Vincent came calling, six years after the last time we said goodbye. My first instinct was to drop everything. But there was another voice inside nudging me, There are certain kinds of love you just can't handle. I could handle this kind, maybe. Because Vincent was on the verge of singlehood, and fortunately, I'd been reevaluating my situation with Henri for some time.
         My mother was less impressed. When I went back to our small home in Hampstead for the afternoon, she tisked, "He shouldn't leave his wife."
         She had made me homemade chicken noodle soup and ladled it into a bowl. I hovered a spoonful of steamy thick noodles at my suddenly pursed lips. "She's not his wife. They only live together."
         "Live together?"
         "Yes, Mother. People nowadays, they shack up, they swing, they even engage in menage a trois."
         "Don't get fresh, darling. Does she keep the same address?"
         "Yes."
         "Well, to me that's still together."
         "Okay. I guess you don't understand what I'm getting at."
         "Get what? I feel terrible for Henri. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with that man."
         The truth was there was nothing wrong with Henri. Before him, I'd jump into love, then let it fizzle over a technicality. The way Henri slurped his bowl of Cheerios in the morning didn't bother me for some reason.
         When I got back to the apartment late that night, I knew what was waiting for me: Henri, spread out on the couch with his hands just under the elastic band of his skivvies, watching the comedy network.
         "Henri?"
         He raised a finger.
         I glanced at the TV. Conan O'Brien was pretend driving his desk through Central Park with a blond pretty thing from the audience. Henri started laughing.
         "I talked to Vincent last night."
         Henri knew about Vincent. Knew I'd been sneaking out of the apartment with my cell phone the past month, and now he knew with whom. He also knew Vincent was the only guy to ever break my heart.
         "Do you want to talk?" I asked.
         He kept his gaze on the TV. "I'm watching."
         I went back to the bedroom and stayed there. Dark was all over the place, except for a thin band of light cast from the hallway. It kept me awake.
         But so did the fact that I occasionally heard laughter coming from the TV, and none coming from Henri.

