I can see her now, the top sheet just covering the tops of her breasts, her rich auburn hair flowing to her shoulders. (Who else had long hair in those days? Hardly anyone. I should have, had I had any sense. I have at my best moments a sort of ethereal quality, which my blondish hair, now worn long, rather enhances, I would say. But then I couldn’t conceive of it.)

She was so beautiful, Rhoda was. I hated my own looks in those days and would have prayed, had prayer occurred to me as a logical means to any sort of end, to look less like myself and more like Rhoda. No one else there looked remotely like her. In a school full of girls, she looked like a young woman.

“Wine,” she said, extending the jug.

“We’re not using glasses?”

“We are getting in tune with more basic things. Wine straight from the jug. You crook your finger in the handle and let the jug rest on your upper arm, like so-”

I put a stack of records on. The Modern Jazz Quartet, J.J. and Kai, George Shearing. (Whatever happened to all those people?) We talked. I don’t remember what about. Rhoda was in a depression and trying to laugh and drink her way out of it. I was keeping her company, but not doing the world’s best job of it.

“Prissy?”

“Hmmm?”

“Everything’s so alone, isn’t it?”

“Everything’s a pain in the ass.”

“I think you’ve broken new philosophical ground. Everything’s a pain in the ass.”

“It really is.”

“I’ll tell you something, most people are a pain in the ass.”

“An unqualified pain in the ass.”

“How do you qualify one?”

“You have to pass an examination. On the state level, I think. What would I do if you didn’t exist?”

“It’s like God. You would have to invent me.”

“God would have to invent you?”

“No, I mean-”

“I know what you mean. I always know what you mean. We always know what we mean. Rho, I couldn’t study, I fell asleep over the book.”