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My husband said: “Fine, let him come. Let him see that you are not the woman he remembers. His memory is frozen on your passion for each other. Let him see how happy you and I are.”

I waited, trembling.

It was a cold, clear evening. Laurel hobbled out of the taxi on crutches, one leg shorter than the other. He had regained his weight and, though pale, was almost handsome. He glanced at my completely handsome husband once and dismissed him. He kept his eyes on me. He smiled on me happily, pleased with me.

I knew only one dish then, chicken tarragon; I served it.

I was frightened. Not of Laurel, exactly, but of feeling all the things I felt.

(My husband’s conviction notwithstanding, I suspected marriage could not keep me from being, in some ways, exactly the woman Laurel remembered.)

I woke up my infant daughter and held her, disgruntled, flushed and ludicrously alert, in front of me.

While we ate, Laurel urged me to recall our acrobatic nights on the dormitory bench, our intimate dancing. Before my courteous husband, my cheeks flamed. Those nights that seemed so far away to me seemed all he clearly remembered; he recalled less well how his accident occurred. Everything before and after that week had been swept away. The moment was real to him. I was real to him. Our week together long ago was very real to him. But that was all. His speech was as beautifully lilting as ever, with a zaniness that came from a lack of connective knowledge. But he was hard to listen to: he was both overconfident of his success with me—based on what he recalled of our mutual passion—and so intense that his gaze had me on the verge of tears.

Now that he was here and almost well, I must drop everything, including the baby on my lap—whom he barely seemed to see—and come away with him. Had I not flown off to Africa, though it meant leaving the very country in which he lived?

Finally, after the riddles within riddles that his words became (and not so much riddles as poems, and disturbing ones), my husband drove Laurel back to the bus station. He had come over a thousand miles for a two-hour visit.

My husband’s face was drawn when he returned. He loved me, I was sure of that. He was glad to help me out. Still, he wondered.

“It lasted a week!” I said. “Long before I met you!”

“I know,” he said. “Sha, sha, baby,” he comforted me. I had crept into his arms, trembling from head to foot. “It’s all right. We’re safe.”

But were we?

And Laurel? Zooming through the night back to his home? The letters continued. Sometimes I asked to read one that came to the house.

“I am on welfare now. I hate being alive. Why didn’t my father let me die? The people are prejudiced here. If you came they would be cruel to us but maybe it would help them see something. You are more beautiful than ever. You are so sexy you make me ache—it is not only because you are black that would be racism but because when you are in the same room with me the room is full of color and scents and I am all alive.”

He offered to adopt my daughter, shortly after he received a divorce from his wife.

After my husband and I were divorced (some seven years after Laurel’s visit and thirteen years after Laurel and I met), we sat one evening discussing Laurel. He recalled him perfectly, with characteristic empathy and concern.

“If I hadn’t been married to you, I would have gone off with him,” I said, “Maybe.”

“Really?” He seemed surprised.

Out of habit I touched his arm. “I loved him, in a way.”

“I know,” he said, and smiled.

“A lot of the love was lust. That threw me off for years until I realized lust can be a kind of love.”

He nodded.

“I felt guilty about Laurel. When he wrote me, I became anxious. When he came to visit us, I was afraid.”

“He was not the man you knew.”

“I don’t think I knew him well enough to tell. Even so, I was afraid the love and lust would come flying back, along with the pity. And that even if they didn’t come back, I would run off with him anyway, because of the pity—and for the adventure.