"I've admired your work a great deal, Mr. Norwood," I smiled. Our hands were still linked.

"Alan," he said and let go of my hand. "Call me Alan, love."

"OK. Alan. I'm Vicky."

"Yes. Well, nice and warming to see you ladies on this cold morning." He looked at Barbara and then at me, "I've got to get to work now. Like to read your work some time," he said and dazzled a smile at me.

"Yes, I'd like to show you my work," I said to his retreating back.

He did call me the next week and came over for tea. Tea, not coffee. I shook and trembled, nervous and pleased. He told me he had read a piece of mine and was very complimentary. He complimented me on some of the photos I showed him while he drank his tea. Over the next five years, he called me about once a week and stopped by every month or so. Each time, I loved the visits, though they were exhausting. He was the kind of man who wouldn't allow my attention to wander for a single moment, the kind who shocked with small obscenities and flattering remarks about my appearance. He actually did seem to like my writing. And I liked his outrageous flattery, his liveliness, his need to impress me. He was well known and I was flattered by the attention. After a while, he told me about his girlfriend, Joanne, and how much he loved her. He even interviewed me for another magazine once and later published a few pieces of mine when he became the senior editor. I was happy with our friendship.

It was five years before we became lovers.

Mid-afternoon and the sun shone yellow through the paper shades. The bed was cool and clean and my skin felt smooth and beautiful. The sex had been as usual, just ok, but Alan made me feel necessary, appreciated. How pathetic, sad it seems now. I wondered where Alan's little cat was. Where did she sleep? I asked him. He said, "There she is, " and pointed to the closet door, which was ajar. She was a little calico cat and I took care of her when he was away. He called her Birdie.

Whenever I was there in the afternoon, the phone rang at three o'clock. I could tell right away from his tone that it was Joanne . "Hello, love!" It took a couple of weeks of afternoon lovemaking for me to get the fact that she called him every day around three. I stared up at him while he talked. He put his arm around me and pulled me close to his side, I guess so I wouldn't try to read his face while he talked to her. I was supposed to keep quiet. I should have yelled, Hi, Joanne! But he had told me not to tell her about us.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it would be too hurtful. She thinks you're just a good friend of mine."

"But," I said, "I'll be lying to her every time we talk."

"Never mind," he said, "Don't tell her now. Maybe later."

I knew he was lying, both to me and to her. I asked if he was sleeping with her still, even though they'd broken up. He said no. I finally told her about us after he died. She said she had known. I knew she hadn't, that she was saying that to protect herself. I knew because she wouldn't have told me every time they slept together. She wouldn't have talked to me about what a big baby he was and that he gave a good back massage. He never massaged me. I massaged him.

"Why," I asked, "don't you massage me?"

"Because," he smiled, "that kind of thing is established right away. One person is the massager, the other, the massagee."

"Why can't it be both ways?" I asked.

"Ah," he said with some triumph, "it just isn't."

I was looking out the window as John drove. We were going to Alan and Beatrice's house for Alan's memorial party. Memorial party. Not service. There had been a small service at the crematorium ten days before. We hadn't been invited to that..I thought I saw Joanne in the car alongside us, next to her husband. It was Joanne.

"Hey, John! Look!"

We both looked. She looked right at me, but gave no sign of recognition. It had been four years since we had seen each other. She looked like a sad little girl wearing makeup. I waved. She didn't seem to see me.

The memorial party was given by Beatrice, the woman he had lived with for the past four years. About sixty people were there. She had invited all his friends, which included me and three other ex-lovers of his.

