by John Grant

     "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
     the past."

—F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I turn my eyes with difficulty to look at Jéanne's face. She is leaning forward toward me, holding my thin hand in her firm one, her brown eyes reflecting the stretched skin of my face. I can hardly feel her fingers wrapped around mine.

     "Simon," she says. "Your time is very near now."

     "I know," I whisper.

     Her voice still bears strong traces of the French accent she has slowly been losing over the years.

When I first met her, she was very slightly drunk, leaning her head back against the arm-rest of an overstuffed green-velvet sofa, eyes shut, singing along almost silently to something sultry by Patricia Kaas that was playing in the background. The room was littered with the debris of a corporate function — cocktail sticks smeared with unidentifiable cream-based sauces, bent paper plates dumped on the floor and half-heartedly shuffled under the edges of the chaises, half-empty wine glasses in which bobbed the remains of anonymous marine crustacea. Two weary-looking waiters were lackadaisically tidying up. The mumbling woman and myself were among the last half-dozen or so guests still here. The waiters ignored us as they went about their duties, as if we were items of furniture whose restoration to order was not their responsibility.

     "May I sit?" I said.

     She didn't open her eyes, just bent her knees to make room for me at the far end of the sofa. She was wearing a loose skirt of some thin material that was dyed all in splashes of primary colours. The cloth fell away from her knees, showing me spirals of sparse, fine black hair on the bitter-chocolate skin of her calves.

     I sat and watched her as she sang. I couldn't really hear her except as a distant embellishment of Kaas's voice. She had one hand behind her head; the other, extended, held an empty wine glass as if it were a cigarette. The inside of her arm was a milkier chocolate than the rest of her. She was very lovely, I recognized, but that wasn't why I was sitting there. I was in my fifty-eighth year; I reckoned that she couldn't be older than her mid-thirties. I had aged beyond the pastime of seeking out women. Besides, I assumed she'd been brought along by someone; I didn't know her face as belonging to one of the embassy flacks.

     So why did I sit down on Jéanne's sofa? Why hadn't I left the party an hour or so before, when it would have been decorous for me to do so?

     To be honest, I don't know. I'd seen her during the evening, her face highly animated as she talked to people in suits or dark, knee-clamping dresses. The first time she'd floated into my field of view, all I'd registered was the brightness of her clothing, which was like a butterfly resting for a moment, wings quivering, on a military-grey cement wall. When next I saw her, closer this time, bending as she reached for a vol-au-vent — past an ambitious assistant of mine who'd come to the party with the fly of his tux open, only nobody wanted to be the first to notice — I realized that it wasn't the clothing that was the butterfly: it was her.

     As she straightened, she met my eye. She smiled as if at an old and close friend, almost conspiratorially — "We have to pretend we're enjoying this, but it'll be good to kick our shoes off together when all these ghastly people have gone." It was only as she turned away to continue whatever conversation it was that she was having that I remembered I'd never met her before.

     Now, looking at her tilted-back face as her lips moved lazily in time with the music, I had that same feeling of familiarity.

     I leaned forward and took the wine glass from her hand. One of the bored waiters came over and I gave it to him. She seemed oblivious to any of this.

     As "Mon chercheur d'or" came to an end, Jéanne pursed her lips as if holding a last note for longer than the sound itself went on, then slowly raised her eyelids so that she was looking at me down the length of her nose.

     "Welcome back," she said in a voice that was rich with red wine ­ and not the kind of red wine committees choose for embassy functions, which was what we'd been drinking.

     I started. The words matched so exactly what I was feeling.

     For a moment I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just grinned like an elderly idiot. Then I fell back on the usual party-encounter default.

     "My name's Simon McLafferty."

     "I know."

     As I stood, she reached out the hand that had been behind her head so that I could help her to her feet. She was about the same height as I was, a little shorter than when I'd been younger ­ as I was now beginning to wish I still was.

     "You're the reason for this shindig," she said, gesturing around her vaguely at the collateral damage the waiters had by now nearly finished tidying up. "How could I not know your name?"

     I shrugged, letting go of her hand. She didn't take her fingers away from mine immediately, instead stroking my palm and then brushing the backs of my knuckles with hers.

     Again I was startled. The contact, innocent in itself, seemed to speak of an intimacy between us. To others, probably not. But to me it had that meaning.

     "And you are …?" I said.

     "Jéanne." No surname.

     For a moment I wondered if she might be a particularly high-class hooker some of the wags at the embassy had set up for me as a little extra going-away present. But there was nothing of the hooker about her, no provocation in her attitude toward me, no suggestion of sex — just that casual knowledge of me. Anyway, the embassy didn't have any wags.

     I'd made a career as a diplomat in an era when most diplomats advanced their positions by well gauged financial contributions to The Cause or by sycophancy, or more usually by a combination of both. If I'd been any good at the corruption game, I'd probably have joined in with them, being an anonymous donor here and a loyal fundraiser there. As it was, I'd had to resort to the practice of my designated profession. By the time I met Jéanne Hardacre I'd served my nation abroad under three presidents before finally, during the second Bush administration, finding it impossible to countenance any longer the further defence of the indefensible. Hence my departure, tonight, from the world I'd known all my working life. In the morning I'd fly back to Newark or JFK — I now forget which — and from there I'd take an Amtrak train and finally a rental car until I was lost from sight at my cottage in northern Massachusetts.

     But that was tomorrow. It was still not quite yet nine o'clock in the evening. I was talking with a person who intrigued me — who had, it would seem, gone out of her way to intrigue me.

     "Have you had dinner?" I asked.

     "Phooey." She waved her hand toward a cocktail stick that the waiters had left on the carpet for the cleaners to vacuum up. "Just formal-function shit. I've spent the evening trying to work out if the stuff I've been eating is organic or inorganic. I'm hungrier than when I started." She rolled her eyes in an exaggeratedly vampish display, then assumed a Marlene Dietrich drawl. "Take me and feed me, Mister McLafferty."

     "Simon," I said. "Not 'Mister McLafferty'. Simon."

     Outside, the evening was mild, but there was just enough chill in the breeze that I was glad I had my coat. Jéanne, after vanishing to the ladies' changing room for longer than seemed strictly necessary, had reappeared wearing over her peasant-style dress a jacket that seemed to be made out of loops of cheap, creamy-grey fabric. Again, it was a garment that wasn't a recognized part of the uniform diplomatic flacks and their spouses wore.

     She fished in its pocket for a battered pack of cigarettes.

     "I should give this up," she muttered as she held a lighter to the end of the cigarette she'd finally fumbled into her mouth. The words made the cylinder duck and weave.

     I grinned. "So should I." I took a deep draw on the Gitane I'd lit for myself, and looked around me. The embassy was near the river, and the lights of the offices on the far bank created kaleidoscopic mosaics on the water. A pleasure craft drifted into view from under the Old Bridge and brought with it the sounds of whatever MTV thought the world should be listening to this week. It sounded like the kind of music you might dance to if you wanted to remove your underwear without using your hands.

     I'd told the security goons to take a hike — now that I was no longer a diplomat but only an ex-diplomat, I'd said to them, I didn't merit the expense of their services. No doubt they'd reckoned I was planning a night of passion with a beautiful stranger, and wanted privacy for this reason, but that wasn't in the slightest the truth. Yes, I could recognize that she was lovely — only a blind man wouldn't have seen this. And, yes, she seemed to be surrounded by a visible mist of sexuality; I do not pretend I was unaffected by it. Yet the reason I wanted to spend a few hours with her before leaving for home had nothing to do with any hoped-for seduction, nothing to do with sex at all. Aside from all other considerations, there were more practical ones: I'd reached that stage of life where I was, to euphemize, rarely if at all capable of rising to the occasion. Besides, outside one short and shameful interval, I've never had a great deal of interest in brief encounters. No, the fascination she exerted over me was not a matter of sex but of a strange and exhilarating mix of novelty and a sense of existing complete acquaintance. It wasn't because she was a woman that I'd asked this person to have dinner with me; it was because the mystery of her had ensnared me.

     Hell, I didn't even know what the mystery of her was, or if there was a mystery at all. Perhaps it was all in my mind. Perhaps she was thinking I was a boring old fart with a late-life itch and she might as well get a free meal out of me before explaining that No Way.

     And yet this wasn't the message I was getting from her as she hooked her free arm in mine.

     "Where do you want to take me tonight, Simon?" she said through a cloud of exhaled smoke as we strolled along the riverbank sidewalk.

      "Thomas's?" I suggested.

     She smiled. "A reliable cuisine," she said in an exaggerated Egon Ronay Guide voice, "but not an exciting one. You've become very predictable. Remember, you're no longer a government representative, Simon. Kick over the traces, why can't you?"

      So we went to a small Thai restaurant called the Phuket Tavern that I'd never known existed. Needless to say, Jéanne joyfully mispronounced the name, and after a while so did I.

     Just a dinner, and then we would probably never see each other again.

Thirty years later, she leans over again and looks directly into my eyes. Mine are pale blue and watery with age and the knowledge that death is already in the room, creeping toward my pillow; they see hers as two brown, shining blurs, but I know her gaze is still as alive and youthful as when I first met her.

     "Do you remember Lynne, Simon?" she whispers.

     Of course I do. How could I ever forget? But how does Jéanne know that Lynne will forever play a role in the theatre of my memories?

     That night, after I'd bidden Jéanne farewell outside the lobby of her hotel, watched by a steam-breathed commissionaire and glass doors behind which gold gleamed in synthetic welcome, she told me almost as an afterthought that I was going to marry her sooner or later. It proved to be later — almost a year later. I returned, as I'd planned, to Massachusetts alone. We corresponded for months by e-mail, and our typed endearments grew ever more elaborate and genuine, before she announced that she was throwing over her journalism job and coming to the States to be with me: "Tu es le plus cher." How could I have stopped her, even had I wanted to? We announced our engagement shortly afterwards. The more bigoted of my acquaintances were horrified that I should be "touching myself with the tar brush", the rest were horrified that a beautiful young woman like Jéanne should be contemplating marriage to a ghastly old duffer like myself, and assumed her to be a gold-digger; a chercheuse d'or, as Kaas might have been singing it when we'd met. We didn't care. We just retreated to the sanctum of my lakeside cottage and lived there together in perfect amity. That, of course, got the tongues wagging even more agitatedly, and I said nothing to still them ­ even though, in point of fact, I'd insisted in my old-fashioned way to Jéanne that we respect all the traditional proprieties until after we were wed.