***

         A month before, Vincent called me out of the blue. We spent a lot of the subsequent phone conversations catching up on the years in between us, my time in Montreal and his since he bought a one-way Greyhound ticket to Boston. Eventually we got around to talking about Kathleen, the woman he met at a Million-Mom March in Washington, and now the woman he was leaving. She was this Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging political activist with a fervent mind, but somehow, he explained, those qualities in her vanished. "A year ago she turned into this complacent born-again Christian, and joined an organization of some sort," he said with solemn tenseness one night. "At first she was going away to a mountain retreat in Vermont every couple of months. But then it turned into every other month, and then every other weekend. Sometimes she'd call me in the middle of the night in this eerily calm voice. She'd tell me about how happy she was, about all the new friends she was making."
         The last call, the call that made me detail my own vague yet persistent state of restlessness, he said, "I wish I was holding you this very moment."
         Vincent and I made arrangements. He decided to come to Montreal on a Friday so he could spend the weekend. He was staying at the Chateau Versailles on Sherbrooke Street, and at eleven that morning, we were to meet in front of Subway in the Faubourg.
         It was eight years earlier that Vincent and I met at a coffee shop across the street from Concordia's downtown campus. We'd seen each other over the months in line or at a table when one day, while I was alone sipping mocha cappuccino and reading The Great Gatsby for the umpteenth time, he was suddenly lingering over me.
         "So, are you Daisy?"
         "Oh, God, I hope not."
         "I didn't think so anyway."
         "Why is that?"
         "You seem to exhibit this quiet confidence. A strong will."
         I said, "You a psychic?"
         "Close. An artist."
         A week later I found myself posing in his studio in the artsy Plateau district. The studio was fashionably bohemian: Chinese silk dividers, a futon, and an Indonesian mirror-embroidered bed throw. I'd never been painted before. Sitting motionless on a wooden stool, my head turned toward the window, I felt exposed but strangely free. When he finally put down his paintbrushes, I was this purplish-haired permutation that looked like me, and didn't.
         My mother was none too pleased when she heard what I'd done. "And you just met this guy?"
         "Yes."
         "And you went to his place just like that?"
         "No. We talked for a while."
         "And if he had a nice smile, I'm sure you'd overlook the fact that his name was Jeffrey Dalhmer."
         One thing my mother didn't realize, because she was my mother, was that I wasn't star material. My eyes were brown, same as my hair. My complexion bore a chalky varnish. And yet, even without a single standout physical virtue, I'd been told I was hardly unpleasant to look at. Vincent liked that I was business oriented, a natural when it came to numbers and budgets, stuff that was deeply foreign to him. He was handsome, but naive about it. He was spontaneous and independent, the way a wild horse is spontaneous and independent. It seemed like it turned him on that there was something controlled and unneedy about me.
         And maybe because of our differences, ours was a messy love. We fought a lot, but we made up a lot, too. We'd go weeks where he couldn't keep his hands off me, usually a time when he turned something wonderful from fingertips to canvas. But then we'd go weeks without him so much as initiating a kiss, and this was a time usually when he chucked everything he touched.
         One morning I had woken up remembering a particular dream. How Martians had destroyed the Statue of Liberty and Air Force One, and how they had gathered up all the people in the malls and hooked us up to machines. "And you know what these machines could detect?" I'd said to him. "Happiness. They took this long tube and stuck it down our throats and into our hearts and there they measured our happiness." I thought Vincent would laugh, but he said, "Maybe it's trying to tell you something."
         "Like what?"
         "That you're not really happy with me."
         "That's not true," I answered. But after a while I started to wonder if maybe the dream was trying to tell me something. Then, when the day came that I saw him last, it wasn't with a handshake or a fizzling out of our love but with frustration, and the discovery that he had cheated on me. Which afterwards I understood was an attempt on his part to protect himself from the inevitable course we were on. We had battled clear through that third year, from New Year's to New Year's. We had turned from lovers into strangers, and yet somehow, when it ended, it never felt entirely over.
         As I waited for him to arrive, I thought, Maybe it's foolish to want to step back into your past.
         I also thought, You'd think people would get over their first love, but you'd be surprised.
         He'd driven in from Boston, and I waited half an hour, biting my nails and pacing. Finally, I felt his warm hands slide over my eyes. "Don't say a word." His voice was still smooth and velvety, and it pushed a button, a button I'd forgotten existed. When I turned, it seemed like six years hadn't passed at all, only he was grayer around the temples, his crow's feet a little more deeply etched.
         Vincent was from Montreal, too, but had been driven away by drama in his home life. Among his three brothers and two sisters, he was the only one who didn't have a drinking problem. And his father often took a strap to his backside, even as his mother kept buying belts for father's day. I felt sorry for him.
         I figured that was a part of love, too.
         After lunch, we walked up Crescent Street and sat out on the patio of Thursday's Bar and Grill. We watched the passers-by and Vincent splurged on a bottle of Chateauneuf de pape.
         "Boy, did I miss it here," he said, clinking his glass with mine. "Boston's cosmopolitan and all, but Montreal's got the best of Europe mixed in."
         I waited for him to say the other things he missed, and when it got quiet a minute, I said, "Me, too?"
         "Of course, you, too. That goes without saying."
         We were a bit tipsy when we got out on the street. Feeling it even more as we walked over the hot pavement and through the bustling crowds. We got to the corner of St. Catherine and Crescent, where all the marquee shop lights twinkled.
         And as we waited for the light to change green, he took my cheeks in his hands and pressed his lips hard into mine.

***

         Henri and I called Thursday night "swim night" at the Westmount Y. Before him, I was afraid to stick even my little piggy toe in the water. But with his summery voice, he held me prone in the shallow end while my legs kicked wildly in his arms.
         He'd been on the McGill swim team. So he could throw his body off the diving board into 2 1/2 twists any time he wanted to. Often he tried to coax me onto the board, but I was too chickenshit to even climb the ladder. He wasn't the pressuring kind, just like with our engagement. We'd been together four years, and it took more than two of those before I considered moving in with him.
         Because somewhere in the back of my mind something was stopping me.
         A week after I confessed my secret phone calls to Henri, we went swimming. As we toweled off, I noticed his quietude, and he said nothing until we were in the car at Victoria Avenue waiting for the red light to click green.
         "Are you leaving me?"
         It was pouring out, and the rain was sliding down the windshield like sheets of gooey paint. "I don't know," I said, meekly. "I don't want to."
         "Then don't."
         As I put my keys into our front door, he said, "I just want you to know, Mimi, I'm not a pistols-at-dawn kind of guy."
         "What does that mean?"
         "It means if you want to leave, just leave."
         I knew he didn't mean what he said. Not totally. But I also knew he wasn't a fighter. His philosophy was that people were going to do what they wanted to do, and nothing short of killing them was going to stop them.
         Later, when I came out of the bathroom, he was already in bed with the light off. I stood in the threshold with the light behind my back while I stared straight into the dark in front of me.
         Into the quiet blackness, I said, "Henri, I think I need to go to my parents' for a while."