I mentioned this to Alan's best friend, Bill. Alan had talked a lot about Bill, but I had not met him until then. Bill was a retired cop, a real sexy guy somewhere in his fities with a full head of white and charcoal hair, the do from the fifties, pompadour and slicked sides. He leaned close as he said that at his own funeral he hoped to fill half a stadium with his women. He said this with his hand warm around my upper arm. He said he had seen my picture. I thought he meant the one I'd done for Alan, the one in the bedroom, the Japanese-y one with a branch, a rock and snow. Much later I felt my face flush hot when I realized he meant a picture of me, not by me. The full-length nude of me stretched out naked on Alan's couch, under the big ferns and snake plants, the one I've never seen. That's the one Bill meant. Alan kept telling me about the picture every time he called after I said I wasn't going to see him anymore. He said it was very good, that I'd like it. He said he wouldn't send it to me, that I'd have to come and get it myself. I never did see him again. Who's to know when it's going to be the last time? I don't even remember the last time. A few days after the party, I called Beatrice to ask if she'd send me the picture, if she ever came across it. She said she would, but I sensed that she didn't want to come across it, that she may have even thrown it out already.

John, my boyfriend, live-in lover, significant other, partner - what to call it. - knew that Alan and I had been lovers. He had to know that because Alan was still calling after John moved in with me. When Alan finally realized he was losing me, he got serious and offered me the whole thing - money, place, marriage maybe, everything. He loved me, he said. More important, he added, I loved him. It's over, I told him.

Last night, thinking about Alan, I fell asleep and dreamt that John and I were in Alan's apartment with some other people. I don't know who they were. But we were all searching for something. Alan woke up and came out of his bedroom. He saw me and looked so sad. He put his head on my breast and rested it there. I wanted to stroke him, to comfort him. But John was there and I was embarassed. I didn't want John to misunderstand. Alan knew it was over between us and all I wanted to do was to comfort him in his sorrow. Just to stroke his thin hair, his pate, his face. Liar or not, he did love me in a way. He used to see me as Earth Mother. It's my face, I know. I really don't think of myself that way at all. That kind of woman takes everything in her stride, is definite about her likes and dislikes and doesn't need anyone's approval. I look like that and maybe even act like that. But I'm not that way. I'm jealous, petty, squeamish. That's all I remember about the dream. It did start me thinking of the way we were, without the bad stuff. There was a time I thought I was in love with him. I thought about him all the time. I was happy when we went for walks in the morning, in the mountains. There were things he would tell me about birds, about the trees, about the tracks we sometimes saw. One day, walking behind him, I said, "The bird is on the wing. But that's absurd, The wing is on the bird." I laughed at the stupid thing I remembered from childhood. He turned around, furious, said, "Quiet! You have to show respect when you're in the woods."

He never wanted me to play the guitar for him, to sing for him. I wanted to. He did make some copies of tapes of his that I especially liked. Sandy Denny in that Irish folk rock group I loved so much. Steeleye Span. Her high voice....And Alan told me she had died falling down some stairs. He liked synthesizer music, electronic and dramatic. It all sounded like movie music to me, a background to everything he did, all our time in bed. This music seemed to reflect something he wanted to feel. He'd put it on and feel somehow grand, nostalgic. Well, we all listen to the music that makes us feel the way we want to feel. He also loved Japanese koto music and shakuhachi. During our afternoons, he wore a short Japanese cotton robe when he wanted to cover himself .

His last lover, Beatrice, was pretty, with short blonde hair. She was about forty pounds overweight, but it looked good on her. She was well-proportioned. She is a public relations agent. For this occasion, she had rented a wedding-sized lawn canopy, two port-a-toilets and even ran up a six-page thing on Alan with poems, articles by him, and a photo of Alan on the first of the six stapled pages. Stacks of these were on a table by the steps to the garden where people could take them as they left the party. I would have said to Alan, Well, it's the only way she knows to do things, like a PR agent. He would have said, Show a little respect.

An hour into the memorial party and I had drunk three beers by the time we were told to drag the rented folding chairs out from under the tent into a semi-circle on the lawn. A man with a black beard, a chunky silver earring, a t-shirt, jeans and black motorcycle boots sat down in the center of the circle next to a woman, probably his wife, and Beatrice.

"Who's that?" I asked Carla.

"A friend and shaman."

Carla is a poet.

