“It hasn’t worked out so badly.”

“Hasn’t it? You have the same nightmare over and over again. You live a lonely life and you feel the loneliness of it. You’ve been trying to starve your own need for love and you need to give love and you need to receive it. It’s a stubborn force, Rhoda. It won’t let itself be starved out. It’s too real a need to be dismissed that easily.”

She started to say something, to offer up some objection, then changed her mind. She smoked her cigarette and asked if there was any coffee left.

“I’ll get some.”

Megan brought back two cups of coffee. The coffee was hot and strong. Rhoda sipped hers, set the cup down in the saucer. She took a last drag on her cigarette and put it out. A line from Eliot- I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. In coffee spoons, in cigarette butts, in days awake and nights asleep. She had been measuring out her own life, parceling it out piece by piece. Years were passing, filled with nothing, and she was twenty-four years old and unutterably alone.

How much was Megan offering her? And how much would it cost her to accept Megan’s offer?

She sipped more coffee. “I’m all lost,” she said.

“Poor girl.”

“Poor girl. Yes. I had such a sweet time tonight. Dinner, the wine, being with you. I haven’t had an evening like that since I left Tom. Or since longer than that. I needed it, the friendship, all of it. I thought you would be my friend.”

“I am your friend.”

“I thought that was all you wanted.”

“I want that and more. I want to be your friend. And your lover.”

“My lover.”

“Yes.”

“What would we do? I don’t understand.”

“Does it matter?”

“I-”

“I would make love to you,” Megan said, “I would make you feel like what you are, like a woman made for love. I would show you the dark side of the moon, I would make you laugh and cry. And we would be close and warm and nothing would matter, nothing at all.”