081413 #worm She telephoned him from another continent, pretending not to sound as though she was pretending not to be lonely. She had heard a song spilling out of the anonymous speakers in the ceiling of a too-ritzy clothing store whose prices she could never afford anyway, so why was she in there? Probably because a woman who wanted to marry her had dragged her in there, intent on changing Krim's wardrobe, and thence her approach to life and especially relationships. It wouldn't work. It never does, one hopes. But the song moved her to wrap herself in the red and glass embrace of a telephone booth outside on the plaza, and dial a dreamed-up number from a dreamed-up life an ocean away. Ltiky answered: once he had decoded the strange familiar voice, his blood moved a little faster, his breathing became more urgent. Electric whirlybirds took flight in his gut. She said she was coming back across the water when the summer was over. She said she'd done some soul-searching. Pretending to sound as though he was merely pretending he would be able to think, until he saw her again, about anything but the sound of her clunky black shoes clunking up his front porch steps, Ltiky said she should give him a call when she got back. Fifteen, even ten years before, he really would have been able to think, in the interim, if not literally of nothing else, certainly of little else without visions intruding of her mischeivous smile, her scornful arms akimbo. The days and the hours, as he counted them, would have been laced with the narcotic of jealousy--who is she with? Will she keep our appointment? Will she be disappointed in me? Now, however, after the negotiations of time and the brute fact of life's having gone on, the tortuous, old longing needed to be invited, cultivated even, in order to consume him. He didn't have to go to work that day, and he had, as usual, no pressing social engagements, so after they hung up, he invited it.