He lit a bunch of half-dry sage leaves and started a chant to the four corners, the cardinal points. His wife was wearing a baggy, dark cotton skirt, and a white blouse, had long, unruly hair, just like mine on this warm, damp day. She beat a dum dum rhythm on a small tom-tom in her lap. He walked from one person to the other waving

the smoking leaves towards our faces. Carla cupped her hands as if to catch the smoke. I could feel a laugh rising. I thought about pollution. Alan was cremated ten days ago. I guess the smoke meant we were sharing something with Alan's soul. The smoke would mingle with our breath and disappear into the ether the way he had gone. With the drumbeat and the smoke, I felt like giggling. It was a scene. I wondered what Alan would think. He'd probably have told me to keep quiet and pay attention. I poked John.

"These are my people," I whispered. He thinks I'm so straight.

He smiled.

"I brought you here," I breathed in his ear. He thinks I'm so middle-class.

He grinned.

"Not so bourgeois me, huh?" I hissed and poked him again.

"Was Alan into this stuff?" Something I hadn't told him. He wasn't smiling.

Here we were at a California-type, hippy-style thing and he's from Northern California, lived that way, alternative culture and all. If I thought I was earning points, he'd let me know he wasn't giving any and set me on another track.

"Well, yeah, he was kind of into this Indian shit. I'll tell you later," I whispered.

The Walking Trails Guide Book said that there was "a gem of a pond" not far from the old Letchworth Village Cemetary.

The road up to the pond was so rocky that I could feel each sharp stone through my hiking shoes. We walked uphill for about ten minutes until we came to the cemetery. It lay like a sleeping, fat man, belly up in the clearing on the side of the wooded hill. In among the long, green grass, the grave markers were metal T's, the crosspiece of each with a raised number in the center. The regular layout gave the feeling you get when you drive past a military cemetary. It's always a little kick to watch the rows line up like Rockettes as you drive by.

There were only three real headstones among the metal ones. They had names and dates chiseled in, no numbers. Those headstones said that three men had died in 1966 and the oldest was twenty-six. Guilty, rich parents who couldn't rest easy with the plain markers with no names had those stones put there, I guessed. Maybe the other sixty were no more than twenty-six, too.

Letchworth Village itself is down the road from the old cemetery. When you drive through - the highway passes through the middle - you see low stone houses, stone dormitories, gray stone. Sometimes there's a parked school bus. No people walking the grounds. It's a state-run institution for retarded adults. I imagine dirt, deadly routine and pathetic, twisted people.

The metal crosses and the three headstones made me sad.

"Let's get the car," I said to John, "My feet are killing me."

Down was a much faster walk. We drove back up the road, past the cemetery, to the pond and left the car near a doorless, grafittied building marked Men, Women. There was another station wagon at the other end of the lake. No one to be seen.

As we started on the path around the lake, the sun broken through the filter of the high trees, we looked at the emptiness of the water. Probably because of all the rain we've had this summer, it looked too high. It looked blank. If I hadn't seen the branches dipping down into the water's edge, it would have looked like a white-gray hole, an abyss. It was a warm day and pockets of mist wafted here and there just above it. Suddenly, a quarter of the way around the pond, cold pricked my face, I shivered. The cold enveloped me completely. I clutched my arms to my body.

"Let's go back," I said to John, my voice coming out a croak.

"Okay. But why? Don't you feel like taking a walk?"

"Do you feel that?" I rasped.

"What?"

"That cold."

"Yeah, I do."

"I thought I was imagining it. I don't want to stay here any longer. It's eerie," I looked around at the branches dipping down towards us. "Come on! Let's go," I almost yelled as we walked faster, back the way we had come.

No sound except for our shoes on the gravel and twigs cracking under our feet. No birds, no water sounds, nothing except us. The surface of the water, still as a sheet of plastic.

I shivered in the warmth of the closed car.

"Let's get out of here. Crazy getting that cold. It's warm out."

"I know. I felt it, too."

"That's a really weird place. Some gem!"

"Yeah, really weird."

"Like there was some kind of spirit there, warning us."

"A spirit?" He looked up me with interest.

