"Did the clock keep you up all night?" she asked when it had finished chiming, surprising all of us.

"Oh, not so much," her sister said. "It wasn't that loud." She rolled over languidly in the covers. She could spend all day in bed. She said she was looking for work but was going to be teaching a class at the university for the next term. Something about research.

"But what room is above this one?" she asked.

"That's our bedroom."

They both looked at me and I was staring at the wall. I wasn't listening exactly until she said bedroom. The word bedroom immediately reminded us all that "our" was no longer her and me, but she and her new boyfriend. Bedroom is such an excellently loaded word.

Sometimes I don't know why I even walk in the door.

I do it for my son. I hope he never understands any of this.

Dear Francine,

I don't know what she will look like. For a long time I only chased women with dark hair and eyes. They were as opposite of her as I could get. Ultimately their counterpoint made them unreal. I have chased a life with no future. I don't want anything to last. I know I can't have you; this might be why I write you still. I let everyone else attainable fall away. I live in my head. I'm in a love with a girl who doesn't exist anymore.

How wonderfully self-defeating. How easy. I will never hurt again, right? I can hear you laughing at me. What if I could have you? Is that the secret epiphany I'll learn in the end? How frightening it might be to get what you want: if you don't know what you want.

Dear Francine,

You should know that I'm sitting here staring at your postcard, as I've been doing for about a week, and I still don't know how to answer. I have to write something, so I'm starting without knowing where this letter will go. Well, they've all begun that way, but this one feels more like a challenge.

"Tell me the story you have to tell."

And that's all she wrote. I like the picture of Madrid, though. Are you on vacation? I can't imagine finding anything cheap in Spain. Well, strawberries. I had some excellent strawberries in Mallorca. They were small and popping with juice like little kisses.

Going through the week with a challenge like your line floating through my head has been irritating. What is the story I have to tell? If I had a gun to my head and was about to be erased from the earth, what would I say? What mark would I leave scratched on the wall? My story, of course.

But I don't know how to arrange my life in any meaningful way. Maybe I wrote you in the first place because I thought you would point me toward a starting point, since you knew me back in the day. I don't know if there was an original moment of truth or if I'm inching my way toward one. I guess that would mean I have hope for the future, that I'm capable of learning or changing, that I can be more than a guy who approves insurance claims and wastes energy chasing the affection of a different woman a month.

However, I do have a story to tell you this week, without getting into the story I have to tell. Not yet. Or maybe this is part of that story. I don't know but I need to get your take on the situation because it's freaking me out a little bit. Well, not really, but I'm not sure how to respond to some statement that have been revealed to me.

So, I met a new girl.

About two weeks ago I was at eighties night at a local establishment I enjoy, one that has a slightly sketchy atmosphere but a good mix of people depending on whether the university students are in attendance. R and I like to check it out only every couple weeks because it's got a cover charge. However, it can sometimes be the best dance party in town.

Well, I have a few of the well drinks as toast to the DJs, who are doing an excellent job (one of whom is a friend of mine) and make my way out onto the dance floor. Not two minutes into "Pussy Control" I meet a girl who shouts her name as V, and becomes my dance partner for the next several tracks. She was curvy, with a tongue ring, and long bangs of blood-red hair she kept tucking behind an ear.

V danced in a dirty sort of way that I really appreciated, but she never let me get too close, and when we went outside for a cigarette, the first thing she told me was, "You're bad."

"As in?" I asked.

"You know what I mean," she said. She had an evil little smirk that, combined with the red hair, had a pretty strong effect on me. Or maybe it was the drinks.

Dear Francine,

I'm sitting here in my boxers getting ready to go out. I started to write you something earlier but decided to drink a few beers and watch Comedy Central instead. Oh! you gasp, you're not my first priority? Baby, until you write me a full and real reply, you'll get the after-thoughts.

