The next night I trudged to the subway and went down to the New Life restaurant on West 28th, where Katin Bazerian dances, wearing the name Alexandra the Great and comfortingly little else. I caught the last set. When it was over Kitty came to my table and we did in a bottle of rhodytis. We listened to bouzouki music and didn’t talk much.

Eventually I said, “Get your coat and come home with me.”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s to know? We’re nice people and we love each other and we should go home together.”

“Oh? We love each other?”

“We always have.”

“You drift from girl to girl, Evan, like a bee from flower to flower. Like a dog from hydrant to hydrant. Evan, I think there are healthier things in this world than our cockamamie relationship.”

It is always bad when girls talk about relationships. They shouldn’t be allowed to use the word.

“I always thought you liked our relationship,” I said.

“Oh, I do. Oh, shit, everything’s rotten.” And she looked at the floor, and I watched the wine evaporate in my glass, and she looked up and said, “He wants to marry me.”

“Who does?”

“A… a fellow. You don’t know him. He’s a nice boy, he works steady. He’s an assistant cook at Gregorio’s on the next block and he plans to be a chef in a few years and he loves me and we talk to each other, you know, and we are good together, you know, I mean bed, we’re good together-”

I wanted something with more authority than rhodytis. Something like heroin, for instance.

“Evan, when a woman is thirty she can frankly forget the whole thing, and I am halfway to being thirty.”

“You’re fifteen?”

“I’m twenty-five.”

“That’s halfway to-”

“Between twenty and thirty it’s halfway.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, this life is fine up to a point, but at a certain point a woman is ready to settle down. It’s a human thing, to want to settle down.”