over his right eye from the business with the men on the roof on the Roosevelt Hotel, a little bandage.

“I got falling down drunk last night,” he said.

An older couple was shown to the next table. The man held his wife’s chair and she smiled at him as he sat down to her right instead of across from her.

Jean watched them. She wondered what her parents would look like if they were still alive. What would be left of the young faces in the old pictures? She looked around, the yacht clubbers, the polished brass ship’s fittings, the photos on the walls, the hurricane flags hung over the long bar.

She wondered how much like her mother she was.

“Is it all right, being here?” Jimmy said.

“Of course,” Jean said. “I’m not sentimental . . . and I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Your parents aren’t in any of the pictures.”

She wondered if he knew everything she was thinking.

“You’ve already been here,” she said, not as a question. She moved her drink so the light from the candle floating in the bowl lit it up, made it even prettier.

“You wanted to know how I worked. This is how I work.”

“Tell me what that means,” she said.

“Everything carries its own history with it,” he said. “You do. I do. Objects do. Places. Whatever happened in this room is still here in a way. If you want to see it. If you let yourself see it.”

He didn’t look away from her. “So there are ghosts,” he said.

“Are they sentimental?” she said and smiled.

“Some of them,” he said.

She didn’t want to talk about ghosts.

“Have you ever been here before?” he said.

“There are pictures of me with my parents here.”

“But you haven’t been here since?”

She shook her head. “Why would I?”

“You must have always wondered the things you wonder now, whether he did it, who she really was.”

“No.”

“So what makes you want to know now?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but it wasn’t true.

Someone dimmed the lights. It was nine o’clock.

The linen of the tablecloth was so white, the marigolds in the clear vase so bright and perfect. He breathed in her scent. It filled his head. Starting from when they were at Ike’s he was saying more than he usually said, letting her see more. I’m falling for her, he thought, and thought again how good a word for it it was, falling, wherever it led, whatever happened now.

“What are you wearing?”

“It doesn’t have a name,” she said.

“Your own concoction?”

“Do you like it?” she said.

“I don’t know if that’s the word,” Jimmy said.

She smiled again and looked away. Maybe she was falling, too.

“What is perfume made out of?”

“Oils, mostly. And alcohol.”

“How did you get into this?” he said.

“A woman taught me the business.”

“How does it work?”

“The business or the perfume?”

“Perfume.”

“The molecules of the scent activate receptors in the nose and the mouth, which excite certain areas of the brain.”

She drew her drink across the table closer to her, turning it in her fingers. “That’s the simple explanation,” she said, as a way of teasing him.

“A minute ago,” Jimmy said, “I remembered a day with my mother. On Point Lobos. Carmel and Monterey. Out of nowhere. I thought maybe it was your perfume.”

“Were there flowers?” Jean said.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I remember the cypress trees.” He knew he was telling her more than he should.

“It’s not supposed to work that way,” she said. “That’s called ‘a headache. ’ It’s when a scent—” She broke off. “How much of this do you really want to know?”

“More,” he said.

“A basic, low-quality scent acts directly on the limbic system in the temporal lobe of the brain. It calls up what are called ‘moment memories. ’ It’s better for a scent to be more general. The smell of cotton candy reminds you of a trip to the carnival when you were six. A good perfume reminds you . . .” And here she paused, because she knew how it would sound. “Of being in love.”

The ghosts in the room leaned closer.

“Mixing memory and desire . . .” Jimmy said.

She knew the line, but didn’t remember what it was from. “What is that?”

“Freshman English. T. S. Eliot,” Jimmy said. “ ‘April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain . . .’ The Wasteland. I read it—and quit school.”

She laughed. “You just stood up and walked out?”

“I waited until the end of the day,” he said.

Even when he