Did I tell you I'm usually only interested in a female for about thirty days max? Sometimes it's as short as a week. You're reaching your expiration date, and unless you give me something more than a reflection of my own pent-up high school angst, I'm going to have to turn my wandering eye elsewhere.

No, I'm not really such a dick. You're the only person who'll ever hear the previous statement.

I'm meeting my pal Rob at Lucky's and then I'm not sure what afterward. We seem to be ending up at the Lucky Noodle a lot lately. The drinks are expensive as hell, but by the time we get down there the Carrie Bradshaw knock-offs are mumbling in their martinis and looking for a young man wearing a tie to save them, such as myself.

That melancholy crap about Sparky the Husband-bot isn't anything to get too worried about. Really, I'm not even sure why I wrote that down, since the lab assistant was the only girl to bring the protective response in a while.

Before the alcohol intervention I had planned on writing you a long and detailed account of a regular day in my life at Rothschild Insurance. Today I even got to partake in a sexy conference call with Gretchen at the home office in Frankfurt. (I'm trying to work my way into a trip to check out the headquarters, but I'm not confident at this point.) Gretchen loves correcting my grammar and I enjoy imagining what she's wearing while we compare claims payouts and balance various spreadsheets. Oh, the office life for me.

Did I tell you I'm living downtown in the High Street Tower? I doubt you remember it: I don't know if it even existed when we were in high school. But it's a posh apartment, and in easy stumbling distance of every place I might want to hang out on a Friday night.

D asked me to send you his love. I wasn't sure if you wanted everyone in the world having your address, so I haven't given it to him yet. But I can if you don't mind. He's still working in Phoenix. In fact he called from up on a billboard putting up a giant advertisement for liquor, and he said he had his hand on the crotch of a ginormous little black dress.

"People aren't meant to live in this fucking heat, man," he was saying. "It's unreal. I don't know if I can take it anymore!"
He got a new place, this little apartment that he says reeks of nicotine and cat piss. He's been dousing the walls with clorox and actually called once to ask what he should do about the chlorine smell.

I told him the females would love it.

He'll be okay. He's the most depressed optimist I've ever known.

I keep meaning to get down to Scottsdale to visit, especially since getting back to the States, but it just hasn't worked out yet. According to him it's a real scene down there.

So right now I'm imagining you reading this letter in a Manilla hotel, fanning yourself a little, business papers spread all over the bed, and you're asking yourself, when is this going to get interesting?

I'm not going to tell you what you're wearing.

So, unfortunately this is where I take my leave to go find that very "interesting" stuff. Adventure! In the Night Life! Carrie's out there somewhere waiting for me. How about you tell me the real story about you and J? That'll give you something to write about, yeah?

Take care,

Dear Francine,

I was asleep when we entered Iraqi airspace, so I don't have any momentous memories for you from that experience. C-5 Galaxies, the giant nose-opening jets the air force uses to move stuff, do two things that instantly put me to sleep: they give off a high-pitched hum, and you fly facing backwards, which just feels weird for some reason and makes most people air sick.

I woke to the crew chief working his way between the passenger seats, checking harnesses and tapping soldiers on the head while he mouthed the words: combat landing. I was wearing ear plugs, so his mouthing looked like "I like candy."

We all waited for another twenty minutes, unable to see anything since the aircraft had no windows, until the pitch of the engines dropped an octave, and I felt my stomach go free-fall as the plane abruptly dipped toward Baghdad International somewhere below.

Dear Francine,

"Wife for the Night" is a hick term I picked up somewhere. Every time I hear somebody using it, I know they mean something derogatory but to me it just sounds sad. You wouldn't hear a hick who hadn't had a wife at some point saying that.

As to why I was putting up with her crap, it wasn't to get laid but because somewhere inside me is a fully functioning little husband-bot that's been programmed over time to take care of drunk women, and it perks awake and slips into the role way too easily when I've been drinking. I start listening and nodding and holding them up when they stumble, and when they say ridiculous things my first impulse is to protect them rather than call them on their bullshit. Real intimacy and the prospect of a real future make me feel like I'm choking - but in a doomed situation the programming spits out every gesture and reply necessary to fake it for a few hours.