***

         My mother made up my bed with my old Duran Duran sheets like I was fifteen again. I was lying on my back as she folded my laundry into neat separate stacks by my feet when she said, "Do you know what happened to Jenny Garfinkel?"
         I knew where she was going with this. Every story she told ended up with some tragic yet entirely avoidable set of circumstances because a woman did something foolish rather than something practical. And it was always a friend of a friend, someone I'd never heard of before.
         "I don't know who that is, Mother."
         "Well, she met a guy on the Internet."
         "You mean one of those perfectly safe web sites that millions of singles use for dating purposes?"
         "I don't know. But she met him at a mall and do you know what happened?"
         "Don't tell me. She was murdered. Her limbs were scattered all over the province. In fact, dogs found her and gnawed on her remains."
         "Oh, shhh. They were married five years while he was married to someone else."
         I sat up, more engaged than I wanted to be. "What's that got to do with Vincent?"
         She folded another pair of socks. "I'm just saying don't expect things to always turn out the way you want."
         After she left the room, I felt hot. He's leaving her, I thought. And he's going to leave her whether I'm the one he's leaving her for or not.
         And yet I didn't know this, of course. I only secretly hoped that it was over between Vincent and his "wife," and that I was the one he couldn't stop dreaming about now.
         But my mother had a way of issuing calm motherly advice that in my head sounded like a clanging warning bell. It reminded me of the conversations her sister and she had over a particular young man my mother once fancied. Every so often, in the midst of talking about their younger days, they'd drop in this man's name: Roy Randell. When my mother wasn't around, I asked her sister about him.
         "Ah, your mother's first true love."
         "And?"
         "And they went out for a time, but then he was called off to the war effort, I believe."
         I figured he died over there, and said so.
         "No, my dear. He returned."
         "And?"
         "And what?"
         "Did they start dating again?"
         "Of course not."
         "Why not?"
         "Because, silly, your father had already proposed."

***

         I had only been at my parents' a few weeks when Vincent had an exhibit, his last in Cambridge, the final weekend of June. After that, he was closing up his studio and moving back to Montreal that, in his words, had never left his heart. When he first told me about the exhibit, he said, "Come, get your ass down here." But then as the show grew closer, his answer turned to, "It's up to you."
         I understood that he was turned off by any show of obsessiveness, love or otherwise. He never liked the quality that turned one from independent and confident into amorphous and clingy. He'd told me he'd gotten enough of that from Kathleen. Still, I wanted him to beg me to come see his show, and when I said, "Maybe you're too busy this week," he answered, "Yeah."
         My heart suddenly took me hostage. "Yeah?"
         "Mimi, no, I wasn't talking to you."
         I heard a woman's voice. He cupped the receiver, and I heard some back and forth, then explosive laughter from both of them. I wondered if the other woman was Kathleen. I didn't want to start getting paranoid about the possibility of his saying, "Guess what? I want her back. So sorry." When he returned, I said, "Is everything all right?"
         "No, yeah, it's just hectic here. So, where were we?"
         I said, "I'll come in on Friday."
         That Friday night, Vincent picked me up at Logan Airport. He booked me at a hotel for $95 a night near his studio. Heading down Sturrow Drive, he told me that Kathleen still had a lot of clothes in their closet and that she could return for them any moment. He said, "So I can't let you stay."
         "Vincent, you thought I wanted to stay there?"
         "Oh, sure, of course not."

***

         Not the next night, but the night after, Vincent and I made love in my hotel bed. When he lay on top of me-he let himself down gently, and I closed my eyes to the full warm weight of him-my first thought was, I have to tell Henri.
         Afterwards, as we shared a Kool cigarette with our eyes tracing the shadows across the ceiling, he said, "It's true that Kathleen turned eccentric, but not before we were already on the rocks." Then he sat up and stared at the wall. "It wasn't entirely her fault."
         I didn't know what that meant.
         "Well, she got tired of waiting."
         "Waiting for what?"
         He wouldn't look at me. "For me to marry her."
         A minute later, I sat up, too. I was curious. "Exactly how many relationships have you been in since....me?"
         "I don't know. Thirty."
         I returned to my back. A sharp current ran through my chest. I wanted to hear him say that maybe he hadn't found the right person, but he just sat there, smoking. Then, when I said that maybe he wasn't in love with Kathleen, he said, "Probably."
         He extinguished his cigarette in the ashtray on the night table, then settled his head on my flushed breasts. "You should know that ours was the longest relationship I've ever had."
         I didn't know what else to say except "Thank you."

