Once at a fancy cocktail party given by an author I’d come to St. Louis to wrest a book away from. It was the time I’d met his wife. And once more, in the Mayfair Hotel, when I’d taken an inept swing at him and he’d slammed me against a wall and hit me in the face with the back of his hand. Perhaps you don’t forget people you knock around. That becomes their place in your life. I, myself, find it hard to recognize people when they’re not where they belong, and Mack Bolger belonged in St. Louis. Of course, he was an exception.

Mack’s gaze fixed on me, then left me, scanned the crowd uncomfortably, then found me again as I approached. His large tanned face took on an expression of stony unsurprise, as if he’d known I was somewhere in the terminal and a form of communication had already begun between us. Though, if anything, really, his face looked resigned—resigned to me, resigned to the situations the world foists onto you unwilling; resigned to himself. Resignation was actually what we had in common, even if neither of us had a language which could express that. So as I came into his presence, what I felt for him, unexpectedly, was sympathy—for having to see me now. And if I could’ve, I would have turned and walked straight away and left him alone. But I didn’t.

“I just saw you,” I said from the crowd, ten feet before I ever expected to speak. My voice isn’t loud, so that the theatrically nasal male voice announcing the arrival from Poughkeepsie on track 34 seemed to have blotted it out.

“Did you have something special in mind to tell me?” Mack Bolger said. His eyes cast out again across the vaulted hall, where Christmas shoppers and overbundled passengers were moving in all directions. It occured to me at that instant—and shockingly— that he was waiting for Beth, and that in a moment’s time I would be standing here facing her and Mack together, almost as we had in St. Louis. My heart struck two abrupt beats deep in my chest, then seemed for a second to stop altogether. “How’s your face?” Mack said with no emotion, still scanning the crowd. “I didn’t hurt you too bad, did I?”

“No,” I said.

“You’ve grown a moustache.” His eyes did not flicker toward me.

“Yes,” I said, though I’d completely forgotten about it, and for some reason felt ashamed, as if it made me look ridiculous.

“Well,” Mack Bolger said. “Good.” His voice was the one you would use to speak to someone in line beside you at the post office, someone you’d never see again. Though there was also, just barely noticeable, a hint of what we used to call juiciness in his speech, some minor, undispersable moisture in his cheek that one heard in his s’s and f’s. It was unfortunate, since it robbed him of a small measure of gravity. I hadn’t noticed it before in the few overheated moments we’d had to exchange words.

Mack looked at me again, hands in his expensive Italian coat pockets, a coat that had heavy, dark, bone buttons and long, wide lapels. Too stylish for him, I thought, for the solid man he was. Mack and I were nearly the same height, but he was in every way larger and seemed to look down to me—something in the way he held his chin up. It was almost the opposite of the way Beth looked at me.

“I live here now,” Mack said, without really addressing me. I noticed he had long, dark almost feminine eyelashes, and small, perfectly shaped ears, which his new haircut put on nice display.