I don't know if it makes me feel better. It makes me feel comfortable sometimes. It brings back not any distinct memory, but a way I remember living, taking care of someone else.

But really? She had blue-green eyes and her hair smelled warm, and outside she grabbed both my hands and just looked at me. And of course it feels good to have a drunk lady rubbing up against me, whether I'm "safe" or not.

As for S, I don't know if want to get into the full S story, especially with someone who's got full rights to I Told You So, Idiot. I think you are one of the few people I really do want to talk with about it, but it's only recently that I've stopped waking up to dreams of her. It's only recently that I don't hear her voice in my head and every evil and amazing thing she used to say.

I got spit into the world in 2005. I left S and left the army, and didn't realize just how much those two institutions had comprised my life. I'm sick of telling Iraq stories at work and in the bars. I'm sick of giving my opinion on the war. I'm sick of wondering when I have to tell any prospective female about eleven years of S and how of course we're great friends now and I'm great and life is great when I don't know how to define how I feel. I don't know if I am still sad about it. I don't know if the blandness of life is something general or if it owes its dust-taste to all the leaving that's been going on. I'm trying to look inside for the "happiness" stuff but it seems like external forces have provided the stimuli for too long, and I can't find satisfaction in anything else. I can't believe how much I miss the army.

What a stupid paragraph I just wrote.

Today I bought a bamboo mat for my bedroom that was probably made by one of your suppliers in a sweatshop and I rolled it out in my bedroom and moved the bed back into place, and the only thought in my head was, "Damn, I really want to fuck somebody on this."

Is that the brain-state of a depressed man?

Do you remember when I sent you roses after we went to that dance together? You were so weirded out. I only did it because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know how to be friends with a female so it seemed like the only correct next step was to do something awkward and "romantic." You did give me a kiss after the dance, which I remember having a lot of lip and being soft and super-nice, but I should have been able to leave it that.

Why am I mentioning those uncomfortable roses? They seem fairly representative to me of all the things I have done in my life because I thought it was expected. I have very rarely been in a situation to make my own decisions. Yes, I decided or was compelled to love S, but with that one decision I readily relinquished so much other free will. I did the same thing with the army. I just gave into it all.

Once it had begun, it seemed like I had to ride it all out to the end. Pretty damn big decisions to make as a teenager. I've always been perfectly willing to do awkward and uncomfortable things because I thought it was expected of me. I'm a perfect manager. The role is provided and I fill it like silly putty.

So when some drunk office manager starts rambling at me about shit I can't even understand (how the hell did she know what my education level was, anyway?), I just fold right into it.

And to answer your last question, I pretty much spent that year alone in Germany riding the train. Every weekend I wasn't playing soldier, I rode the S-Bahn, the cheap train, from Frankfurt to wherever I could get in a day. Mannheim, Heidelberg, Darmstadt. Hameln. I don't even remember most of them now. I can get a map if you're really curious.

I liked watching the families on the train, or the drunk football fans, the old couples staring out the windows. Those enormous German windows in trains and buildings, flashing the blurring colors of their countryside and cities, all the alien geometry we only ape in the states. The idea of a double-wide trailer in a German city always cracked me up.

I always wanted to part of something bigger than myself. I wanted to have the European experience we all imagine. But trying to do it in the military, during a war, married. . . I didn't think carefully enough about what that really meant, what it would do to us. When I look back now I think the decision to go to Germany was also the decision to leave S. It just took four years to manifest itself fully.

My mind still doesn't feel very clear. I still find myself staring out the window past the computer screen for most of the day. I need to do something but I'm not sure what. I'm not sure how to get my mind out of these spirals. The bottom is always a dream of rolling in morning-warm sheets with a blonde-haired girl and how vibrant it all was at first, how amazing every second of my life felt. I keep trying to figure out when and where it changed. When I wake, I can't find her in the bed. I lay there blinking until I remember finally. Then I get up and go to work.