     So we slept in separate rooms, and during the day either took long walks or worked.

     By then I was well on through writing my memoir of my time in the diplomatic corps, complete with the obligatory postscript on how America had lost its way in the first few years of the twenty-first century. You may have seen the book, which had its moment of vogue: The Spurned Handshake, it was called, with a long and forgettable journalese subtitle added at the insistence of the publisher. Jéanne, for her part, began to do what she told me she'd dreamed for years of doing: write a novel. Her literary star in due course far outshone my own dim and flickering one, as of course all the world knows.

     While ambling around the lakeside or through the woods, first under the panoply of the glorious New England fall colours and then, a few weeks later, over and through them, we spent much of our time talking about our individual pasts. Jéanne's father had been of second-generation Jamaican immigrant stock in Britain, and like myself had served his nation as a diplomat, mainly in France. It was perfectly possible that I'd met him at some stage, but I couldn't remember having done so; in my profession you see so many thousands of faces that it's often impossible to remember them, and the photos Jéanne showed me rang no particular bells. Her mother had been French, but Jéanne always veered away from the subject of her mother whenever the conversation touched upon it. I gathered Mme Hardacre had left her husband for someone richer and "more exciting" when the couple's solitary child had been little more than an infant. Thereafter Charlie Hardacre had raised his daughter alone. It was clear she'd adored her father, and that she had every justification for having done so. One of the rare times I saw her cry was when she spoke of his death — he'd been the victim of a hit-and-run accident while on a visit home to his native Solihull.

     She'd been in her early twenties at the time, and studying at the Sorbonne. Her educational qualifications were — are — much more impressive than mine. She told me how the grief of her father's sudden death had thrown her into a tail spin, into a dark fog from which it had taken her a year or more to emerge. She'd been institutionalized for part of that time; she became almost wistful as she described the freedom from responsibility she'd enjoyed in the rural mental hospital where she'd been treated, and the expert care she'd received from the psychotherapists. I too had been well treated in such a hospital; I discovered from her that it wasn't the same one, but nevertheless it felt as if we had yet one more shared experience.

     In all such accounts she was completely honest with me, neglecting none of the details, as if she wanted me to know her through and through, the darker aspects as well as the lighter ones. I hope that I was equally transparent with her; I certainly tried to be.

     Yet, as if there was an unspoken agreement between us, we never talked about our previous loves. I could not imagine she had reached the age of thirty-three without some grand affairs in her past, and of course I'd been married twice already in addition to having lost my heart a few other times; but when fate or design had thrown Jéanne and myself together it was as if we were entering a new room in a house, leaving our romantic histories behind us in the previous room, still there but separated from where we now were by the thickness of a door. Of course, from time to time I would open that door a crack and peep through to spy on my own memories, and I assume Jéanne did the same; but we seemed never to feel the slightest urge to describe what we saw there.

     I am sure I have never talked to her about Lynne.

     Including Jéanne — most especially including Jéanne — there have been four women of significance in my life. "Women of significance." What do I mean by that pompous-sounding phrase? I mean the women who have in a sense never left me. When I was with them, the rest of the world could have disappeared and I would barely have noticed; after circumstances had separated us, they remained so much a part of me that it was as if I were constantly aware of their presence nearby, wherever they might in reality be. This was true even after Alyssa, my first wife, died.

     Two of these four women — Alyssa and Jéanne — I married. Between them, there was the ghastly error of my second marriage, a relationship based solely on physical attraction and thereby doomed; the sex between us was fantastic, unlike anything I had ever experienced before — we did everything except fill the bathtub with spaghetti and wallow in it — but almost all the rest of the time, and sometimes even during the wildest of our lovemaking, we were either arguing or not speaking to each other. I soon discovered that Helen was one of those unfortunate people who lack what I would call a soul; her emotions were devoid of all depth, and the same was true of her intellect. On the surface she seemed to be bright and caring — she was a considerable asset to me at the many diplomatic functions my job entailed — but there was nothing more in reserve below that surface. The only person she could truly feel deeply for was herself. She had no interest in anything beyond the immediate and the local. Helen could have been described by a line I once heard in a song: "Her fingernails are the universe, and all the rest is tiny." At last, to my considerable relief, I discovered that she'd been conducting a string of liaisons behind my back, and I was able to divorce her.

     The other two of my "significant women" never became my lovers, although I loved them entirely, and I believe they felt the same toward me.

     Lynne was the first. She and I were both nineteen when we started sharing a stream at University College, London. We were studying Physics and Astronomy. Had we been merely studying Physics, it's possible we might have developed little more than a nodding acquaintanceship; it was a heavily attended course. But the Astronomy set was far smaller, drawing a half-dozen or so students from University College plus a couple from King's College. Several times a week, and most notably at the lengthy practical sessions on Thursdays out at the observatory in Mill Hill, the few of us were thrown together, becoming a kind of loosely knit family because we were such rarae aves within the university. Three of the set were women, and an outsider might have predicted there would be keen rivalry for their attentions on the part of the men; but that wasn't the way it worked. Although I don't believe any of us ever thought much about it, any sexual behaviour among us would have carried with it, because of that quasi-familial ambience, a vague whiff of incest; we were brothers and sisters, in a way.

     This curiously ambivalent environment led to an odd relationship between Lynne and myself. She and I became as close as lovers can — certainly closer than the vast majority of lovers that age — and yet, instead of following the path that might have led us toward marriage, our footsteps were diverted into a sort of totally encompassing friendship. We talked about everything that was important to us; no subject was taboo. We bared the mansions of our souls, all except for a single attic that was kept locked — the attic containing the damning evidence of our bodies' physical yearning for each other. I can glamorize this now by saying that we wanted nothing to get in the way of our treasurable friendship; but I think the truth is that we were both hamstrung by a virgin lack of confidence, and balked at the prospect of fouling up something we rightly regarded as all-engulfingly important. What if our carnal encounter, the unique first for both of us, was disastrous? In later life we would have known that just about every first encounter is precisely this, and we'd have known too that such failings are irrelevant eddies amid the broad ocean of genuine affection; but, of course, we didn't know these things.

     Because we could not admit to being in love with each other, we rarely embraced when we met; we did, however, develop the habit of reaching out as if to take each other's hand and then, instead, merely brushing the backs of our knuckles together. It was a gesture that must have been patently obvious to everyone around us, but naturally we thought it was our secret, and our secret alone.

     The trouble with the situation was that it couldn't progress in any way. With something so fundamental being constantly unspoken, the friendship was barred from becoming any deeper; at the same time, it had already become far more than sufficiently deep for either of us to risk destroying it by introducing a possibly disruptive factor. What we didn't realize was that our timidity would eventually destroy it anyway.

     And so we started drifting apart, even though our affections for each other diminished not at all. Lynne began dating someone she cared enough about that a few years later she married him. I was invited to the wedding, and went. As I hugged the happy bride in congratulation, a message passed between us, transmitted by a glance and by that touch of the knuckles: something had gone seriously awry with the script somewhere, but we were uncertain that the foul-up would necessarily work out for the worse. In another lifetime we would stick to the plot the playwright had set down, and see what would happen then.

     We never saw each other again. Perhaps we were both too embarrassed by the sense of wrongness in the course our lives had taken. Perhaps we were conscious of how dangerously any further contact might develop.

     Time is a trickster like that. If we'd met when we were both just a little bit older and wiser, I have no doubt that my life would have worked out very differently.

     This is no complaint. I have been very lucky in my life. If I'd married Lynne I'd almost certainly never have married Alyssa or Jéanne, and I'd never have met Evelyn. But at the same time, I have had to accept a sense of deprivation that Lynne and I never attained the ultimate closeness of being lovers, even if only briefly. It's as if there is an omission from my memories, a recollection that should be there but has been lost.

     After Lynne's wedding my life carried on much as before. I'd emerged from university with a middling degree in Physics and Astronomy and no immediately interesting job prospects in either of those fields. I dithered with the notion of becoming a science journalist, toyed with the idea of going on to do postgraduate work, ended up bumming around Morocco for a bit while I "found myself". What I found instead was an unexpected facility for picking up languages. Certainly I'd never evidenced such a capacity during my schooldays, where I'd only just scraped through my French exams before dropping the subject like a hot potato. Now, though, it was different. I returned from Morocco with a passable fluency in French, German and Spanish, not to mention a markedly increased self-confidence brought about through a pair of genial and for me extremely educational relationships I'd enjoyed with two of the girls I'd met who were, like me, ambling aimlessly around Morocco scoring cheap dope, avoiding the cops, and sleeping on beaches. I feel slightly ashamed that I can now remember neither of their names. One was German or perhaps Austrian (hence my discovery of the German language) and the other was American (hence my discovery of oral sex).

     Back in London, I took my linguistic abilities to the Foreign Office and asked for a job. They trained me in the ways of the Civil Service — a year of the most excruciating boredom I have ever known — and then declined to employ me. Sighing, my father continued the generous allowance he'd been giving me, and I used it to take myself for a few months to New York.

     To Greenwich Village, to be precise. There I discovered the glories of the counterculture. Paying cash, I rented what was described as an apartment but was in reality more like a built-in wardrobe with a hole cut out of one wall just large enough to accommodate a malfunctioning toilet you could sit on only if you scrunched yourself up; however clean and tidy I tried to be, the place still remained a pit of squalor, so in the end I gave up being clean and tidy.

     But who cared what the place was like where I slept? I hardly saw it. I was out each evening to clubs like The Bitter End and The Scene, listening to good and bad — mainly bad — folk music, jazz, rock'n'roll, blues … During the day, so much as I saw of it, there were always places like Washington Square where I could listen to the buskers, admire the girls, fend off the Hare Krishna missionaries, and pay through the nose for frequently substandard grass.

