The diner was set up for Halloween, with skeletons dangling from the ceiling. Management had decided to get a jump on Christmas too: fake pine needles and colored lights were taped to the walls. The tackiness of the setting for our meeting pleased me, as did the crowded room; I’d dreaded being alone with Paul. Right away, I thought I saw him; I’d forgotten how waitresses would flirt with him, ignoring me. But I’d been looking at a waitress and a kid who might have been in college. A few minutes later, I watched an old man approach, too short, his gait not at all what I remembered; he used to walk so briskly. He wore an expensive-looking suit that matched his gray, thinning hair. I’d dressed in my ordinary way: jeans, boots, a pony-tail.   

            Paul set a square white box on the center of the table, as if he’d brought dessert, and then he sat down across from me.

            “Please tell me these aren’t her ashes,” I said, which made him smile, not knowing how much it cost me to say the word ashes, still. He glanced at my wedding band. He wore one too, this almost unrecognizable old man with parchment skin.
         
“I realize that it took some effort to hunt me down,” I said, pleasantly. I’d never bothered to update my information in our college alumni directory, and I’d been using my married name by the time the Internet made contacts easier.

            “I always expected to see you, acting.”

            “We’d like coffee,” I told the server, the same girl who’d flirted with the young guy. “And two grilled cheeses with tomato.”

Although Paul seemed anxious, he smiled again. In our old, impoverished days we’d split that sandwich.

            “I teach fourth grade,” I said. “In front of a classroom, I always have the starring role. And I employ my old stage techniques, changing the pitch of my voice if the kids aren’t paying attention. Or I’ll alter the blocking of the scene, moving to another place in the room; my captive audience turns their heads to watch and listen.”

            He asked if I had children of my own.

            “Two daughters, one works at Google in the Pittsburgh offices. The other is in med school at Dartmouth.”

             Paul looked surprised; I assumed that he was doing the math in his head.

“I married not too long after we broke up. I’m a widow.” Let him think that I may have married an older man, when in fact, my kind husband had been our age. Let him understand how quickly I ceased to think of him.

He told me that he also had daughters, and after I asked if he’d show me their pictures, he took out his phone. They were blond, pretty girls. The eleven-year-old, who’d studied the harp since first grade, now played the instrument with a competitive youth symphony. His seventh-grader, the athlete, did water-polo and fencing.

            “My wife is both their chauffeur and manager.”

I thought that I knew her type, assessing which niche instruments or sports might gild a path toward the Ivy League. I could be wrong though, and she wasn’t my concern.

            I watched him, remembering our old passion. After we met in college, we hadn’t liked to be separated. I enrolled in constitutional history; he endured dramaturgy so that we could sit together. We slept on mattresses on dorm room floors. Other couples we knew eventually disintegrated like old newsprint or dried leaves, but not us.

            My daughter Zoey, the one at Google, lives with her boyfriend; they divide the chores. “Didn’t you?” she’d asked, once. There were almost none, very little cooking—mostly the grilled cheese sandwiches and leftovers Paul brought home from the restaurant. We’d spread out a blanket and pretend to picnic, although there was barely enough space for that. Zoey had said, Oh yeah, the East Village world; she’d streamed Rent. Beth, my med student daughter, the age I was when Paul and I sat entangled on our bench, recently left her boyfriend behind for two weeks, so that she could enjoy an all-female camping trip.

            Neither of us picked up our sandwiches when they arrived. I stared at the white box on the table, worried that it contained the heavy, ugly barrettes with which Delphine had pinned up my hair. I said, “You stayed out of touch with everyone we knew.”

“About Delphine, we, she…I grew impatient with how we were living our lives.” He went silent.

            “What are you saying?”

            Paul raised his palms up. He shook his head, and then looked away. “I was an idiot, who lost you.”

            I had no intention of listening any further. I was conscious of the people in the diner watching what they probably assumed to be a middle-aged married couple have a fight. The husband in his pricey suit. The wife springing up from the booth, gathering her jacket, while he pleaded with her to stay.

“There’s more, Melanie. You didn’t know this, but she was…there were drugs,” he said softly. I sat down again; I didn’t ask why he knew this.  What I thought of was how whenever Paul and I were running late—for the start of a movie, or to go out with friends—he’d amuse me by saying let’s make tracks. Now I imagined his arms with track marks on them, and it was difficult to meet his eyes, thinking of Delphine, witch-like in my mind, her fingers claws as she dared to touch Paul, adjusting his head to catch more light, all those years ago in the studio.

“How about opening that box you brought?” I asked at last.

            “First, this.” He removed an envelope from his suit jacket and handed it to me. Inside were more than a dozen photographs of us in Washington Square Park, my feet in his lap, as he stared at me with—anyone would call it adoration. Although our clothes and the seasons changed, we always looked joyful. One might have said she’d been scoping us out for a painting. Or that she’d been stalking us.

I shuffled the photos like a pack of cards. If I wanted to, I could sequence the pictures:  first, the tentative light of early spring, buds like small, curled fists in the trees; the skateboards, the scooters. June, July, August, the sun like a spotlight on the Arch. The “Dylan by Demand” dude shading his eyes as if he were on stage, playfully looking out at a crowded audience, when he was only reacting to the brightness of a summer day. Autumn: acorns rolling on the asphalt, a plaid scarf around Paul’s neck.  