Take care,

Dear Francine,

I still can't believe we ran into each other in Frankfurt. I always wondered what had happened to you, and then there you were walking past the Starbucks. I used to think I saw people I knew all the time, watching crowds roll by, the same way I could sit on the S-Bahn and suddenly think I was hearing English. Always kind of drowsy, riding just to get into the city to be around people, knowing the language gap held up a distance I could never cross. Usually the double-take proved the sudden familiarity was all in my head. But that time someone I knew was really there.

It's great about your job. Traveling the world is how I always imagined you, even if it is to sell stuff made by poor people. (But they're happy to sell it, right?)

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write. I've been meaning to follow up for a long time but something always gets in the way. I haven't had the itch to write much of anything for nearly two years. Every day I don't write takes me even farther from ever calling myself a writer again. But that's fine. I just don't care to see my name on anything, even at the bottom of a letter to a friend. You said write me a letter like you used to, and here I am.

Living in the States again took adjusting. I've been back almost a year now and I still feel out of place most all the time. I'm going to more parties now, making friends finally, but I still find myself standing in the middle of a room wondering what I'm doing there, how this life can be real. I am amazed by the adaptability of life. Every day that I am not writing second-hand about living is a day I am in the first-person. Every new person helps atone for the friendships and relationships I failed.

Hah. But anyway.

I'm working in a medical insurance claims office on 11th Avenue now. All day I read treatment files and decide whether or not someone will most likely go bankrupt from the procedures the company won't cover but the doctors push. I try not to think about it too closely. Following the company's rules makes it easier. I'm a cog. I have a great view of the street from my office and spend more time watching the traffic pass than studying case files. I moved my computer so I could see the street.

Do you remember the time we skipped school and J shoplifted those CDs from Sam Goody? The weather is the same today, leaves falling everywhere. The sidewalks are carpeted in gold. You know they tore down the high school? I went down to visit my mom and drove past Taylor Street, and there was just an empty field. There's a fence around the field to keep people out. It looks like really soft grass, too, thick and dark green.

It should be against the law to tear down a high school. How many thousands of graduates now have no place to aim their anger and regret? Just this expanse of park-green grass you can't even lay on because there's a fence around it.

I always wanted to say thanks for coming to the wedding, too. I'm sure you were very aware how crazy it made S to see you there. I couldn't have imagined you any better, in your Jackie-O glasses and that leopard-skin dress like a Sixties ad. I never heard the end of it, but I wanted to invite you and I'm glad you came. I always valued your friendship. I should have known it would be trouble between S and me that she didn't want us to be friends. I think I know what she was so afraid of now, but it doesn't really matter anymore.

So a few weeks ago I was at an after hours party, standing with a woman on my arm who had somehow made herself my wife for the night (or I liked her, I think, but I never saw her again) when she took my face in her hands and pulled me close and whispered a little desperately: "Will you recognize that I'm more educated than you are? Please?"

The more I consider the statement, the more I think I was someone else for her right then. I would like to know what I looked like. I wonder what my response was. I gave her a ride home and she kept asking if I was safe. But I think she was talking about her own safety.

This isn't very important. I only think about these interactions because I am striving to live without expectation, to never take anything for granted, and in that frame of mind everything is absolutely important until another experience comes along to place it in further context. I'm as grateful for a kiss as I am for sex, or even meeting someone's eyes from across a room. I don't have to want any more than that.

So life is going well, and I hope I will have more interesting things to report. We both wanted to get as far away from this city as possible and all the reasons that brought me back don't seem so pressing anymore. I'm glad to be here, though. I've been amazed by the old friends who still have room in their hearts for me, and the generosity of all the new friends.

I hope this letter finds you smiling. It was great to share a beer in the Romerplatz ("What the fuck are you doing drinking at a Starbucks in Germany?" Heh) even if it was touristy and the waitress had funky hands.

