written. And in fact he did write back to me after a few weeks, a very sweet, very sad letter in which he apologized for taking so long to respond, then explained that he’d been depressed of late because of losing his novel. As for the story, it was “marvelous"—that was all he said. There was none of the sort of detailed criticism that he’d given my poems when he’d come to visit. There was no substantive response at all, which annoyed me. Of course, he concluded, when I got to Bradford I would be welcome to take his class; he’d save a spot for me. But that was it. A letter of a paragraph, at most. And then just a month or so later, he was killed in that car crash. I still hadn’t heard from Anne, and now I supposed I never would.
At first, when I started at Bradford, I made a point of trying to steer clear of Anne. I never went anyplace where it seemed likely I might run into her—supermarkets, for instance. (I suppose I assumed that because my mother spent so much of her life in supermarkets, Anne would too.) Early on I had looked up her address. She lived on Silver Avenue, in a neighborhood of older houses through which, under normal circumstances, I would have bicycled on my way from the dormitory to the history department, where I took most of my classes: It was the most direct route. In my mania not to run into her, however, I used to take a detour around the football stadium that added at least ten minutes to the trip—all so that I would never have to lay eyes upon the house where Jonah Boyd had lived, or upon the woman who lived there still.
Of course I heard news of her. Boyd’ death was still so fresh that people gossiped about it, other students as well as professors and secretaries. Already rumors swirled of a lost novel. And there was gossip about Anne as well. No sooner was her husband in the ground, people said, than she had quit drinking and smoking. Cold turkey. She was said to have lost forty pounds; to have cut her hair short and stopped dyeing it. Someone saw her at the pool, swimming laps and talking to the lifeguard. What did this mean? Was she glad of her husband’ death? Had she perhaps had a hand in it? And then one day—inevitably, in that small town—I did see her. I was riding past the library on my bike, and she was walking across the lawn that fronted the administration building. At first I barely recognized her, she was so changed. Not only had she lost weight, she was positively slender; you might have even said gaunt. Her hair was short as yours, Denny, and was a sort of glorious silver color. She wore a loose sundress and sandals.
Fearful in case she should recognize me—but was she even aware that I was now a student at Bradford?—I turned around and rode away from the history department, circling back only once I was sure she was gone. But the next day, when I biked to class, instead of going around the football stadium I took the more direct route, right down Silver Avenue, right past the house where she lived. From the outside, at least, it appeared to be a rather ordinary house, built in the forties, of red brick with green shutters out of which half-moons had been cut. There were roses in the front yard. The curtains were closed. A blue Buick was parked the driveway. No sign of Anne, though.
I felt curiously ebullient—as if, merely by bicycling by her house, I had conquered some demon in myself, or made the first step in some process by which I might undo the past. Suddenly I felt I no longer had anything to fear on Silver Avenue, and I gave up my old route round the football stadium. Now I rode boldly by Anne’ house every weekday, every weekday I gazed frankly at the front door, almost willing her to step through it and look me in the eye. This went on for about two weeks—and then one morning, I actually did see her. She was standing on the front lawn in jeans and a man’ oversized T-shirt, pruning her roses. I don’t know what possessed me then: To my own surprise, I found myself slowing down, coasting, stopping. She