     It was at one of the lesser music clubs that I encountered Alyssa. They were having what would later be called an open-mike night. After the main act — a so-so British punk-glam band called The Flaming Ghoulies who were briefly famous back then — there was a call for singers to come up from the floor and perform a song or two. The audience wasn't averse to rowdily disapproving of these hopefuls, most of whom were three-chord wonders and seemingly destitute of all talent. Nonetheless, it was the audiences' boorishness rather than the musicians' ineptitude that generally kept me away from such presentations.

     The audience was being especially malicious the night an elfin woman stepped nervously onto the small black stage, blinking against the lights. Although not especially short, she was very slightly built, so that the standard-size guitar she carried seemed far too big for her. Pale, almost pinched, triangular face. A pointy chin. Short copper-red hair. Baggy blue jeans. A short pseudo-kaftan that couldn't hide her lack of much bust. Her voice, when she sang, sounded much like she herself looked: it came across initially as frail and hesitant, but as you continued to listen — which most of the audience didn't — you realized this was an illusion. She was deliberately holding much in reserve; and the more you listened the greater you could feel the magnitude of those reserves. Many years later, when I first heard Alison Krauss sing "Maybe", I recognized something of the same; but with this singer it was like believing a money spider had landed on your arm and slowly discovering it was an eagle.

     I was impressed by her, but then her two songs were over and she was replaced by a fat Quebecois who sang enjoyably bawdy songs in French at an audience to whom it was all Greek.

     When the show was over, I migrated to the bar next door, ostensibly in search of a lower-priced beer than the club would have sold me but in fact in the hope of scoring some contraband Acapulco Red. No such luck: it proved to be a gay bar of impeccable respectability. This didn't bother me, except for the lack of dope. I was standing at the bar chattering happily with a patron who'd identified me as straight as soon as I'd walked through the door when I became aware that someone was settling into the high seat behind me.

     I turned. It was the singer. So she was gay. I had the predictable male reaction of momentarily regretting that such an idiosyncratically attractive female was off-limits, so to speak — "What a waste!" — but overall my reaction was: So what?

     "Not many other girls in here," she said to me with a scowl, looking around her.

     "Ah …"

     My companion laughed. "Sometimes there are, but they come here in pairs," he said to her over my shoulder.

     "Oh. That explains it." Her eyes, which were green, focused on my face. "You swing both ways?"

     "No, I …"

     "Well, you never can tell, can you?" She grinned. "Would you guys object if I stayed here?" She bobbed her head toward the scuffed guitar case she'd propped up against the bar. "I'm tired, fed up and in need of chemical support, and I don't want to have to go back outside and find somewhere else."

     My companion chuckled again. Wordlessly, the barman plonked down in front of her a double shot of a brown, lazily roiling liquid that looked like it might eat through the glass at any moment.

     "My treat," I said.

     She let out a long sigh. "Why is it all the nice guys are gay?"

     It wasn't the moment to correct her.

     "You were good in there," I said instead. I waved my hand toward the wall separating the bar from the club. "I liked your performance a lot."

     "You must have been the only one," she responded dourly, watching her untouched drink as if it might suddenly spring at her.

     "Most of those morons don't know how to listen," I said. "If they ever learned, they've forgotten. The only thing they can hear now is their own voices."

     The guy I'd been speaking with touched my elbow in farewell. "I'll leave you two alone, shall I?"

     He faded away. The singer had been right about the nice guys.

     I don't know that she noticed his going.

     "You're being too kind," she muttered. She'd plucked up the courage to raise the glass to her lips.

     "It's an island malt," said the barman as he breezed by, midway between one customer and another. "The first sip'll taste like ammonia, dear. After that, you'll wonder why you ever bothered to drink anything else."

     She sniffed suspiciously. "And your cousin's an undertaker needing the business, right?" she said to the man's back.

     "Do you want me to get you a beer?" I said.

     She shook her head. The chin-length hair, which looked from a distance as if it should be as stiff and prickly as metal wires, was clearly soft, silky and fine, because it made waves as her head moved.

     "Whatever this stuff is," she said, "I've most surely drunk worse."

     She necked it back in one, and gasped.

     "Awesome," I said.

     "Necessary, more like." The voice that had been smooth, soft, even fastidious, was now harsh and wheezy around the edges. She put the glass down. "Another," she said to no one in particular, which I assumed meant me.

     I bought another couple of shots of the Scotch and guided her over to a table, leaving the rest of my beer on the bar. I figured that a second glass of the firewater might make it dangerous for her to be on one of the high seats. Once she was settled, I brought over her guitar and leaned it on the table beside her.

     "Cheers," I said, my glass at my mouth.

     She raised an eyebrow. "Skoal."

     I sipped. The barman had been right about the taste of ammonia.

     "You're of Scandinavian stock?" I asked as tears stung my eyes.

     "No." She grinned again. "I just use the word. Would you believe I'm actually Jewish?"

     I looked at the pale skin, the copper-coloured hair, the green eyes.

     "No," I said. "To be honest with you, I wouldn't."

     "Well, it's true." She took a gulp and the shot glass was half-empty. "Dad's family is Irish Catholic, but Mom's a Jewish momma — heart-shaped face, dark eyes, black hair, the whole nine yards. She even likes gefilte fish — or says she does, but maybe that's out of loyalty. Dad adores everything about her 'cepting the gefilte fish, worships the ground she walks on. Guess he's right, too. So do I, only I'd never let on to her. Dad says he loves her so much that, when it came to making me, he couldn't bear the thought of her losing even one of her genes, so he gave me all his instead." She toyed with the glass, angling it around in a precessionary circle, watching the liquid swirl. "It's a cute notion, I guess, even if it's nonsense." Another, smaller sip. "I believe it entirely."

     I was a little slow in taking in her last couple of sentences because I'd briefly misconstrued her. What the heck could a baby want with her father's jeans? Then I fathomed what she'd said, and grinned in my turn.

     "You're the living proof."

     "And what about you?" she said.

     I gave her a quick history, omitting quite a lot.

     "Little rich boy, huh?" she said at the end of my monologue.

     I changed the subject. "Those songs you sang tonight — were they yours?"

     "The first one was. The second one was going to be, but I lost my nerve. There's a kid called Janis Ian who's starting to sing around the clubs, so I stole one of hers."

     "I liked them both." I wasn't lying, even though my mind had begun sluggishly to realize how attracted to her I was becoming. "You made any records?"

     She sneered. "Yeah. Right."

     "I mean it."

     "I'm just a kid from Long Island who's plucked up enough courage to sing in public and is now wishing she'd been not so stupid."

     The tone of her voice belied the self-deprecating words. I was getting a glimpse at the strength I'd sensed behind the seeming frailty of her voice. She wasn't going to be deterred by the dismissive reception she'd had from the goons next door. She'd be back — if not here, somewhere else. I knew just enough about the music business to know it was a complete lottery: many of the best performers got ignored by the record bosses in favour of a lot of the crap. But it was beginning to be a good time for singer-songwriters, and even better for female ones because of their relative rarity. If she persisted, and I was certain she would, she'd be asked to make at least a debut album.

     I said something of this.

     She curled her lip. "You sure you don't swing both ways? You sound like you're trying to …"

     "I said I didn't swing because I don't. I'm straight. I drifted in here by accident, just like you."

     Her eyes narrowed and she gave me a long, appraising gaze.

     "I can see I oughta be careful. You been buying me booze under false pretences."

     Then we were both laughing.

     A while later, she told me it was her turn to get the next drink — apparently the staff in here didn't believe in waiting on tables.

     When she was halfway to the bar she paused, an empty glass in each hand, and turned to glance at me.

     "Did I do something wrong, Simon?"

     I don't know what I looked like, to her or to anyone else. I was staring at the back of my right hand. As she'd risen to her feet, reaching out for my glass, she'd brushed my knuckles with her own. The touch had brought memories rushing back of Lynne, and of all that I'd known a few years earlier. My intervening time hadn't been exactly chaste, as I've told you, but I suddenly realized how loveless it had been. I'd been proud of the fact that I was an island, whatever John Donne said. There'd been plenty of affection with the two girls in Morocco, and here in New York for a fortnight with a legal secretary who'd discovered the relationship was going nowhere when I'd stupidly let her see the room in which I lived, but still I'd been able to maintain my distance, my aloofness. There'd been no temptation to do otherwise. There'd been no reaching out of my soul the way there had been with Lynne. It wasn't a sensation I'd been at all conscious of missing — not in any way. When you look back at childhood, you can recall with nostalgia and a sort of yearning the happy, irresponsible times you spent then, but you have no desire actually to go back and relive that period of your life. It was fine while it lasted and you wouldn't have missed it for the world, but it's a part of the past now and it's right that this should be so. My attitude toward the closeness I'd shared with Lynne was much the same. She had enriched my being, and the enrichedness had not faded just because she was no longer there — would never fade, so long as I should live. Why try to top up a well that would never run dry?

     But that casual stroke of Alyssa's fingers against the back of my own changed everything. For an instant I understood how St Paul must have felt in the Biblical myth when suddenly his world was filled by the radiance of his god.

     I raised my eyes toward where she still stood, half-twisted in my direction.

     She must have seen my awe, I thought, because she nodded before continuing on her way to the bar.

"Do you remember how you felt when Alyssa died, Simon?" whispers Jéanne, her face so close to mine I could put out my tongue and touch her chin. Her breath smells like a Spring morning, as it always has even as she and I have grown old together.

     I must have been mumbling my reminiscences aloud. What kind of memory to leave my wife of her dying husband? A garrulous dotard drooling about the women he knew in his youth, about women other than herself.

     I begin to apologize, but she silences me with the lightest of kisses.

     "I was asking if you recall what it was like when Alyssa was taken from you," she says, leaning back in her chair but still holding my hand and my gaze.

     Why is she asking me this?

     I've told her so much about that dark period of my life, but I've always held myself back from telling her the full truth: that for many months I lived under the burden of the knowledge that I would rather have died with Alyssa than continued existing on my own. It was as if I had to carry a sack of rocks with me everywhere I went: always the oppressive weight of them, more often than not the stab of their sharp edges as they shifted within the canvas.

