“Do you have time for a cup ofcoffee or something?”he asks her.

She looks at her watch.“I’ve got a meeting with my thesis advisor in halfan hour.”

“That’s nothing compared to the tight schedule of an unsuccessful, small-town lawyer,”he says.

“Where would be fast?”Iris says.

”The Koffee Kup.The coffee’s so bad they spell it with a K.And the lighting is so bad, it’s impossible to sit there longer than fifteen minutes.

I’ll race you there.”

He drives behind her, not wanting to risk letting her out ofhis sight, and feeling the juvenile, slightly demented thrill oflooking at the back ofher head, her hands on the steering wheel.A Marlowe College sticker is on her rear window.The sight ofit ignites a little fizz ofpity and tenderness in him—at thirty-three, she’s new to Marlowe’s graduate program, and her fixing that sticker to her car connotes some desire for definition, a will to belong, or so it seems to him.She maintains the exact thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit all the way to Leyden’s miniature Broadway, and when she pulls into a parking spot in front ofthe diner she uses her turn signal.Such devotion to the rules, such commitment to the princi-ples ofhighway safety—it would be ludicrous to believe that a woman like her could ever entertain the possibility ofsome sexual adventure, of entering into the grim geometry ofinfidelity.

He is astonished by his own ardor.He is like a man who suddenly discovers he can sing, who one day opens his mouth in the shower and mu-sic bursts out ofhim, each note dipped in gold.But the timing is wrong.

He is thirty-six years old, he has commitments, and until now he gave no more credence to the transforming, commanding power oflove than he did to the myth ofAtlantis.Yet this desire, this overwhelming need to look at Iris—who he is convinced is not only beautiful but beautiful in a way that only he can fully appreciate, a beauty somehow designed espe-cially for his eyes—is something he has allowed himself to succumb to.