***

         The next night, Vincent showed off his work at a funky art center in Cambridge. He hated this kind of stuff, told me so privately, and if not for his agent lecturing him on the fact that art can't exist without business, he would have just as well sold his art from the trunk of his car.
         Actually, I didn't mind the atmosphere. Cocktails flowed, juniper burned in tiny bundles on metallic tables, and jazzy music lulled overhead. It was all a new world to me.
         Most of the evening Vincent mingled with art dealers, prospective buying patrons, and friends. Once, he came over to make sure I was okay.
         "As soon as I get rid of all these leeches," he joked quietly, "we'll be together."
         I grabbed a couple of hors d'oeuvres and bummed a fancy cigarette off a leggy blond sitting on one of the cushy sofas. Then I moseyed around by myself looking at his paintings on the dimly lit walls.
         The exhibit was called "Apples." Installations shaped like apples and looked like apples but weren't really apples. They were red and stemmed and two-dimensional-looking while some were metallic bulbs adorned with leaves like those of artichoke hearts. Others looked like photographs that were paintings in acrylic, which reflected, according to Vincent the night he stroked my hair in my hotel bed, the precarious space between familiarity and the unknown, perception versus reality.
         At one point I watched him as he talked about his art to a group of potential purchasers. He was animated, his hands, it seemed, doing most of the talking. There was also a look of intensity in his eyes that made me feel lonely.
         Just then he separated from those people, and saw me standing with his best pal, Mack, who was an industrial sculptor. When Vincent arrived, Mack said, "I was just telling her how much you were looking forward to getting back to Montreal."

***

         Over the next three months, Vincent would usually meet up with me in Montreal, though twice I went down to Boston. There were also the phone calls back and forth. I put 1,500 miles on my Chrysler Neon.
         But more often than not, he had too many things to do. He had to pack, and straighten out his affairs, plus find a new place to live. It didn't matter that I was the manager of an established restaurant downtown and could get time off whenever I wanted.
         So we only had snippets of time, which made me miss him more. In this way, he was the same as ever. When we were alone, it felt exactly like that: two people, the entire world left to themselves. And yet when I was out of sight, it felt as if he forgot that I existed. He knew how to make me miss him, because he had places to be that didn't include me.
         On one of the occasions we were to spend a weekend at a BB in the eastern townships outside Montreal, he had to cancel at the last minute. When he missed his second straight weekend, I went drinking.
         I stopped off at Sir Winston Churchill Pub, and I noticed Henri in the corner by the bathrooms. It had slipped my mind that he might be there. Our hangout.
         Those few months we'd talked sparingly over the phone. When he heard my voice, his always turned suddenly buoyant, as if he didn't want to scare me away in case things fell apart with Vincent. He had spoken to my mother a few times, but she stopped trying to extract information from me when I told her that she was a lousy spy.
         I took one of the stools and ordered peach Schnapps. Henri walked by and said, "I was going anyway."
         I had several more shots, and when the lights flickered at closing, Henri reappeared. "I think that makes a baker's dozen."
         He took my keys, then drove me back to his apartment, where he graciously held my head over the toilet. He slept on the couch, and gave me the bed. Our old bed. The next morning, I stumbled out into the living room where I found him sitting on the loveseat sideways, his legs dangling over the arm. He was in shorts and flip-flops, and holding a knife in one hand. I saw a red apple in the other.
         "Good morning, precious," he said.
         He gave me a concoction to drink. While I slept, he'd rushed out to the convenience store, picked up limejuice and OJ. Back home he mixed in cumin and put it all in a blender and stuck it in the fridge overnight. I forced it down.
         Then I went over to the couch and fell over. The corners of my eyes were gummy with eye cheese, and I began removing it with a pinky.
         The apple skein hung to the floor in a big twirly rind. A minute later, he came over onto the couch and stared at me. I didn't like it. He loved me, but maybe too much. People don't want to be loved too much, I realized then. The responsibility is staggering.
         "You said a lot of things last night," he said.
         I placed my left arm over my eyes to shield them from the harsh morning rays. "What did I say?"
         "You said you didn't think you were you anymore."
         I opened my eyes. Henri was frowning.
         I didn't remember saying it, but it did sound like something I was feeling.
         He held a wedge of apple on the edge of his knife blade before sticking it into his mouth. "But you're right, you know? I mean, maybe that's the point."
         "What is?"
         "Maybe you don't want to be you."