     Why did she die? Was it my fault? Irrationally, I believed that in some way it was … in between being furious with her for having let herself be killed.

     How she died is well known. We'd had fourteen years together. Under just her given name, Alyssa, she'd released eight albums, one of which had gone platinum and received a Grammy. She was far from a household name, but she was certainly successful and, more important for her (and me), she was highly respected within the music industry. I cannot now remember all the others who recorded her songs — Judy Collins, obviously, and Joan Baez, but also some far less expected names, like the Rolling Stones, John Mellencamp, and, the biggest surprise of all, the young Bruce Springsteen, who used "Show Me the Face of Truth" as an encore on one of his tours and was so gratified by the audience reaction that he put it on one of his albums.

     Her first demos were recorded by me on a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, using her parents' garage as a studio. We spent all of a Saturday, starting early and finishing late, covering the garage's insides with layers of primitive soundproofing derived from about a thousand cardboard boxes we'd scrounged from the local supermarkets. On the Sunday I acted as her recording engineer, an unskilled job that involved pushing the "start" and "stop" buttons at the appropriate times, turning the "volume" button for the single fade-out we attempted (no automatic volume control on this machine, thanks be), making suggestions that were ignored, and being the other half of a couple of arguments when things didn't turn out the way she thought they should. We laid down five songs in all, discarding one of them after we agreed it still didn't sound right after multiple takes. (A few years later a studio version of it bobbed for a few weeks into the Billboard charts, the only single of hers to do so. So much for the tastes of the market.)

     Her parents had supplied us with just the one bedroom for the weekend, which was truly cool and with-it of them … except for the fact that we hadn't started sleeping together by then. Alyssa drew her mother off into the kitchen for a few minutes of tightly spoken conversation, and it was suddenly announced that the couch could be made up for me. For the rest of the weekend I suffered occasional sympathetic glances from her Mom and Dad, as if there might be something genetically wrong with a guy who didn't want to sleep with their daughter. In truth, I both did and didn't. I wasn't quite back to the same state of mind as with Lynne, but to something like it. I didn't want to risk destroying what Alyssa and I had discovered in each other through any precipitate action — yes, that was a part of it, but only a small part. The greater reality was that we both knew we were in this together for the long haul, that lovemaking would inevitably start sooner or later, and that the timing of that start was actually irrelevant — better to wait until the moment seemed entirely right than just fall into the habit.

     (The moment came a couple of weeks later. She took a shower while I was visiting her apartment, which was tiny but about five times the size of mine. Suddenly she emerged into the main room, naked and dripping, arm outstretched to me, said, "Aw, come on, let's get this thing over with," and dragged me in after her. We took my clothes off under the raining water in the cramped, plastic-smelling cubicle, but the rest proved impracticable there — to my astonishment, this was her first time. Mission was accomplished later on her bed as she impaled herself on me.)

     I managed to get my visa renewed, and by the time we got married I had all my papers in for permanent US residency, with a view to eventual citizenship. As a man preparing to be married, it behooved me to think about a career of some sort. I found my linguistic abilities opened up a lot of doors for me in a nation where foreign languages are so little learned. The jobs I took over the next few years weren't engrossing, but they stood me in good stead when eventually, now a full-fledged US citizen, I applied to the diplomatic service.

     Our two careers meshed remarkably well together. She had to be on tour for about one-third of each year, although never for more than a few weeks at a time; after I'd served my initial apprenticeship in Washington DC, I too was "on tour" much of the year, in my case almost all of it. But it didn't really matter where I was posted at the time; for her, coming home to one place was as easy as coming home to any other. And I have no illusions but that she greatly assisted my ascent up the diplomatic ladder. What better an escort could a diplomat have on his arm than the unceasingly charming, gaminishly lovely Alyssa? About her there hung an iridescent cloak of glamour and fame, and in its radiance I was more brightly visible.

     And then, while I was on a transatlantic flight to Bangkok, the domestic flight that was carrying her and her parents to a benefit concert in California crashed into a Utah mountainside, with the death of all on board. I'd been twenty-four hours in Bangkok before anyone there made the connection and thought to tell me. I flew back to New York immediately, of course, and then out to Salt Lake City, where I found there was absolutely nothing I could do except wait for news that was never going to come. After the first day, a friendly travelling salesman allowed me to buy as much as I wanted out of the illicit stash of booze he'd brought into the state with him in the trunk of his car, and I retreated to my hotel room for several blank days of misery. It wasn't the best thing to do, and I'm not proud of myself for it, but I emerged from my room stronger in some sense for the necessary lacuna, despite the ravages of my head and gut.

     I survived. That was the best thing I could do for her.

     The funeral for her and her parents. Not much to bury. I was embraced by relatives I'd never known she had.

     The music industry. Sales soared. Her deleted early albums were reissued with new covers tastefully limned in black. I put everything into the hands of a business manager, directing him to send all the royalties to a slate of international children's charities. Friends — of whom I had few, because of the social exigencies of my profession — told me I might have been better to immerse myself in the day-to-day minutiae of managing her estate, thereby avoiding direct confrontation with my grief until it had been ameliorated by time, but every time I thought of doing so all I could see was a Brobdingnagian cash register ticking up dollar signs in exchange for Alyssa's life.

     In exchange for my life, really. Strange that I've never thought of that until now, staring upward from the pillow at Jéanne's incongruously tranquil face as I tell all this to her. I died as surely as Alyssa did on that hillside, amid the mangled metal and the flames. The only difference was that I had the ability to be reborn, whereas she was gone forever.

     (Christian acquaintances told me she was "in a better place". I rejected their supposed comfort as the patronizing bilge Alyssa would have considered it to be. Only fools and the insanely deluded rely on mythology for their consolations.)

     And somehow my metaphorical rebirth, my reinvention, happened. I was given a six-month furlough to "get over things, fella", and at the end of it I returned to my posting in Thailand. There I daily faced the bizarre mixture of spirituality and real-world absolute ruthlessness the government of the day practised. A little of that ruthlessness infected me. I became not an especially nice person to know, but perhaps that was my salvation. I could present the same hard carapace to my own suffering as I did to other people's.

     Three years later I was transferred, for no particular reason I could understand, to Mexico City, where I underwent countless daily siestas but more importantly a sort of siesta of the soul. I mellowed. I became Simon McLafferty once again, not the robotic entity that had temporarily possessed his body.

     But there was still a vacuum within me, the vacuum left by Alyssa.

     The trouble with vacuums is, to be oxymoronic, that they're entirely empty. Nature abhors them, as the cliché truthfully tells us; and it is completely unselective about what it uses to fill them, just so long as they're filled. In my instance, Nature used Helen.

     She was essentially an embassy groupie. I'm sure she had a job there of some sort, but I was never interested enough in her to find out what it was. All I was really interested in, to my shame, was her cute ass, her little apple-like breasts, her willing pussy.

      No. I'm not being fair to myself. There were parts of her that I loved. The way the sun caught the fine dark hairs on the back of her gracefully long neck. Her Rabelaisian humour. The sparkle of her eyes as she held herself back from mocking someone who deserved to be mocked. Her voice, which was superbly modulated, even on those frequent occasions when she was talking wrong-headedness or being privately spiteful. I loved the superficials of her, in other words. We were married almost before I understood what was happening to me, and certainly before I'd had the chance to realize there was nothing of Helen beyond the superficials. If I'd been a better person, back then, I'd have had the humanity to discover this sooner, but instead all that interested me — totally absorbed me, in fact — was the welter of extraordinary sex in which we engaged. I'd like to say there was a detached part of me that stood to one side as an observer, watching dispassionately as we coupled, recognizing our cries and moans for the empty things they were, but there wasn't. I threw the whole of myself into physical sensation, and had no recollection that any alternative world existed.

     We were back in New York, our marriage three years old, by the time I met Evelyn. The government had set up a covert office to analyse the intentions of terrorist leaders globally with a view to "quietly taking them out" where the opportunity arose, and the persona I had created in Thailand commended itself to the powers that be as someone who might be "gainfully employed" in such an endeavour. The real Simon McLafferty would have loudly rejected such an assignment: the murder of a murderer is still a murder. The artifactual Simon McLafferty, by contrast, accepted the task as "an exciting, forward-looking opportunity".

     Evelyn jolted me out of that mind-set. Ironically, it was my Thai experience that drew us together, even though the Thailand-induced version of me should have repelled her. An administrative secretary in our little clandestine group, she was the daughter of an American father and a Thai mother. Although she had never been to her mother's native land and the accent modulating her quiet voice was straight Brooklyn, she had a Thai sensibility that drew me to her. Hers was not the facet of the Thai mentality embodied in the government I'd known; instead it was that marriage of compassion and sophisticated aestheticism — and asceticism, too, in perfectly balanced moderation — that has often made me wonder if the Thais are not, between their periodic political repressions, the most advanced people on earth

     One coffee break, Evelyn and I shared a table in the crowded diner just up the block from our offices. We were strangers when she asked if she might use the vacant seat. Half an hour later, we had known each other all our lives. Whenever I think of Evelyn now I see her as I saw her in that diner, one elbow on the table, her raised hand toying with the line of her upper jaw, her soft black hair stranding across the curve of her cheek as she stared aslant down into the maw of her coffee mug while she spoke, as if she were scrying for the words in the black surface of the liquid. Every once in a while she'd glance up to look me directly in the eyes, giving me a smile of lightning swiftness, before resuming her more contemplative pose. She was in her late thirties, I discovered — roughly the same age as I was myself — but the smoothness of her skin and her slenderness made her seem younger; she'd had a husband but had got rid of him a long time ago, wisely. On the side of her forehead, just above the outer edge of her right eyebrow, she had a small red birthmark about which she was utterly unselfconscious. She had a way of raising this eyebrow to emphasize a word or a phrase that made her seem momentarily almost like a child.

     But that is just what I saw. In reality, I absorbed her. In the space of only a half-hour or so, she became a part of every cell in my body, like an invasive virus. Unlike a virus, however, rather than attack the cells, she destroyed only the toxins she found therein, the toxins that had been spawned by the loss of Alyssa, by my grim experiences with the Thai government, by — and this made it hard for me to speak during the few seconds it took for the understanding to dawn on me — my marriage to Helen.

