Janet asked what I did for work, but I wasn’t really paying attention to the question because by then I was already beginning to get the sense that there was something vast and wrong in her life, some shadow so enormous that it covered her and me and half the tables in Diem Bo. It was in the movement of her eyes and hands, and in her voice-which was on the husky, throaty side, and resonated behind the bones of the middle of her face. The advantage to meeting and dating when you’re fifteen or seventeen or twenty is that, except in a few awful cases, there has not yet been too much trouble in your romantic life, or in your date’s. You might go through some kind of trouble like that later, together, but at least you start out more or less unscarred. But on dates as a something-less-than-young man, with a something-less-than-young woman, you could start out with someone who had already been through such horror and misery in other relationships that the hope and eagerness in her had been kicked to death before you even had your first kiss.

You could see it in some women’s eyes, in their posture. You could hear it in the way they talked: their pain quota had been filled, for life; there was only so far out into that naked middle ground they were ever going to let themselves go again, and who could blame them?

I wondered sometimes if women saw that in me.

But this was different. This trouble was immediate and oversized. It crept around in Janet’s voice, in the choreography of her hands-which were long-fingered, strong-looking, beautiful hands. I had just a flicker of a thought then that I should get away from that trouble, protect myself, make things easy. But it was attractive, too, in a strange way. My own troubles stirred and blinked in a bad sleep. They sensed a friend in the room.

“So what kind of work do you do?”