            “For years, I went back there to the park-- as if you’d show up,” he said. I didn’t tell him that at one time my cut-off point in Manhattan was midtown, so as not to be within walking distance of where soot had drifted through the sky in the days after 9/11.

            “You can have the pictures, if you like.”

My daughters would have enjoyed these photographs when they were little girls. They used to ask who was your boyfriend before Dad? What did your favorite boyfriend look like? They had no memory of their father; he’d died when one was a ten-month infant; the other had just turned two. They looked forward to when I dated; if there was a second or third date they’d usually end up with toys. Once, a man who’d been a famous TV talk show host flirted with me when we both were standing in line in the Herald Square Macy’s, buying towels. I failed to recognize him, but other women were mad. Can’t she do some shopping without an asshole like you bothering her? one woman asked. When I heard the celebrity’s name, all I could think about was that I’d read somewhere that he had a summer home on a spit of land that jutted into a cove in Nantucket; I’d imagined myself lying there, sunbathing without responsibilities. I was sometimes more tired from working and mothering than I admitted.   

            Occasionally, I’d take my daughters to sites that commemorated those who died in the Twin Towers; I liked bucolic settings, a stone by a gazebo, a nature reservation in New Jersey where, at one time, the skyscrapers were visible. I’d have the girls run their fingers over his name, although the excursions bored them. Late in their teenage years they changed their attitude, going to the other extreme. They wanted to see memorials throughout the country. We stopped and did this on every vacation, or on trips to visit colleges. My daughters continued the tradition while traveling on their own.

            How I’d loved my daughters! A therapist once suggested that I taught in their school so as not to lose sight of them, which was nonsense; I’d taken pleasure in watching their days unfold.

             Paul opened the box he’d brought with him. “Delphine left me some paintings.”

“Her canvases were always three times the size of this table!”

            It took him a while to unwrap a watercolor in a gold frame. She had painted us on an afternoon that she’d photographed, when both of us were leaning back against the armrest of the bench, our knees pulled up. I remembered that day. The Dylan crooner had hopped up on the other end, saying that he was serenading us in our gondola, which Delphine must have overheard. She had drawn an actual gondola in Central Park, in an impressionist style, slashes of buildings in the background. There were frisbees on the ground in the snapshot, which, on her canvas, she’d turned into lily pads. She’d left our faces white and blank, but anyone, I thought, would assume that we’d been happy.

            “This is beautiful,” I told him.

“I had it appraised.”

I said that I had no wish to hear its value.

“Regardless, the profit is half yours.”

“Does your wife know about us?”

“Everything.”

“About this painting?”

            He stayed quiet. There was no point in him admitting that she wouldn’t want him to share the money.

“There’s a second one, which is yours to keep,” he said. “My assumption is that Delphine worked from other photographs that she took of us.”

            This gift had been bundled in layers of paper too. Her painting: it was of us as we were then, my hair sliding past the edge of the armrest on the bench, his hand closing around my ankle, in his lap. The expression on his handsome young face: gratitude. He loved me; he was grateful to have me. In fact, it was the typical way that Paul had gazed at me, as if he’d kept the pose for all the years that I’d been with him. Delphine had captured the extraordinary smoothness of the bench that we liked, never a splinter, the wood worn to a sheen from decades of use. She’d used extra paint on Paul’s dark, shaggy hair; in bed, I’d press my face to his hair and feel the seasons, the heat of summer days, the cold of December, when carolers from a church down the street gathered on the corner.

            With all my heart, I still wished I’d married Paul. I could have been spared my incredible grief, which more than twenty years later has never truly abated.

            Imagine, imagine, beyond the artist’s eye, because Delphine had painted only Paul and me in the park, not the buskers, skate-boarders, babies in strollers, or students, by now all aged, replaced by replicas.

            “I want the gondola picture,” I told him. I pushed the portrait of us aside on the table, like a used plate. “This one of us means nothing to me now.”

            I reached for my jacket and stood up.

            “Don’t go yet,” he said. But I left the diner with a Delphine Morgant painting of a gondola in the Central Park Reservoir under my arm.

            It seemed to me that those who’d recognize Delphine’s work breathed a rarified air, like mountain climbers. The commuters in crowds by the train station would assume that I bought art from a street vendor.

I had no intention of allowing this picture to be exhibited. I could arrange for a private buyer and set up a trust for my girls; I could tell the truth, that I’d met with Paul, who gave me a painting of some value, left to him by an awful woman, who we’d met in the neighborhood. A trust fund in case you ever need anything when I’m gone, I’d explain to my two highly competent daughters. You’re not going anywhere, you’ll live to a hundred, we’ll see to it, they’d say, or something like that. I did a good job raising them.

A Delphine Morgant, a brilliant canvas, held now in plain sight in my hands. I imagined one person pausing for a better look, then the rush-hour mass of pedestrians rearranging themselves into a long line on the sidewalk to view the work.

What I intended to do, seriously, was bring the painting back to New York on a Sunday, driving down Fifth Avenue toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art, parking when I reached the rows of amateur artists with their tables and stands. Very young couples often hesitated there, trying to decide whether prints or drawings seemed worth a few dollars to decorate their apartments. I’d present the framed gondola for free to one of these couples. I’d say it was an early study. I’d say that in a subsequent rendition, the two blank faces were completed.