I may be starting to feel the itch to write again, now that I think about it. I have something to confess but I can't say it yet. I feel like there's a word I haven't learned.

Yeah. So don't let me get too dramatic. You remember the false intimacy of letters.

Take care,

The night air was like warm water. David left the red light alley and turned back toward downtown. In a minute he found another British pub, this one full of adults and cigarette smoke. It was noisy. He ordered a Stella at the bar, turning to watch a football game underway on one of the five televisions peering down on the room.

“Who are you in for?” the man sitting next to him asked, nodding toward the figures running on the screen.

“I don’t really follow it,” David said.

“Ah, American. I’ll forgive you that, then. Where you from?”

The Stella was smooth as water. “Seattle. You?”

“Norfolk.”

“I’ve been there.”

“You have?”

“I spent some time at Feltwell.”

“You were military then. You’ve been to Iraq? I was in Basrah in 2003.” He pulled back his right sleeve to reveal a crest tattooed on his forearm.

David nodded. “I was there.”

Then man extended his hand. “Rory.”

“David. Good to meet you. What do you think of Spain?”

“Nice place for a holiday.”

He tripped over trying to order a Bloody Mary. When he said Bloody Mary the waiter stared at him, so he tried “Vodka und tomaten – shorle? Juice?” Finally the waiter smiled and brought him back a small can of V8 and a shot of some unknown vodka. David poured them both in his empty water glass and used his butter knife to mix the drink. When that was gone he ordered a bottle of champagne, apparently no problem at six in the morning. He mixed bites of egg with swigs of ice-cold wine. By the time he had finished the bottle, his head was swimming and he had to hold the sides of the table to steady himself as he stood.

David tossed three euros on the table – unnecessary, he knew, but he was playing the part of the ignorant American – and focused on the doorway. He nodded to the host as he walked into the hotel lobby. Blinking in the morning sun, he oriented himself on the beach and turned toward the strip, where he had seen several convenience shops on his run.

There were few families out at this time of morning. Those crossing the street came from the cheaper hotels without direct beach access. They had to stake out real estate on the sand early. He looked at them and almost imagined them American until a husband said something to his wife in Dutch. David nodded at a boy carrying a blue inflatable boat and crossed the street for the line of stores with banks of sunglasses at their doors. Inside he found the back cooler and pulled out a case of German beer. He passed an aisle of tinned things for the Brits, and then a display of Alpine chocolates.

In his room, he carefully loaded as many of the beers as he could fit into the fridge, and then sat on the edge of the bed with an open bottle in his hand, slowly taking swigs and staring out the window at the beach. Without intending to, he fell back asleep and when he woke it was afternoon.

Out on the street he walked watching the flow of people. He followed the tide back down to the city center, where he bought a flask of whiskey in a convenience store and then walked out on the quay to sip it and stare at the water as the sun set.

Behind him he heard the onflowing mix of voices and languages. The sounds settled with the lapping waves in an isolating way he found relaxing. He watched down the beach as a hotel lit floodlights on a wide gazebo and began testing dance lights and the stereo system. Music blasted across the dark water then went silent.

He spent another hour walking the city, growing more drunk but taking no joy in it because he was alone. The jet lag was coming on again and waves of fatigue tossed his head around.

He had been on the island twelve hours and was no closer to his goal. David looked at the empty flask and set it on a window ledge as he passed.

Sometime later, after another pint of warm beer in a British pub were families were singing karaoke, he caught the sight of red neon down an alley. A minute later, he found the small strip of light above an unmarked door set away from the street. He knocked and when there was no answer he tried the door. It opened on a long fluorescent hallway with lime-green walls.