"Yes. I got so cold suddenly."

"Do you think it was an evil spirit?" he said, his interesting increasing. He likes that kind of thing. John sometimes says that I have second sight, because I get definite feelings about places, not based on anything. It's as if I know who's been there. Or something.

"Oh, I don't know. I don't believe in it really, but there was something there. It didn't seem evil, it was just there."

"Do you think it's the cemetery?"

"I don't know. Could be."

At the memorial party, I put my arms around Joanne, the one woman Alan had really loved, but who wouldn't marry him. I wouldn't either, but he was only offering me that at the end, out of desperation, out of fear of being left alone. She told me that every time he stayed over at her place, he asked her to marry him. I put my arms around her three times that day.

I met Joanne the first time at his bedside. We were in the hospital visiting Alan the day before he was to have cardiac by-pass surgery. He introduced us. I was standing on one side, she on the other. I was wearing my fur coat that day. She admired it and he said he'd like to see her in it. Like an idiot, I took it off and handed it to her. "Doesn't she look beautiful," he said when she had it on. Thanks a lot.

The week before the surgery, I bought him new sheets, a duvet cover in subdued beiges, a pattern that might be considered masculine. I bought him two pairs of comfortable, cotton pajamas. I gave him presents even before he went to the hospital. I gave him a gold, Mexican falcon. It was a pin. He had a shelf on which he placed his fetishes, his relics. That's where he put the golden bird with wings outspread. It glowed from the darkness of the shelf. He gave me things, too. A little black rectangle, about three inches square, with a hole in one side. You look through it and see points of light, reflected back and forth, forming a pattern. I think there were holes in it somewhere and mirrors inside. He gave me a piece of alabaster he had carved. It was a little woman, like the Earth Mother. He had put eyes, nipples and crotch in with a black marker. He gave me a piece of jade carved into a mythical beast, stylized and flat, good to hold in the hand.

Joanne was holding up well at this strange party, I thought, not making a big thing of being the most important one in his life. Except when he was on assignment out of the country, they talked every day for ten years. Joanne looked out of place here with her neat, yuppie suit and hairdo. Everyone else looked arty, me included. She has permanent brown hair and dark brown eyes. I know she wears contacts. I still don't understand how he liked me and Joanne at the same time. We were so different. We are so different.

She smiled at everyone politely. I could see she looked tired. Maybe she'd been crying. She was there with her husband, who also looked out of place in his suit and tie. She married him two years ago. I'm sure Alan was very broken up about it.

I put my arms around Carla, an ex-friend of mine. Carla looked the part of poet. Her long, brown-gray hair was parted in the middle and fastened in a bun at the nape of her neck. She always wore thrift shop clothes and had on layers of wrinkled, brown cotton.

I introduced her to Alan about seven years ago when he and I were still just flirting friends. One day, I arranged for Carla, Alan and me to have brunch together at the diner across the street from his little apartment. He didn't earn much money as an editor for a literary magazine. I even offered to pay my own tab that day. "Nonsense," he said. She kept looking at me and smiling coyly at him. He was his bombastic, clever self, charming her. I don't know that I was charmed by him that day. I felt sick with jealousy. It was like I was in bed with them.

They got it on. That's what I wanted. It was like screwing him without doing it. She told me about it. I got jealous even though we weren't lovers yet and even though she told me she had to really work to make him come.

I called him later that afternoon. "How did it go?"

"Fine. How should it have gone, love?"

"Can I come over? I have an article I wanted to show you." Lies, all lies. I did have an article, but I could have sent it to him, or given it to him the next time he came over for tea.

"Sure. See you later." And he hung up.

I drove over immediately. The apartment he was in then was very dark, cramped. I had never been there before. I handed him the article. He said, "Thanks," and put it aside with barely a glance. "What do you want?" he asked so abruptly, it shocked me.

"I just wanted..." I hesitated. He was looking at me intently, glaring almost. "I felt lousy about you and Carla. I was jealous." I was whining.

"Isn't that what you wanted, love? Didn't you want us to sleep together?"