***

         Before Vincent packed up his car to come north, he sold eight of his paintings on the cheap because it was too much hassle to cram them all in. Over the phone, I mentioned how tough it must be to sell something you've worked on for so long.
         "Not really. I was sick of looking at them, anyway."
         I was thinking whether or not I could be an artist, and I realized I couldn't, because I didn't think I could part with anything.
         Vincent got the loft he wanted. It was near the same place he rented way back when I was taking business classes and he was enrolled in Concordia's Art Program. "I want to celebrate when I get up there tonight. Call a hotel."
         "Which one?"
         "I don't care. Just get us the works."
         After I hung up, it occurred to me that he never said he was coming back for me.
         I booked us into a suite at the Sheraton downtown. It came with a Jacuzzi. I wanted to call him back to tell him the name of the hotel, but my fingers ended up dialing Henri's instead. From the very beginning, he and I had had a respectable relationship. There wasn't the high-falutin' gun-slinging shots fired in the air, or palpitations of the heart. But ours was a natural and easy progression. He worked in a plant in the paint lab testing the natural elements like snow and sleet and heat on the new lacquers. I once asked him if he was going to do this for the rest of his life, but he shrugged. "Why do I need something better to come along? I've got pretty much all I want right here with you."
         When he picked up, I didn't hear any of that sweet sentiment. "Where's Vincent?"
         "He's not here."
         I waited for him to ask me if everything was all right. It was true when Henri said he wasn't a pistol's-at-dawn kind of guy. I knew now that there weren't going to be anything like ten paces and revolvers involved. "Henri, I'm confused about what I'm doing."
         I heard something in the background. Maybe the low whir of a blender, or a passing vacuum. Then the noise stopped. "What do you want from me, Mimi?"
         "I don't know." I thought I could meet up with him at the pool. "I'm going swimming soon."
         "Have fun."
         It was Thursday. "You're not going?"
         "No."
         "But you never miss a day."
         "I haven't. I go Wednesdays now." There was a long pause. "Mimi, do you have anything else?"
         "No. I guess not."
         We didn't hang up. Then, before he did, he said, "I wish I could help you."

***

         I went to the pool at seven. It had been two months. In the shallow end, a group of bathing-capped grandmothers were exercising with an aerobics instructor; in the deep end, some teenage boys were horsing around. Also, there was a girl who kept climbing the ladder to the springboard and throwing herself off. She was a gutsy little thing, no more than eight. I watched her as she'd point her toes momentarily over the edge, then dive off into half-pikes and corkscrews. She didn't even look.
         I swam my laps. And as I proceeded from one end of the pool to the other, my head bobbing above and below the water, I didn't think of Vincent or Henri strangely enough but of Roy Randell, the man who was maybe my mother's one true love. A month ago, while she was making spaghetti and clam sauce for my dad and me, I asked her if he ever crossed her mind. She said, No, but I swear her face pinked a little. And I couldn't help feeling, even though this was my mother I was talking about, that she, in the deepest recess of her unsuspecting mind, didn't want Vincent and me to work out.
         Because what would it say about her life then? What would it say about her being with the same man her entire adult life, and perhaps the wrong one?
         It all made me think of Henri.
         There were things I liked about him that I knew Vincent didn't possess and thus were going to drive me crazy. Henri was calm, sometimes to the point of being phlegmatic. And it made me sad that he was thinking of me while I was thinking of someone else.
         There was nothing wrong with Henri.
         To embark upon a life with Vincent was predicated on the acceptance that he was going to give me, with his cool standoffishness and self-serving passion, tremendous heartache. There'd be sobbing, lots of it, and yet there'd be moments of grace. A few at least.
         Or maybe the truth lay in the probability that we weren't going to be together in a year. Perhaps we were headed along a path ineluctably, unswervingly, doomed. One thing I realized: no matter the relationship, someone always wants more than the other.
         I had to meet Vincent in forty-five minutes. So I climbed out of the pool, applied a light foundation on my cheeks, long lash mascara, checked my legs for bumps, blow-dried my hair, brushed teeth, smiled wide in the mirror, got dressed. Then I walked out into the brisk night air and hailed a taxi. When I got in, I said, "To the Sheraton, please."
         We drove along Sherbrooke. The street lamps twinkled in the twilight. In a matter of minutes, I'd be with him. My heart beat arythmically.
         I told the driver to step on it.