“Sorry for giving you a hard time,” I said.

When he went away, Janet started to say something, but it turned into a deep, watery cough that sounded like it was shaking her body from bone marrow to skin. She excused herself and walked off to the bathroom carrying her purse. I watched her go.

I put my right hand in the pocket of my sport jacket. They were playing Beethoven quietly from small ceiling speakers, and I heard it as if from a childhood dream: my mother and father home from work and enjoying a drink, asparagus steaming, Beethoven on the tape player. I tried to calm down. I looked around at the other men at other tables. They seemed well groomed, with normal hair and good, white-collar careers, and a regular dating record, or a wife, or a steady girlfriend, or kids. No one else in Diem Bo was nervous. I tried doing a breathing exercise Gerard used before his bicycle races, but it made me dizzy so I stopped and stared out at Newbury Street over the top of my arm. When Janet had been gone twelve or fourteen minutes, Joshua brought the scallops. “And a Vietnamese iced coffee,” I said, pointing across the table at the tall glass.

“Very good,” he said.

Five or six minutes later he brought it. “How are the scallops?”

“I haven’t tried them yet.”

“Excellent.”

Two more minutes and I understood that Janet Rossi was not coming back. The part of me that had been against going out on a date again had been the correct part, and the little troll reappeared and started in on a not very nice line of I-told-you-so. In compensation, then, I developed a plan: I would eat all the food we had ordered, buy a thirty-dollar bottle of wine on the way home, and then put John Hiatt on my music machine pretty loud and drink and paint until I knew I could fall asleep. Sitting there, formulating that plan, I felt an old sourness rising. I began to feel sorry for myself in the most childish and brutal way, and though I knew from other times that it would pass, that it was only a little half-dry bloodstain on the shirtsleeve of my mind, I wet it and rubbed it and indulged it for a few more minutes until I saw Janet come out of the bathroom. At which point I started spooning scallops onto her dish like Joe Date.