d felt when I’d been in the Marines, suffering from an unknown disease with no one but unfriendly nurses and doctors to check on me, and I had had to think about dying when I didn’t want to. And what it made me feel about Peggy Connover was that I wanted to make love to her—more, in fact, than I’d wanted to do that in a long time. It’s possible, let me tell you, to become suddenly attracted to a woman you don’t really find attractive; a woman you’d never want to take to dinner, or pick up at a cocktail party, or look twice at in an elevator, only just suddenly it happens, which was the case with Peggy.

Though what I said was, “No, Peggy, I don’t think it would be right. I think it’d cause a lot of trouble.” I don’t know why I said this or said it in this way, since it wasn’t what my senses were dictating.

Peggy’s face lit up with pleasure, and also, I think, surprise. (This is always the most vulnerable time in such encounters. At the very moment you absolve yourself of any intention to do wrong, you often roll right into each other’s arms. Though we didn’t.) What happened was that Peggy came over to the bed where I was sitting, sat beside me, took my hand and squeezed it, gave me a big damp kiss on the cheek and sat smiling at me as if I were a man like no other. She told me how lucky she felt to meet me and not some “other type,” since she was vulnerable that night, she said, and probably “fair game.” We talked for a while about how she was probably going to feel in the morning after having drunk all that wine, and that we would probably want a lot of coffee. Then she said that if it was all right she’d like to find something I’d written and read it and write me about it. And I said I’d like that. Then as if by some secret signal she came around the bed, pulled back the covers, climbed in beside me and went immediately to snoring sleep. I slept beside her the rest of the night fully clothed, on top of the covers, and never touched her once. And in the morning I left before she woke up, to go interview a football coach, and never saw her again.

After about a month, a fat letter—the first of several from Peggy Connover—arrived at the house, full of talk about her kids, humorous remarks about her welfare, her weight, her ailments, about Van, whom she’d decided to go back to live with, what plans she was making for their life; but also about stories of mine she’d read in the magazine and had comments on (she liked some but not every one), all of it in the same chatty voice as when we’d talked, closing each time with “Well, Frank, hope to see you again real soon. Love, Peg.” All of which I was happy to hear about, and even answer a time or two, since it pleased me that, as we had never been more than friends, we could still be, with everything hunky-dory. And it pleased me that somewhere out in the remote world someone was thinking of me for no bad reason at all, and even wishing me well.

These, of course, were the letters X found in the drawer of my desk when she was looking for the sack of silver dollars she feared might’ve been stolen. And it was these letters that in some way made our life seem to break apart for her, and made continuing somehow seem impossible (I found it likewise impossible to explain anything then, since much else was wrong already). X believed, I think, when she read Peggy Connover’s letters, that if these chatty, normal over-the-fence-sounding sentiments were hidden there in my drawer (they weren’t hidden, of course), in all probability more letters full of similar good sense and breezy humor were going out (she was right). And that there was none of that around the house for her. And she began to think, then, that love was simply a transferable commodity for me—which may even be true—and she didn’t like that.