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horror when he told her how many hours he had to study each day. “But then you are so young and strong,” she said, with a tender and admiring smile. Of course he liked her—who could not?
    She even approved of my room, though she sat rather stiffly and gingerly on the single straight wooden chair. She looked across the street to the piles of fish and remarked that she had noticed lower prices here than in her own
quartier
, but this was her only suggestion that I had come down in the world. And I thought then, but did not speak, of her beautiful
poisson normand.
She only said, “Such a nice clean room, Patience, and it must be so convenient for you.”
    I made tea, boiling the water over Sterno which Madame thought terribly ingenious, and we ate the pastries which I had bought. Bruno and Madame talked about the beauties of Italy, of Florence in early spring, Venice in October. And painting. I could imagine her saying of him,
“Tellement cultivé, ce jeune Italien, tellement sensible.”
    After that day everything deteriorated. The weather turned cold and it rained fiercely as though to remind us all of the difficult past winter. When, finally, I booked passage on a boat which was to leave the third of June, I felt that my exit was being forced, the city and the time would have no more of me. I had accepted the impossibility of Bruno—westill saw each other but I wept and it always ended badly. I did not see Madame again. I did call her, meaning to say goodbye, but there was no answer.
    Sometimes it occurs to me to write to Madame, to send her pictures of my husband, my house and my children, as though to convince her that I have grown up, that I am no longer that odd girl who came to her in the wet summer coat, or who tried to charm her with tea made over Sterno in an unlikely room. Or I try to imagine her here, perhaps as the great-aunt whom, on shopping trips into town, I occasionally visit. But this is impossible: my aunt, an American Gothic puritan with a band of black grosgrain ribbon about her throat, my aunt laughing over the purchase of a tiny
soutien-gorge
, bringing in wine,
l’essentiel?
This won’t do. And I am forced to leave Madame, and Bruno of whom I never think, as and where they are, in that year of my own history.

Gift of Grass
    “But what’s so great about money—or marriages and houses, for that matter?” Strengthened perhaps by two recent cups of tea (rose hips, brewed with honey and a few grass seeds), Cathy had raised herself on one elbow and turned to face the doctor. “Couldn’t there be other ways to live?” she asked, consciously childish and pleading.
    “Have you thought of one?” Oppressed by weariness and annoyance, Dr. Fredericks was unaware that both those emotions sounded in his soft, controlled voice. Once, in a burst of confidence, Cathy had said to him accusingly, “You speak so softly just to make me listen.” Now she said nothing. Believing himself to be in command, Dr. Fredericks also believed his patient to be overcome by what he saw as her transference. She saw her feelings toward him as simple dislike and a more complicated distrust.
    She lay back down, giving up, and reconsidered the large space that served as both the doctor’s office and his living room. It was coolly blue and green—olive walls and ceiling, royal-blue carpet, navy silk chair and sofa, pale-bluelinen lampshades on green pottery lamps. Only the couch on which Cathy lay was neither green nor blue; it was upholstered with a worn Oriental rug, as though that might disguise its function. Like most children—she was sixteen—Cathy knew more than her elders thought she did. She knew that at one time her mother had been a patient of Dr. Fredericks’s, and she recognized her mother’s touch in that room. Her mother, who was an interior decorator, had evidently “done” it. As payment for her hours of lying there? It would have been an expensive job; Cathy saw that, too. God knows how many hours