David pulled the door closed behind him and walked carefully down the hall. In the light he realized how drunk he was. He trailed a finger along the plaster of one wall to maintain his balance. The hall turned to the right and ended in stairs going down. He heard faint dance music from the floor below, more an echo as through a wall. He went down the stairs. A set of institutional-looking double doors at the bottom made him think of a hospital. Through a glass panel he saw more hallway but now dimly lit and lined with doorways, and down the hall women stood in many of the entryways.

He expected the music to grow louder as he open the door but instead it was sealed out completely when the door closed behind him. Watching him enter, the woman nearest him stretched an arm up the doorframe and smiled. She was topless with red nylon running shorts and tube socks pulled high up her thighs.

But she said nothing as David walked past. Each door had a small window, giving the floor the look of an asylum. Some doors were open to show girls lounging on small beds, reading magazines or talking on cell phones.

The air smelled like a hundred different perfumes, plus latex. Some women were obvious types: French maid, schoolgirl, black leather, long ironed-straight hair. They watched him genially as he passed. He expected scorn or distance in their eyes but each smiled. Some spoke in German, Spanish, Russian. Low music played from some doorways. Somewhere a toilet flushed.

At the end of the hall waited another set of doors. David pointed at the floor and asked the nearest girl, “Mas?” and she nodded. As he passed through the door, he saw reflected in the glass panel that the first set of doors was already opening. The women’s bodies all straightened in response.

Down the nest set of stairs he found the same scene. This hallway had branches that led off like different office departments. As he walked past the women he found himself growing more detached. He studied their earrings rather than their breasts. He looked at fingernails, the shapes of their hands. One woman had a pinky that went crooked when she put her hand against her face. More languages came at him and he smiled without responding.

He was growing more tired without another drink and had begun to forget the initial urge that drew him toward the neon. David put his hands in his pockets and walked slower. There were other men in front of him. He had time to linger without catching up. He turned a corner and heard music that made him pause.

From an open doorway at the end of a dim branch he heard, “If I could be one thing, I’d be your cigarette.”

He blinked, not trusting his ears. The mind had a way of matching foreign languages with memories, creating a false understanding. It was a song he hadn’t heard since he was a student. Since before the war and before Sarah.

The second line convinced him he wasn’t dreaming: “So close to your lips, so full of regret.”

David nearly fell over a chair along the wall as he approached the doorway.

“I’d be your cigarette.”

The door wasn’t open completely, just cracked enough to let the music and a line of yellow light free into the hall.

He knocked on the door, pushing it open a little, and said, “Hello?” and then “Abend?”

“Yes?”

The door opened to reveal a blonde woman in a tube tope and high-cut black shorts.

“Hello,” David said again. “Do you speak English?”

“Of course,” she said. Her bobbed hair moved as she talked. “Would you like to come in?”

She pulled the door open wider and stepped out of the way.

When he was inside the tiny room she closed the door completely and moved a curtain over its small window.

“Would you like to sit?” she asked. “There is the bed or the chair right there.”
David chose the chair, sitting beside a dressing table with a few perfume bottles he didn’t recognize and containers of lotion. The music was coming from a small stereo on a shelf above the bed. It’s power cord stretched to the floor like a crack in the wall.

“Where did you get that song?” he asked. “I haven’t heard it in years.”
She looked as if she didn’t understand him, then glanced at the stereo and said, “Oh, that. The internet. I don’t remember where. It’s good though, isn’t it?”

“I know the man who wrote it,” David said. “Or I did a long time ago.”

“Are you from the States, then?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Are you on holiday?”

David did not answer right away. She had moved to the bed and sat with her knees together. She had hazel eyes and small lips and he imagined this girl in an office suddenly, presenting to a board with her chin raised. Then he stopped himself.

“Not really,” he said. “Is it a holiday if you don’t plan on going home?”

“Of course,” she said. She smiled. “That’s the best kind.”

She lay her head to the side so that her neck made a long smooth line to her shoulder and arm. His eyes followed to the divot inside her elbow and rested on one small purple spot. She saw his gaze and moved her arms across her knees, leaning forward so the loose neck of her top fell open a little.

