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falling into his face. His soft-spoken demeanor caused some to think him harmless, but they were wrong: he was a sniper who flattened poseurs with a phrase and never felt remorse.
    He wanted to know more.
    I explained about Vita Nuova (Not that old chestnut! he exclaimed. I can’t believe Luigi Pieranunzi made me read that in college. Why would you make students read that, when there’s so much good Dante to read?). I didn’t enlighten him about my translation, and I didn’t have to tell him about Romei—Ahmad had read his work long before it had become fashionable—but I did explain about poetry and prose, the story of Romei’s wife. And grad students everywhere, the footnote at the apex of the ridge of the postmodernist canon. Andi, I said, would have someone else to look up to. It wouldn’t be just Ahmad doing Career Day! Nothing, I gushed, would ever be the same.
    Let me adopt her, he said, sitting forward in his Eames chair. Let me adopt Andrea.
    Oh, no , I thought. Not this again .
    Ahmad, I said, we’ve been through this, like, a hundred times!
    When I came home from India, pregnant and broke, I was desperate: how could I live in the City, an underemployed single mom? I considered returning to Suffern, where I’d lived for eight years as Ron’s wife. Telling myself I liked being a wife, I liked Ron’s jokes, his habit of counting socks and planning sex. Ron, who found the City dirty and, truth be told, me too. Where I’d thrown my life in the hot-water wash and watched it shrink. It would be less expensive in Suffern, I reasoned, but then I thought: living on the subway would be better than that.
    Friends shrugged and looked embarrassed when I asked what I should do, as if I were asking something of them. Then I remembered Ahmad. He’d always been logical . Surely he’d have a better idea, one that didn’t involve giving birth on the IRT.
    I hadn’t seen him for more than a year, not since Jonah, the unrequited love of his youth, had died in front of us, killed by a yellow cab on my thirty-fifth birthday. We’d been in high school together, the three of us (four if you count his sister Jeanette, though we weren’t friends then); I didn’t remember Jonah, but he remembered me. Actually, he more than remembered me: he tortured Ahmad for years with remembrances and besotted “what ifs.” So that when the three of us were to get together for the first time in twenty years, it was me Jonah was watching, not the road.
    Or so Ahmad said. He blamed me for Jonah’s death, he said things , unforgivable things. He knew why my mother left us: It was obvious, look at me! What a slut I’d always been! All because I let Ahmad kiss me freshman year, though I was in love with T.—then I pushed him away, and was mean about it. He’d had choice words for me then, too, and our friendship, our beautiful friendship, melted away. When he called me twenty years later, I was about to divorce. I didn’t worry about our falling out: I only thought he knew me when . When I’d been young, before my twelve-year detour with T., when I still believed my future was shiny and bright. If I could just see that Shira reflected in his eyes, I might know how to live again, but we were barely together five minutes when Jonah appeared across the road.
    When I met him at the Palm Court of the Plaza, pregnant, a year later, I saw not the angry man who’d just seen his best friend die, but the dear, sweet, generous friend of my youth. We reminisced and laughed, and cut postage-stamp-size cucumber sandwiches into quarters just for fun. I told him about translation, how I’d just started writing stories; he told me about his transformation from conservative think-tank analyst to college professor and also-ran Nobelist. I’d intended to ask only for advice, but, giddy with how well we were getting on, I thought: He should be a part of my life, our life. I might not inspire my child, but he could. So I asked him to be my child’s