     Evelyn finished her coffee before I did and announced that she had chores to get done back at the office — no time for dallying. In the normal way I'd have downed the last few mouthfuls of my own drink quickly and walked back with her, but I was so dumbfounded by what had happened that I welcomed the prospect of a few minutes on my own to assimilate this new development. I seemed to be thrumming with life in a way that I hadn't been since before I'd been told of Alyssa's plane crash. It was as if, should I have put a fingertip to my flesh, I would have drawn sparks.

     As she went out the door I reflexively did all the usual male things — check out her behind (not great if it had been on anyone else, but most marvellously affection-inducing because it belonged to her), wonder what it would be like to stroke my hand down her naked backbone, fantasize her lips on me — but my mind really wasn't on this. Instead I was watching what I imagined to be the essence of her, that cape-like aura of specialness that Lynne and then Alyssa had worn. While my instincts might be evaluating her as a possible mate, my conscious self was wanting to tuck itself alongside her within that invisible garment.

     She'd forgotten her pen. It was only a cheap ballpoint, lying on the plastic table-top beside her saucer, but it was hers. I reached to pick it up, happy of the chance to return it to her at the office, when I realized she was standing next to me.

     I glanced up before I could stop myself, aware that my eyes were caught unguarded and must be telling her everything I felt about her. She smiled one of those quicksilver smiles, but I didn't know if it was in response to the message in my eyes or just a gesture of courtesy.

     "Sorry," she said, stretching for the pen.

     Her knuckles grazed mine.

"Evelyn captivated you, didn't she?" says Jéanne. It's hardly a question. "Why didn't you become her lover? Why didn't you ever even make a pass at her? She would have been receptive, you know. It's not as if the diplomatic service is some last bastion of the sanctity of the marital vows, is it? Affairs were a commonplace among your colleagues. She knew from the first moment she saw you that you weren't really married to your wife, just sharing sex and social niceties with her. Evelyn wouldn't have regarded your lovemaking as adultery."

     It's becoming increasingly hard to form the words I want to, even if I've apparently been mumbling all this time.

     "Yes," I say, "but I would."

     "Helen had no such compunctions," observes Jéanne.

     "I didn't know that," I pronounce carefully.

     Jéanne snorts.

     "Not for sure," I plead.

     She snorts again, but this time the sound isn't derisive or contemptuous. She's smiling at me with such a wealth of love that I feel the fading, desiccated wreckage of my body begin to glow allover.

     "You're a good man, Simon McLafferty."

     I'm not sure this is the truth, but I don't want to expend any of those few precious remaining breaths of mine on telling her so. I have the fancy that, somewhere, someone is counting down toward zero the breaths this life of mine still has left in it. The chimeric counter hasn't yet reached the classic "Ten … Nine … Eight …" but surely the moment cannot be long distant.

     It was through naivety and inexperience that Lynne and I never made physical love. With Evelyn it was almost exactly the opposite, at least in my case. It was as if she had created me afresh, yes, but I still carried with me the baggage of world-weariness I'd acquired through my widowerhood and my loveless marriage. The sexual act — or so I thought — held no further secrets for me; I could indulge my every sensual whim almost any time I wanted to with Helen. As my "friendship" with Evelyn grew, I enjoyed all the intimacy of lovemaking without the necessity for the actual physical contact. Looking back on it now, I can see that out of my relationships with these two completely different women, Evelyn and Helen, who as far as I'm aware never met each other, I was having a single complete love affair — a single complete marriage.

    Which was intensely selfish of me — selfish not toward Helen, who was getting from me (and from her other lovers, although I did not let myself suspect their existence) exactly as much as she wanted to take, but toward Evelyn, to whom I gave only a part of myself when she deserved everything I could give. I don't mean I owed her the physical thrills of lovemaking, or anything stupidly mechanistic like that. What I did was allow her to come to within a hairsbreadth of the heart of me and then deny her that last tiny distance. Sleeping with her would have involved no betrayal of Helen. What was there to betray? Adultery, in my view, is not the extramarital sex itself but the breach the sex entails of the tacit contract the partners have with each other, the contract involving cherishing and the intention never to hurt. But there was no real cherishing in my bond with Helen, and our coupling had as much in it of the intent to hurt as it did of the desire to pleasure.

     And there was another selfish aspect to my "virtuous" chastity. Let me admit this to myself for the first time. If one cannot plumb the depths of shame on one's death-bed, where else can one do so? Sex with Helen was an extravaganza: it was spectacular, it was inventive, it was a carnal drama of endless surprises. What if sex with Evelyn proved … well, drab? Would I start to look at her and at Helen and compare them, perhaps to Evelyn's disadvantage, preferring the instant gratification of physical fulfilment to gentler lovemaking, however much our souls had become intimate? Would I find myself going through the motions with Evelyn and fucking the daylights out of Helen? I had enough knowledge of my own weaknesses to envisage all too clearly how this situation might arise, and to quail at the prospects of the emotional complexities to which it would subject me.

     "You never knew what you were missing, you goof," interrupts Jéanne.

     Her words bring me up me short, and again I have the unsettling sensation of not knowing I've been speaking until I stop.

     "What do you mean?" I gasp.

     "She'd have opened your eyes to how little you knew about pleasure. She so desperately wanted to, but she couldn't do that against your stated will."

     Time slips, and I'm in the midst of the closest physical contact Evelyn and I ever entertained. We tried not to be seen together too much around the offices, because the members of our secret, technically nonexistent department were far more adroit at sniffing out gossip than ever they were at tracking hostile terrorists. When we dined together it was at the far end of the city, and we left separately to make our differently devious ways to the assignation. During the working day — which often extended until late at night, though not as often as I told Helen it did — we were polite to each other, friendly, but with the kind of friendliness that manifestly is left behind at the office door.

     But on occasion circumstances threw us together, and it would have been visibly unnatural if we'd consistently avoided those encounters. We couldn't perpetually be ducking away from the elevator just because the other was waiting to ride up or down in it. Besides, there was usually someone else in the elevator to act as unwitting chaperone …

     Not on the evening of Thursday, September 29, there wasn't, though.

     The pair of us glanced briefly at each other with a certain embarrassed wariness, conscious of the fact that the elevator was slow and we were starting our journey fifty-three floors up. I once saw a soft-porn movie whose "plot" was that a couple were trying to complete the sex act, to the satisfaction of both parties, during a single elevator ride, and images from it trickled unbidden into my mind as I looked at the control buttons, the ceiling fixtures, the brushed aluminium doors — anywhere but directly at Evelyn.

     I almost lost my balance when she grabbed me by the lapel and pulled me forcefully against her. Reversing the path of my half-stagger, she slammed my back against the side of the elevator and fixed her mouth to mine. She was perhaps three inches shorter than me and certainly far more slightly built, but at that moment I felt significantly the weaker of the two of us — insomuch as I could feel anything at all other than the hot electricity of her kiss as her tongue weaseled between my teeth. She put the flat of her hand on my stomach between us, her fingers splayed sideways against the thin cotton of my shirt, her thumb looped around my tie. Before I understood what was going on, she lowered her hand until the little finger was poking beneath the belt of my trousers. My own hands had instinctively wrapped themselves around her rear, pulling her closer and a little upwards so that I could feel the ridge of her groin against me.

     I dragged my head away for a moment.

     "Security cams," I said.

     "Fuck the security cams, Simon."

     Seconds later the doors wheezed open. She peeled herself almost demurely off me and took my hand to lead me out into the empty, echoing space of the marble-floored lobby.

     Although I could see no one else there, I walked half-hunched-over to try to make my erection less obvious, thanking fortune not for the first time for my relatively modest endowment.

     "That was … That was …" I expostulated.

     "Natural, Simon?" she said. "Inevitable? Overdue?"

     "All of those, but …"

     "Fabulous?"

     "Oh, God, yes, but …"

     Her voice was becoming harsher. "Sinful? Is that what you're trying to say, Simon? A betrayal of your oh-so-sacred marriage vows?"

     I couldn't think of a response. Yes, it had been sinful — gloriously, wonderfully sinful. I was leaning my fists and forehead on the cold steel of the bank of mailboxes on the far side of the lobby from the elevator, which was watching us, still empty and open-doored, a faulty light in its interior humming expectantly. Evelyn was standing halfway between me and it as I turned, her fists on her waist, her legs aggressively astride, her body leaning forward.

     "You're going to have to decide something pretty soon, Simon McLafferty. Pretty goddam soon."

     "I …"

     "Pick between me and your saintly principles."

     Even with my brain in a fever, I noticed that she hadn't said "between me and your wife". She'd wrapped her tongue around the word "principles" and spat it out as if it were something foul.

     "It's not that easy, Evelyn. I … You … I have to protect you from …"

     "From what?"

     I didn't know either.

     "This lobby's under electronic surveillance," I said weakly.

     "So the fuck what?"

     "They'll …."

     "They'll know? Is that what you're trying to say, Simon? Those goons who watch every last furtive fumble in the rest rooms will know our dirty little secret?"

     The elevator doors closed, and it grunted upward to fetch someone else, someone whose arrival might rescue me from this scene.

     "I can't go on like this," she hissed. "You're a fool and a fuckhead, Simon McLafferty."

     She tossed her hair angrily and headed for the street.

     I didn't dare follow her.

     "You OK, Simon?"

     At first I didn't recognize the voice, nor the face that went with it, seen through the blur of my frustrated tears. Then I pulled myself together.

     Hector Rouleau, in charge of the fax machine and other vital tools of modern global communications.

     "I'm fine, Hector. Just fine." A palsied smile. "Something I ate, I guess."

    &nbs;pHe put his head to one side, eyeing me with the speculative objectivity of a crow.

     "You sure?"

     "Sure. I'll be right as rain in a moment."

     "OK, if you say so, Mister McLafferty …"

     He was gone.