“So,” she said. “My name is Anne. Would you like to stay with me?”
David raised his eyes to hers.

“I think that would be nice,” he said.

She told him a sum in euros and he nodded.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked.

Jet-lagged when evening came, David put on his battered running shoes and left the hotel to run down the long strip that paralleled the beach. Hotel complexes lined the street on either side and groups of tourists carrying air mattresses waited at the stoplights. The air cooled down and the neon and red taillights stood out against the darkening sky. He ran easily, tasting the sea, and ended up down in the marina in a clot of people that forced him to slow to a walk. He listened to the languages and read logo t-shirts, heard American music from the open-air bars.

Running back, he pushed himself into a near sprint, arms pumping, hands making karate chops, until his breath cut in his ears and flashes of light threatened his vision. When he realized he was punishing himself he kept going. The street was wide and flat and he wove between parked cars along the curb. The sprint evened itself out but he was still running – not jogging but running like a chased man, so that people turned to watch as he passed, then looking for the pursuer. . . He ran to the hotel and stood in the parking lot panting. He pulled off his t-shirt and wiped his forehead, looking around and squinting through sweat-stung eyes, still amazed he was in Spain, when only this time yesterday he had been sitting behind a desk in Seattle.

In his room, David took a beer form the mini-bar and searched for a bottle opener and finally managed to pop the cap off with a counter top. The beer cooled his throat and he watched the remains of sunset on the Mediterranean.

Later he went to sleep, but woke at four and lay staring at the ceiling until it was time to go down for the breakfast buffet.

Eighteen hours from Seattle, David pulled his black bag from the baggage carousel and walked toward the front of the airport where the tour guides were waiting with clipboards. The women wore blue scarves.

“Deutsche?” a woman asked him. Then: “British?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling.

She checked his name on the clipboard and told him “Hotel Del Mar” and he said fine. She pointed with her pen through the doors and told him his bus number.

David blinked in the Spanish sunlight and felt suddenly pail. His tie flapped against his shoulder.

The other tourists on the bus were all German, and he listened to them as they found seats and shoved bags in the overhead space. The driver made a speech in German that made them all chuckle. He didn’t repeat it in English but hung up the microphone and put the bus in reverse.

The ride took an hour, across the dry interior patch-worked by strawberry fields and small yellow towns. Tiny cars passed the bus and he looked down at the drivers as they passed, studying their backseats and dashboards. He looked up to see a little German boy watching him and he smiled.

The bus entered the resort city and began weaving through narrow streets, up and down hills, finding each hotel in order to call out its name and help the passengers off.
Hotel Del Mar was a small white block on a slight hill above the beach. David pulled his bag from the under-bus storage area and faced the beach from the parking lot. He stepped forward to the sidewalk as the bus ground into reverse and backed adeptly from the cramped parking lot. He smelled the ocean and watched the sun glint off the wide leaves of the palm trees.

Picking up his suitcase, he walked down toward the beach along a narrow path wet from bare feet. His loafers slid in the sand. He paused and pulled them off, balancing one foot at a time. He stuffed his socks in one shoe, tied the laces together and hung the shoes around his neck. Leaving the suitcase at the edge of the strand, he walked through a band of half-filled beach chairs and straw sun umbrellas to the water.

It was as warm as a swimming pool. An old woman tossing a ball to a little girl said something to him in German that sounded like “You should roll up your pant legs,” but he just smiled at her. His tie threw itself over his shoulder and he felt the win lifting his hair. He took off his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.

David looked down the beach where the marina was barely visible. There were white yachts at anchor out in the bay, and the water looked like a blue sheet of plastic rolling itself out to them over and over. People were playing badminton in the surf, and little kids rode inflatable toys.

Reaching for his shirt pocket again, he pulled out a second plane ticket and tore it in half. He knelt to soak it in the Mediterranean until it disintegrated, letting the pieces disperse around his ankles. He turned and walked back up to where his suitcase stood waiting in the sand.

