“So it’s a neighborhood?”

“Yeah, but sort of more. It’s hard to explain. It’s a little like Kosovo.”

“Or Vatican City.”

“Exactly. Allston’s like Vatican City.”

We walked on, hand-in-hand, swinging arms. I wasn’t going to press the issue, what was obvious was obvious. It had everything to do with time. How you didn’t notice it. How you didn’t even need it. Could be 3 in the afternoon, could be midnight. I remember the silence of the drive back from the Cape. I remember the milkshakes. I remember walking backward, again, very slowly, doing a little backward shimmy, down the same hotel corridor as she stood at her door like an actress, wagging at me with her index finger. A beckoning and goodbye at the same time.

Two weeks later she called. Her husband, she said, was on the line as well. They both had something to say. She wanted to make clear that there wasn’t going to be any more to this. That we’d had our time together. She had no regrets. Did I understand? No more phone calls at work, no more letters sent to work. The husband spoke up: “You all right with this?” His voice was pleasant and considerate. “Look, it’s cool. I know she’s awesome.” She laughed a quick laugh, but stopped. She asked if I wanted to say anything. I said I didn’t think I did.

Part of me wants this to be a sad recounting, not a pathetic one, but I see I’m failing. I’m trying to stay close to the facts as best as I can remember them, but as I say, facts disintegrate. For days, weeks, I mourned around the city. I rode the T and read. I went to work. I shouted at kids to line up for snack. “If you guys don’t line up, there will be no snack, period.” At night, in Allston, I considered the nature of self-pity, how it’s not unlike masturbation in the sense of how satisfying it can be in the short term. And the long term is just a linked chain of short term after short term. Then I’d die.

A few years ago I found myself teaching, briefly, in St Louis. This was at Washington University. (It’s neither here nor there, but my mother had long thought that my life would have turned out better if only I’d been accepted to Wash U for college. She was quite proud that at last I’d made it as a visiting professor.) I thought about calling her or sending her a message. All I had to do was reach out to my friends, the ones whose wedding we met at and who were still together, and ask how to get ahold of her. But it felt more like an obligation to a defunct emotion than something I actually wanted to do.

Still, maybe I’d run into her buying groceries at Schnucks or we’d both be pumping gas on the same island. I’d sit across from her at a cafe and listen to her talk. I’m always interested in the way people edit the details of their lives, the way they compress all the years into sentences.