"I guess so. But then I felt sick thinking about it."

"We get what we ask for, don't we, love." He smiled at me, his best Buddha smile. A few years before, he had gone to Japan and sent me postcards of the famous Kyoto temple. He told me that he had lit a prayer for me. They write them down on small pieces of paper, burn them, and clap once as they disappear on their way to the heavens.

When we did start about a year later, I told Carla I didn't want her to see him anymore. It wasn't that I was being possessive or controlling, I reasoned with myself, it was that she had herpes. He got really mad when I told him and said I must have hurt her terribly, that he'd have to call and make it okay again. It didn't matter to him that she had herpes. Then, when I left him, he told me that the only women who turned him on were me and Joanne and that he couldn't stand being left with only Carla who has doughy flesh, he said. Small satisfactions.

I put my arms around Lynn, a little woman with a bad complexion and gorgeous ass-length, ash-brown hair. She had been a life-drawing model for us, for John and me and some other people we used to draw with. Alan had sent her to me when I told him we were looking for a model. One day, when she was taking a break during a modeling session, she told me that she and Alan had been lovers. I didn't tell her about us. She told me he had taken some great pictures of her and described them to me. I should have recognized her from the one in his livingroom, the one of a torso, arms stretched upwards, with very pretty, upturned, small breasts.

The day that we went up to the old Letchworth cemetary and the "gem of a pond," I left a message for Alan on his machine. He was going to publish an article of mine in that self-indulgent rag of his he had started a year ago. He didn't call back. I left a second, very short message the next day, the day before he died. My last words to him were, "Hi, Alan. This is Vicki. Give me a call."

A friend who works at another magazine called the following day to tell me Alan had died on the way to a business luncheon. She didn't know the details. And she didn't know about us. I was speechless. Not exactly speechless. I kept saying, "Oh, no!" till she finally said, "I had no idea. I'm sorry."

I couldn't believe it. He was fifty-five. He was always complaining about his heart. Every time we got to the top of the flight of outside stairs that led to his second-story apartment, he would stop, close his eyes and put a hand over his heart. He was so dramatic that, when he died so suddenly, it almost seemed to me like just another exaggerated complaint.

I guess he had chest pains often. Once, when he was tired and I wanted to fuck, he said, "Don't be that way. Don't you know that it's the holding that's important?"

At the party, I asked Beatrice and then Joanne how he died. Beatrice said that he died in the car on his way to the restaurant, that he must have had a heart attack and pulled off the road not to crash. Joanne said the same thing. Then I asked Carla. She said that he had a heart attack in his car, but had enough presence of mind to pull off the road in order to avoid crashing into someone else. To avoid crashing into someone else. Maybe he was just in terrible pain and needed to stop the car. I wonder how she could add these details. Poetic license, I guess. But it is essentially the same story.

I just can't believe he's gone. I still think about him. Not every day anymore. But I can't believe that he's really gone. Burned up, cremated. He was a presence. Bombastic, yes, but real. He was a liar, over-dramatic always, and he had little feeling for me, I think, after we started. I wish we had stayed friends and never slept together. But it's over now.

What was it about his death and that pond near the old Letchworth Cemetery? So strange, the feeling I had there. Then hearing of his death a day later. As if he had told me in some way. And, I don't believe these things.

Sometimes I think about affairs and artists. I've read about so many of them, of course. But unless they become well-known, it remains tawdry, cheap, heartbreaking. We weren't well known, not yet anyway. But there we were, and someone could read about us some day. Like that group in England, like the Twenties in Paris or the Village in the Thirties. And what kind of dignity does it lend? A while back, I read a review of Margaret Sanger's biography. How adoring the writer and reviewer are. She had many affairs with famous men and she was married. She did what she wanted. Is that what I was doing?

I put my arms around Beatrice at least three times that day. She was like his widow, doing this party for his friends. She said he was the only man she ever wanted to take care of and didn't expect anything from, that he needed taking care of.

It took me a while to realize that she was keeping him.