     I followed him a few minutes later out into a choppy sea of pedestrians moving randomly in the yellow light of the city. I felt as if I'd been flipped inside out, so that every raw nerve of me was exposed to the salt water. Inside me there was the same void I sometimes experienced after protracted lovemaking, a mixture of emotional and physical drainedness. If a kiss and … I guess it's technically called "heavy petting", although that seems a demeaning term for what had happened between us. If a kiss and heavy petting with Evelyn could do this to me, what would it be like if we …?

     I found a bar ­ what else? ­ and stumbled into it. Sitting up at the counter was Evelyn.

     As I lurched in through the swing door she smiled at me as if nothing whatsoever had happened between us. Had it not been for the slight wetness in the corners of her eyes, visible even in the dim light, one might have assumed this was just a chance encounter between colleagues.

     "A beer, Simon?"

     … And I'm back staring at the ceiling in the bare room that will be the last to hold me in this lifetime. The ceiling seems to have moved further away from me than it was just a little while ago.

      "Maybe you're right," I say to Jéanne.

     "I know I am."

     "You know more than you should." I essay a laugh, but it sounds more like an accident of breathing. "I don't understand how you know so much."

     She gives a laugh of her own. There's not much humour in it, but a deal of fondness.

     "Did you ever find out what happened to her, Simon?"

     I give a long, dry sigh.

     Curiously, things with Evelyn carried on very much as they had before. A few times we talked about the "elevator incident", but mostly we avoided the subject. Sometimes we shared the quasi-masturbatory game of describing to each other the things we would like to do together if we were in bed, but we were both too reserved ever to become pornographic; there was something playfully innocent in our inventions, all of which could probably have been overheard by others without too dire a humiliation. One significant change was that we were, when alone, quite open with each other about the fact that we were in love. We accepted the truth that I should stick to the correct version of the script life was offering us and slough off Helen; we also accepted the truth that I wasn't going to, that it would violate my ethics concerning the contract entered into upon marriage and thus taint anything we shared thereafter.

     And then one morning I arrived at the office to discover Evelyn was no longer there. She'd been posted to Madrid to liaise with the Spanish team working to counter ETA; by now her plane was probably taking off from JFK. She had known about this new posting for a month, but had never mentioned it to me; I'd had dinner with her at our favourite Japanese restaurant, Moto, the night before, and she'd said nothing. There had been no tearful farewell; just our usual sibling embrace, pats on the back, as we parted at Grand Central to go our different ways, the customary mutters of "See you in the morning."

     That night, still stunned into uselessness by the abruptness of her departure and by the fact that protocol dictated I should show no reaction beyond casual surprise, I was shucking on my coat preparatory to going home — and never had home with Helen seemed less enticing — when I discovered, slipped into the pocket Evelyn knew I hardly ever used, a folded sheet of paper. On it she'd written a Philadelphia phone number which she identified as her sister's.

     She'd told me all about her married sister Diane, with whom she didn't get on too well. The implication was obvious. If ever I could pluck up the courage to divest myself of my unwanted caricature of a marriage, there was a way I could get in touch with Evelyn. The door might or might not be open: that was something I'd have to discover when and if the time came.

     It was glum, but I wasn't. How could I be, when Evelyn was everywhere with me despite her physical absence?

      It was in Paris a few years later, after a new President had abolished our secret anti-terrorist operation and we'd been reassigned to various different consulates and embassies around the globe, that the truth about Helen's extramarital activities began to come bubbling out — the way such matters usually do come out: she threw them at me as a taunt in the midst of a heated argument, and by the time she realized what she'd done it was too late to herd the words back. Of course, as is so often the way, over the next few weeks I discovered that everyone else around us had known of her promiscuities all along but had been too soft-hearted or abashed or whatever to breathe a word about them to me. I didn't know whether to be angry with my friends for their pusillanimity or embrace them for their intended kindness.

     Society's prescribed code of behaviour in such circumstances coincided with my own inclinations, and I initiated divorce proceedings. Naturally, with Helen's taste for the histrionic in all things, the process dragged on interminably. I still had, tucked neatly into my pocket-book, the sheet of paper Evelyn had left me with her sister's number in Philly, but I didn't want to make that phone call until I knew I was entirely clear of all possible obstacles.

     Even after that had become the case, I hesitated. Would Evelyn be glad to hear from me? It had been a few years. I knew how I felt about her, but had I been reading too much into her feelings for me? Would she perhaps have taken a partner of her own, maybe even started a family, so that I would be like a bull trying to charge my way into the midst of her contentment? And, if her sister was truly the harridan Evelyn had described, was this anyway just going to turn out to be a particularly unpleasant phone call that didn't get me anywhere?

     At last I found the nerve.

     Contacting Evelyn's sister was no easy matter, it turned out. Diane had moved not once but twice in the intervening years, and was now residing in New Orleans, sans husband, in what I much later discovered was a lesbian commune. My, how society was changing.

     Diane proved to be charming, at least on the telephone. She knew who I was, because Evelyn had spoken often about me. I sensed that Evelyn's accounts to me of her relations with her sister might have been more rhetoric than anything else. But there was nothing Diane could do to soften the message she had to give me.

     Evelyn was flown home within six months of the commencement of her posting in Madrid, suffering from constant weakness and exhaustion and perpetually racked with ever-increasing pains. The diagnosis was leukemia, and in an advanced state; she must already have been terminally ill during the final months I knew her. Chemotherapy prolonged her existence a while, but there had been no genuine chance of any remission: her imminent death was an inevitability long before her homebound plane had touched down in JFK. As the time approached, Diane said, Evelyn seemed almost to welcome the opportunity of oblivion.

     The words put a dagger in my belly, and twisted the blade. To what extent had I and my stupid, asinine, stiff-necked "morality" been responsible for Evelyn's embrace of her own death? Nothing I could have done, of course, would have averted the advance of her leukemia — or would it? There have been plenty of cases of cancer being conquered psychologically. If Evelyn and I had been together, who knows what miracle might have happened? And, even if all these "if only" speculations were purest fantasy, at the very least I could have been with her during her agonizing, humiliating final months.

     I somehow finished my conversation with Evelyn's sister, who by the time we put our phones down was sobbing as copiously as I was.

     "It was like you were dying all over again," murmurs Jéanne, "just the same way you did for Alyssa, wasn't it, Simon?"

     My eyes are no longer capable of producing tears. I can see that Jéanne is weeping for both of us. I try to thank her, but my lips are numb, rubbery, outwith my control. All I can manage to make them do is form a silent "Yes".

     In Paris I went berserk for a few weeks. I fucked every woman available to me, including a few who had to be paid for their services. I even thought of attempting a reconciliation with Helen, who seemed the only person for whom I could conjure up sufficient detestation to empower the kind of ultimate hate-fuck I was searching for. When I wasn't fucking I was drinking. I was sometimes drinking even while I was fucking; the force of my self-loathing was so great that the drinking in no way interfered with my ability to fuck. People started to avoid me whenever they could; I looked and smelled like a man dead on his feet and I didn't care. More and more the only women who would share a room with me were the ones at whom I thrust wads of dollars that were no longer of any value to me. Then there was an embassy reception, and the lovely wife of the Kenyan ambassador, and …

     In a quiet sanatorium near Paris, previously a château, I was reintroduced to the self I'd once been. Gentle-voiced French men and women dried the alcohol out of me and talked me free from the claws of grief; rationality returned a little later. As soon as I had the capacity to understand what was going on, a junior staffer from the embassy, Randy Meakin, was deputed to visit me. Visibly uneasy, shifting in his seat, Meakin told me the Kenyan ambassador and his wife were not of any mind to press charges — they deemed that the beating I'd sustained as the security men restrained me was quite sufficient punishment on its own. Once the doctors had judged me recovered, Meakin informed me, I would be flown home to the States; until then I was to be regarded as on fully paid leave.

     The penalty sounded draconian, as if I were being shuffled out of the picture forever. But disgrace in the diplomatic service is hard to come by: the State Department has a way of looking after its own — unless, of course, they commit the ultimate crime of pulling the props out from under a sitting President's falsehoods. Within a year I was fully reinstated and, although rumours about past misdemeanours would never entirely dissipate from around me, officially the hiatus in my career was ascribed to "illness" — true enough, as it happens.

     I foreswore liaisons with the opposite sex. This was not something insisted upon by my superiors, although they hinted very strongly, with the appropriate mannish chuckles, that "it might be a good idea, guy". It was a decision of my own. Only three women in my life had entered the innermost chambers of my soul's mansion, and in two of those cases my own stupidity had made the relationships disastrous — as had been most of my other relationships with women, Helen most notably not excepted. I would be better occupied by contemplating my memories of the wonders I'd shared with Alyssa, and leaving my emotional existence at that. Surely those fourteen years were enough for anyone?

     That didn't stop my mind from lingering on my failures with Lynne and Evelyn. Evelyn was dead, just as dead as Alyssa, but Lynne?

     Back then there was no such thing as Google or any of the other search engines. The internet was, so far as most of us were concerned, an exciting possibility for the future, but nothing more. However, one of the perks of being a professional diplomat is that you have other ways of tracking down information — ways that are funded by the taxpayer and thus are supposedly not for personal use. Supposedly.

     In due course a photocopy arrived on my desk. I imagine it had been produced from a microfiche or microfilm, because it showed the whole of a newspaper front page on a single eight-and-one-half-inch by eleven-inch sheet. The Hendon & Finchley Times had enjoyed a field day, all those years ago.

     I had to use a magnifying glass to read the type of the lead story, but the headline — JEALOUS HUSBAND CONVICTED IN MURDER TRIAL — told me almost as much as I needed to know. Within two years of the bitterly happy day on which I'd hugged Lynne and said goodbye to her, the "nice guy", Pete, whom she'd married had attacked her in a fit of rage with a kitchen knife, stabbing her repeatedly. At the trial a pattern had emerged of spousal abuse almost from day one. In his own defence, Pete had claimed infidelity on his wife's part even since before their marriage, although when pressed he'd been unable to name her partner in adultery or give any reason for his belief. Not surprisingly, the judge committed him to psychiatric care for as long as should be required.

     I read all this with a sinking heart but also with a feeling of inevitability.

