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By Root 622 0

of relationship that people refer to when they use the word affair. It was not an affair. There was sex, yes, but not romance. There was emotion, yes, but generated by external conditions he could not control. She would say nothing and wait. He would say that the time he’d spent with Florence was already beginning to seem an aberration—that was the word. It was the kind of thing, he’d say, that a person looks back on with a sense of having entered something that was, in truth, unreal, and he was already feeling this and knowing this. She would sit and look at him. He would mention the brevity of the thing, the easily countable occasions. He was not a trial lawyer but still, technically, a lawyer, even if he barely believed it himself, and he would assess his guilt openly and present the facts attending the brief relationship and include those crucial circumstances so often and aptly described as extenuating. She would sit in the chair no one ever sat in, the mahogany side chair set against the wall between the desk and the bookshelves, and he would look at her and wait.

“She’s probably already home,” the kid said, walking with one foot in the gutter and one up on the curb.

They went past a pharmacy and a travel agency. Keith saw something up ahead. He marked the stride of a woman crossing the street, uncertainly, near the intersection. She seemed to stop in midcrossing. A taxi obscured his view for a moment but he knew that something was wrong. He leaned over and gave the kid a backhand tap on the upper arm, keeping his eyes on the figure ahead. By the time she reached the corner on this side of the street, they were both running toward her.

She heard the train coming along the northbound track and watched him tense his body in preparation. The sound was a deep bass roll with an in-and-out recurrence, discrete not continuous, like pulsing numbers, and she could almost count the tenths of seconds as it grew louder.

The man stared into the brickwork of the corner building but did not see it. There was a blankness in his face, but deep, a kind of lost gaze. Because what was he doing finally? Because did he finally know? She thought the bare space he stared into must be his own, not some grim vision of others falling. But why was she standing here watching? Because she saw her husband somewhere near. She saw his friend, the one she’d met, or the other, maybe, or made him up and saw him, in a high window with smoke flowing out. Because she felt compelled, or only helpless, gripping the strap of her shoulder bag.

The train comes slamming through and he turns his head and looks into it (into his death by fire) and then brings his head back around and jumps.

Jumps or falls. He keels forward, body rigid, and falls full-length, headfirst, drawing a rustle of awe from the schoolyard with isolated cries of alarm that are only partly smothered by the passing roar of the train.

She felt her body go limp. But the fall was not the worst of it. The jolting end of the fall left him upside-down, secured to the harness, twenty feet above the pavement. The jolt, the sort of midair impact and bounce, the recoil, and now the stillness, arms at his sides, one leg bent at the knee. There was something awful about the stylized pose, body and limbs, his signature stroke. But the worst of it was the stillness itself and her nearness to the man, her position here, with no one closer to him than she was. She could have spoken to him but that was another plane of being, beyond reach. He remained motionless, with the train still running in a blur in her mind and the echoing deluge of sound falling about him, blood rushing to his head, away from hers.

She looked directly overhead and saw no sign of the woman in the window. She moved now, keeping to the side of the building, head down, feeling her way by hand along the rough surface of the masonry. His eyes were open but she guided herself by hand and then, once beyond the dangling figure, veered toward the middle of the sidewalk, moving quickly now.

Almost at once she came upon the derelict,