We bought the camcorder so we could, if I remember correctly, create a record that we were a family. At least that was the idea. I can't remember if she was pregnant then or not. Maybe we bought it to record the dogs.

We drank an entire bottle of wine. One of the big bottles but not quite a jug. We were talking about our fathers. I realized my friend was twenty years older than me and if we remained friends part of that friendship would be watching him die. Of course there is the line: Love is watching someone die. Losing a real love is knowing you will no longer have that. The future.

"Working all the time," he said. "Publishing books. Now making liquor. And not getting laid at all."

I told him: "Why would would I want a girlfriend when I can't even remember to call my friends?"

"You're right," he said. "You're not very good at that."

"I want to make things right now. Somehow a relationship doesn't seem possible."

We sat for a while. I think something happened with his son and he had to go check on him.

I said as he sat back down, "Somebody told me that it's selfish to spend your life alone. Or that's what their mother told them."

My friend nodded. "I need to think about that," he said.

At least six people looked up at the word "Tango." The man with curly hair jumped on the cue, taking his headphones out of his ears and asking the two blond women near his table, "Did you just say tango?"

The woman with curly hair nodded, and he turned away from his laptop to point at her. "You tango, don't you?" he said. "I love it but - oh, man I'm so sore right now. I'm training for a triathlon and I just finished biking fifty miles. Fifty miles! Can you believe that?"

I found myself watching out of pure curiosity. On the power of one word, he was dumping a list of subjects on the two women. The girl with curly hair was now facing him, while her straight-haired friend looked less enthused. She hunched over her coffee and looked from her friend to the guy. He started losing them with the triathlon story, especially when he showed them one of his sore thighs and massaged it slowly. Also, he was wearing white pants.

"Oh!" he said. "You've got to see this. You dance at the Tango Center, right?"

She nodded. He named some famous dancer and she laughed, excited. "Yes, I love her! You saw her at the center."

"No, but I've got this amazing video. Give me your number and I'll send it to you."

She pointed at his computer. "Why don't you look it up online?"

He frowned at the computer. "I don't know if it's online."

"Well, do a search, genius."

He smiled at her, cracked his fingers and attacked the keyboard. She left her seat and moved to look over this shoulder. Her face lit as the video appeared. The thin sound of tango music crossed the coffee shop as they watched the video.

"That's great," he said when it finished. "Doesn't it make you want to?" He looked up at her. She was still watching the screen, and then she looked at him. She had a slight smile.

"Would you like to dance?" he asked.

"Here?" she exclaimed. She looked around the coffee shop. It was half full. The tables around them were empty.

He lept up and started pushing tables out of the way. He restarted the video on the laptop and held out his hand. She lowered her chin, grinning a little, and took his hand.

I watched her friend as the two of them danced.

As part of a class, I had been mulling over two concepts: the first was the question "What if you never had another relationship in your life?" and the second was a list of traits I desired in my perfect partner. Both these questions were supposed to help me choose a person rather than let serendipity do it for me.

I remember reading somewhere that online dating ads that baldly stated what you did not want had more integrity than those listing what you like. The word "integrity" was what leaped out at me in the advice column, as if creating a list of deal-breakers as insulation against another person somehow made choosing easier.

Their shoes scraped on the wooden floor as they danced, her cheek against his neck. And as they turned, I saw a ring on her left hand. Watching them suddenly became a lot more interesting. It was obvious what he wanted, and now I was very curious if she was going to give it to him.

I haven't written anything significant in years. About three years. I was in the middle of a fairly major rewrite of "the novel" when my wife told me she didn't love me anymore. The words stopped coming. The file has moved through three computer now, and I've added nothing useful to it. Every now and then I take it out and read a bit and say to myself "This isn't so bad, I should finish this" but I don't.

I even have an invitation to write essays for a rather major site that pays - it's a paying gig - and I can't come up with anything to write.

Well, why am I writing this. I should be working on that.