     What was it about me? Lynne, whom I'd loved — dead. Alyssa, whom I'd loved — dead. Evelyn, whom I'd loved — dead. All three taken long before their time: by murder, by accident, by incurable disease. What was it Oscar Wilde said about losing one's parents? Was I some kind of Jonah or Typhoid Mary, who brought disaster to everyone who came close to me? Was I, through some obscure chain of causation, responsible for the deaths of the three people who'd meant most to me?

     My grief for Lynne was short-lived, very soon turning into a determination that such a thing could never be allowed to occur again. I was well aware of the illogic of my feelings, but that didn't stop me from knowing — knowing intuitively rather than rationally, so that the rules of logic didn't pertain — that somehow, if I ever let another human being penetrate the shell of my being, that person would not long survive.

     I praised all the gods I didn't believe in that Alyssa and I had never found either the time or the desire to have children. What would have been their fates?

     The legend soon began to be embellished in diplomatic circles about Simon McLafferty and his single-minded diligence. I threw every last iota of my energies into my work. Where others faltered, I forged on. Who can tell how many diplomatic triumphs recorded by succeeding US Presidents were in fact engineered by me, working behind the scenes? Certainly I can't. None of them meant very much to me, so they tend to blur together in my memory. All that they succeeded in doing was to lure me to continue existing from each day to the next.

     There was more to the legend than that. I always had a beautiful woman on my arm when I had to appear at public functions, and hardly ever the same one twice. People wondered what in the world it could be that the middle-aged Simon McLafferty possessed that other men could only aspire to. The obvious — and envious — conclusion was scrawled on the walls of embassy men's rooms all over the world, but it was nonsense, as were all other speculations about my supposedly extraordinary sex life. I didn't have a sex life at all — well, hardly at all. I was entirely uninterested in the matter. Beautiful women were only too happy to accompany me to receptions and funerals because they could tell, using that subtle radar which such women possess, that there would be no obligations afterwards, no untidy scenes of attempted seduction or moral blackmail. I would thank them for the joy of their company, peck them chastely on the cheek, and hand them into the waiting limousine I'd hired to take them home. Like so many gay men, I had a vast circle of lovely female friends, all of whom knew they could trust me as much as or more than they could trust each other. Only in a couple of cases did I misjudge things, and then I dutifully performed what was expected of me, pretending all the requisite enthusiasm, thereafter gently and gradually letting the relationship wither on the vine.

     It was a modus vivendi, or at least a modus continuandi.

     The years turned on. The faces of my beautiful friends changed, growing more beautiful as they grew older. New and nearly as beautiful faces arrived in my world. Plus ça change …

     Until I encountered a slightly drunken woman lounging on a couch at the tag end of my farewell party from the diplomatic service.

     "I always have," she says.

     I nod, although possibly no one other than myself would be able to detect the movement of my chin. Then I recognize the meaning of the words she's just spoken.

     She sees the realization in my rheumy eyes.

     "I always have," she repeats. Cautious in case she might hurt me, she squeezes my hand a little tighter.

     "I don't understand," I whisper, although in reality I do. My ancient heart and my thin, sluggish blood are incapable of anything so gauchely ostentatious as surging, but I feel a faint warmth in my chest.

     Jéanne lets go of my hand and gets to her feet. Smoothing her wrinkled skirt down over her hips, she begins to pace up and down beside my bed. My eyes have difficulty tracking her face, but I can tell she is formulating the words she wants to say before risking their utterance.

     "Imagine this, Simon," she begins. "Imagine that not every human existence follows the customary pattern of birth, life and death — one chance only. Imagine that there is an … an alternative route that some individuals, and only some, can take."

     She pauses in her pacing and looks down at me. This is difficult for her, but there is nothing I can do to help her — nothing except carry on living until she has said all she wants to say.

     "The Buddhists," she continues, "have an intuitive recognition that this must be the case, and so they've devised the notion of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls — and all the elaborate architecture that must be invoked to sustain such a concept. They introduced the concept of virtue to the equation: if you led a good life, you would come back to enjoy a more exalted status, but if you were a total turd you'd be lucky if your next existence was as a dung beetle or a blowfly. All of it's garbage, of course, but it seems to make sense in the minds of imaginative people who sincerely want to improve the human state."

     Jéanne sits down on the end of my bed, meticulous to ensure that the tautening of the blankets will not put unnecessary pressure on my feet.

     She looks at me quizzically as if expecting me to say something, or just to sputter in disbelief, but I don't. I have too little vigour left for either, even if that were what I wished to do.

     "What they based the structure they'd devised on was the rumour that not everyone had to live only the once, and die only the once. It was inconceivable to them that this should apply to just a tiny minority of human beings. The principle of mediocrity dictated that it should apply to all … and so they resorted to the theory of reincarnation to explain a misapprehended phenomenon."

     I think I've managed a smile to encourage her to go on. There's a pain building up in my gut again, and I sense it may be the final pain.

     "You see, Simon, for all your mumbling about the 'four significant women in my life'" — her imitation of my senile croak is amusingly, cruelly accurate — "there has really been only one. Just as with the Buddhists, the truth of the phenomenon is so outlandish to you that it's never even crossed your mind. One in a million, ten million — who knows how many million people? — can recreate their physical existences endlessly, trivially altering the fabric of perceived reality wherever necessary in order to make the truth consistent with what is believed to be possible. They have as many chances as they wish to get the scripts of their lives right — indeed, they need to, because all the other human beings with whom they have to interact are motivated by what you might call 'free will' but what's really just ignorance of the script."

     This time I know I've smiled, because she smiles in response. She's glad she's getting her message through to me. She's left it as late as she could, in case I might have the opportunity to tell anyone else what she told me — as if I would! — but she wants me to know before I depart into the eternal night. She wants to reassure me that my own death does not, by that principle of mediocrity she mentioned, imply her death, too, after a trivial period of years or decades.

      "There weren't 'four women of significance' in your life, Simon. Just one. I was following a script as Lynne, who should in due course have discovered the secrets of the furthest galaxies and of the beginnings of it all, because those are things I have spent many existences puzzling about when the technology didn't exist to let me ask my questions, let alone have them answered — I was following my script as Lynne when I met you, and knew I would have to make extensive revisions. If only we could choose the people we fall in love with! But there I was — stuck with a weak-willed, somewhat shiftless, certainly uncouth boy.

      "I waited, and I waited, and I waited. I was not just an actor on the stage of our now-shared existence, I was also the prompter who kept bellowing your cues at you — only you were too dumb stupid to pick up on them.

      "Eventually I rebelled against the dictates of the playwright, even though the playwright was myself. I must, I thought, have fouled up when I was mapping out the revised plot. You were a mistake, a bit player who was trying to upstage the principals in the cast. Along came Pete, who was a good enough person, appropriately attractive, likely to be a success in his life, tolerant, reasonably intelligent — I can't tell you how many Petes I've spent existences with over the centuries. I shrugged you off as an aberration, and tried to lead the life I'd intended to lead.

      "Only I couldn't. Pete suspected from the outset that I was guilty of constant, gross infidelities to him, and he was perfectly correct in his suspicions — only the infidelities weren't physical. I didn't have the string of lovers his jealousy conjured up. There was only you. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually, I was a serial adulteress with you. You were with me every waking moment, and most of my sleeping ones as well. I knew what I was doing was wrong, that I was being unforgivably cruel to Pete, but my rational mind had no control over what my soul was doing. If he'd been a less sensitive person, or merely less intelligent — the way Helen was when you were being just as unfaithful to her with Evelyn — it would have been easier for him because he might never have had the first inkling of what his wife was doing, but he paid the penalty for his … for his niceness.

      "I didn't predict how it was going to turn out with him in the end — that was on a page of the script I hadn't yet reached — but when he approached me in the bedroom, with the knife in his hand and fury in his eyes, I welcomed the blade.

      "I welcomed the pain, too. I deserved it. It was the first, pitifully small token by which I might repay what I owed him. I would be able to — and did — repay him far more completely later, but just in that moment all I could give him was my merited suffering.

      "And so, messily, my existence as Lynne came to its close. It didn't take me long to add a few extra stitches to the tapestry of reality such that I might re-create myself as Alyssa, who was waiting for you, a brand-new script in hand, when you arrived one night at a dingy music club in downtown Manhattan …"

      She sighs and looks down to where her hands rest on her thighs. The skin of her face is still as young and unlined as ever it was. Jéanne, my solitary beloved, has not chosen to age much in this existence. She has stayed young because she thought this was what I wanted of her.

      Still thinks.

      Jéanne is about to explain this to me.

      "Those were happy years we shared, weren't they, Simon? Both of us were doing exactly what we wanted to do. This time around, I'd realized my earlier error. As Lynne, I'd tried to make you fit into the script that I'd written for us both — I hadn't taken proper account of the fact that you were an independent entity with your own motivations. You couldn't pick up on the cues the prompter was yelling at you because no one had ever thought to give you a reading of the play. It wasn't just that you were unfamiliar with the lines I'd prescribed for you; it was that they were lines you, Simon McLafferty, could never speak unless you became someone entirely different. Which was the last thing I wanted you to do, because it was the unadulterated Simon McLafferty with whom I'd had the mixed fortune to fall in love.

      "So, second time around, as Alyssa, I was less dogmatic about the sacrosanctness of the stageplay I'd prepared. I let you follow your own script, even though neither of us had any idea where it might lead you, and I constantly moulded and remoulded mine so that it corresponded with and was complementary to yours. It was helpful that we spent a reasonable percentage of the time apart from each other — something that I designed into the equation so that the inconsistencies and clashes between the two scripts could never build up until they became too obvious.

     "I was blissfully happy for fourteen years — happier than I can ever remember being, which is saying something. Not only was I writing new music, I was able slowly to produce and rework some of the countless songs I'd composed over my previous existences, pretending they'd just been freshly written. Remember how the critics used to say that the distinction of my albums was that every single track on them was something special — that there were never any fillers? That was because I was choosing to 'write' only a fraction of one percent of all the songs I'd composed, and of course I only ever chose the very best. And remember how those same critics commented on the way I seemed able to distil musical influences not just from all over the world but from every era of history? Now you know why.

     "Not that you ever seemed curious about any of these things — you just accepted me the way I was. Just as you never pried into the reasons why the virgin you'd deflowered performed thereafter with an expertise she surely couldn't have pulled out of nowhere — couldn't have derived by guesswork or intuition. Just as you never questioned the way I seemed to have such an intimate knowledge of history for one who'd never completed a high school course in the subject, and rarely picked up a biography to read. Just as …

      "But I don't need to detail everything, do I, Simon? Your memories of your time with Alyssa — with me — are as sharp as mine are … and possibly sharper, because you have less of a cloud of other recollections with which to confuse them."

     Jéanne turns her head to stare at me where my head lies on its pillow. I'm incapable of motion at the moment, although later I may rally a little — who knows? There are bright tears in her eyes now. She's mourning the end of happiness more than she's mourning me, I think, but perhaps I'm being uncharitable.

     "I thought I'd be with you, as Alyssa, for the rest of your life, but it couldn't work out like that.

      "Each time I recreate myself, I have to make adjustments to reality. They're very small adjustments, at least in the overall scheme of things, but they're not so small as to be entirely negligible. I have to bring into being fully grown parents who perhaps never existed before but who certainly did not bear me as their daughter. I have to amend people's memories so they recall the details of friendships and acquaintanceships that never were. And so on, almost ad infinitum.

      "These trivial interferences have never mattered before, not in any of my past existences. But the possibility has always theoretically been there that they might conflict with the alterations made by some other of my kind. I'd come to think that there must be some law of Nature that prohibited such quasi-paradoxes, but I was wrong. In order for reality to accord with someone else's plans, the singer Alyssa had to be written out of the play. I had no foreknowledge of this, and no say in how it came to pass. I doubt very much if I could have avoided the plane crash — and, even if I had, presumably I'd just have died in some other way. If I'd been given a choice, I would have perished alone, not in an accident that killed other people — the pilot and crew, the parents I'd created and then grown to love.

      "I don't blame whoever it was who did this to me. When you're tinkering with the passage of reality you have no knowledge of any of the minutiae. That other person has probably never connected the death of Alyssa, if they even heard about it, with the workings of their own wishes. My death, the crash — it was just an example of the way things go.

      "But I hadn't planned for it. It took me by surprise. And that caused me difficulties.

      "Normally the time it takes to change the set between one scene of the play and the next is very short — weeks, days, minutes, even just seconds. But in this instance, as I floundered around in confusion, I let a period of years slip by in reality's timeline before I could effect my return. I think that the turmoil created by whoever had displaced me from the physical world may have played a part in hindering things as well — I can't be sure. But, whatever the truth of the tale, by the time I had re-engendered myself as Evelyn — complete with a sister who unfortunately, due to my shoddy workmanship, had a glimmering that everything about me and indeed about herself wasn't quite as it seemed — you'd crazily ricocheted from my most recent death straight into the arms of that ghastly strumpet of yours.

      "At first I wasn't terribly concerned. You'd take me as your mistress; more probably, you'd abandon her in my favour. But, as I should have known after fourteen years with you, you had some of the same flaws as poor Pete.

      "You remember Pete? Lynne's husband. Out of my Alyssa royalties I was able to ensure that his recovery was as rapid as twentieth-century psychiatry could permit, and his rehabilitation into the rest of the world as speedy and complete as twentieth-century society would permit. He became a father and a grandfather, and if you'd ever asked him he'd have told you that his long life had been a richly fulfilling one. He died just a few years ago, and his passing was easy.

      "Where was I? Yes, you shared a blemish with him. You might be irresolute, overly incurious about your surroundings, weak-willed — although Alyssa had drilled most of that out of you. What you preponderately were, though, was a fundamentally nice guy. You had integrity — perhaps it was your integrity that had attracted me to you in the first place, way back at university in London. It's a great characteristic to have, almost all of the time; but there are circumstances in which it's totally inappropriate, and this was one of them. You were fully aware that your marriage to the strumpet was more of a parody than anything else, but you hadn't got the ruthlessness in you simply to discard her. What was it you kept saying at the time? You'd 'entered a contract with her', and you 'couldn't just unwrite the contract'. I could have banged your head against the wall when you first came out with that trite phrase; it was only slowly that I realized you really meant it. The only course open to me was to grin and bear it, until such time as you eventually came to your senses.

      "But then my 'sister' … what was her name again?"

      "Diane," I mouth silently. "Her name was Diane."

      Jéanne reads my lips.

      "Diane — yes, Diane, who'd always felt at an intuitive level that someone had been fooling around with the course of her existence, began to be a little more specific in her suspicions. I'd created her far too intelligent for her own good. I knew it could be only a matter of time before things began to crystallize in her mind. Either she had to be yanked off the stage or Evelyn had to. I've never deliberately killed another human being, even the ones who're really just simulacra, who owe their existences to me, and I wasn't about to start now — although I can assure you I had long moral arguments with myself about it, trying to convince myself that I wouldn't really be killing someone who'd in a sense never existed in the first place.

     "I lost those arguments, I'm pleased to say."

      Jéanne smiles, so that her whole face brightens. Those uncharacteristic tears have gone now.

      "Poor Evelyn," she says. "And poor Simon as well. I succumbed to a cancer of the blood; you very nearly succumbed to a cancer of the soul. I'd known the news of my death would hit you pretty hard if you ever got round to trying to contact me; I'd never guessed just quite how hard. You were so out of control I didn't dare go near you for a long while in case I just made things worse."

     She giggles, an astonishing sound in this dreary room.

      "I suppose I should have been flattered." She assumes her very best Marlene Dietrich voice, the one she habitually adopts when she wants to make something meaningful sound meaningless. "You really cared."

      Then her face sobers again. "I made one futile foray in your direction — as the stoic camouflage wife of a firmly in-the-closet Kenyan homosexual — and we all know what happened then. You were already too far out of your mind for me to reach you, and you reacted with blind hostility to the distorted sense you had of what I represented. I recoiled from you, kept my distance, brought my brief latest existence to a close, and began a fresh life as Jéanne. This time I'd wait until you were ready for me."

      Again the smile. Again the hurried exit of the shadows from the room.

      "You took your time, let me tell you, Simon McLafferty. Years went by. I became so bored waiting that in desperation I had a few relationships with other men — if caviar's off the menu, you settle for beans on toast. Besides, you'd been startled enough to discover that Alyssa was still a virgin, and you'd have been boggled to find out the same about Evelyn — those dark hints she dropped about a long-ago marriage were bogus, designed to throw you off the scent. You weren't going to believe it if Jéanne proved to be all coy and maidenly. No, I had to have A Past, so I constructed it quite consciously … and, to be honest, with a certain amount of enjoyment.

      "At last the moment was ripe. I let you find me. You never thought to inquire too deeply about what I was doing at that stuffy function, and I diverted your attentions — pathetically easy to do, if you're my age — whenever your thoughts turned in that direction. You were retiring from your career, and had a pension that would keep you in comfort. Of course, for those human beings who're gifted with the ability to undergo multiple existences, money is never a problem; even without meaning to, we tend to amass stashes here and there, very few of which are conjured out of existence when we make our adjustments. The two of us were well set up to see out the remainder of your life in luxury if we wanted to, which neither of us did. We enjoyed the glorious comfort of never having to worry about where our next meal — or our next computer, or vacation, or car — would come from. I know" — she raises a hand as if I might have been about to interrupt her, which of course I am too depleted to do — "we would have been happy on bread and water, just so long as we were together, but why accept that when we could have comfort?

      "And you taught me something during our decades together, Simon. You're by no means a saint, and you can be as abominably egocentric and selfish as the next person when your mood's that way, but you're not always so. There have been times when your magnanimity has startled me — startled me, and shamed me. I began to think about all the things I'd done during the course of human history, and I realized that almost all of them were done for me. The most obvious example concerned those riches I'd accumulated. They were just sitting in bank accounts and investments doing nothing but earn me more interest than I could ever hope to spend. Meanwhile, there were people starving for lack of agriculture, kids dying of thirst or being burned alive by the bombs of the water wars, misery everywhere I looked. I didn't have the resources to deal with all of it, but I could at least attempt to ameliorate some of it. I began to siphon off my reserves to where I thought they could do most good. The world's still a horrendous place, Simon, but it's a little bit better than it might have been … and it has you to thank for that improvement, however small.

     "Ha! And I've got you to thank for the fact that, when I start my next existence, I'll be virtually destitute."

     Jéanne remains smiling at the wall, lost in reflection, but her smile turns to consternation as she turns to look more closely at me for the first time in several minutes. Then she's on her feet, running to the door.

     "Nurse! Nurse!"

     I don't know what she expects the nurse to do — I chose to end my life in a comfortable little cottage hospital, not a big-city, highly financed establishment equipped with every electronic life-prolonger known to humankind — but I understand why she makes the gesture. The presence of the nurse will certainly succour Jéanne herself during the final minutes as I ease myself out of this existence, and perhaps it will even bring a measure of contentment to me, too.

     There are long intervals between each breath now, and they sound more like fingernails scratched across a blackboard than respiration.

     Any moment now, as the nurse tumbles futilely into the room, brushing Jéanne aside in a swirl of starched uniform, the last of my breaths will come, and I'll make my departure.

     Indeed, I think
     this
     breath
     will
     be
     my
     last.

I wish I had a few more seconds so I could tell Jéanne how much I have loved all the women she has been. Tell her that and also …

… that she will never again be alone. Not far down her timeline — in no more than a couple of years — she'll be approached by a man who'll be, hm, perhaps she'll enjoy it if this time I'm quite a lot younger than she is, so that she can gain additional pleasure from affronting the staid. She'll recognize who I am, of course, but perhaps not immediately; it'll be fun watching her as she works her way to the inevitable deduction, tantalizing her with fragmented hints and trivial anomalies.

I won't protract my teasing too long.

And then the two of us will be together in fullness, dancing in each other's arms to our shared choreography, reading from the script we have jointly written as we perform on the limitless stage that is humankind's future.

If the stage is, indeed, limitless.