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himself with the thought that not telling him her name could only be a way of protecting herself from future embarrassment. At least she was planning for a future. The important issue was not her relations with a forty-eight-year-old stranger, but her determination to go on at all. That was all he asked: that she not end it, the way Nancy had. He had been what? Fifteen when she had died, and Nancy had been twenty-one. She would have been in her fifties now, probably a mother with kids as old as this girl.
    He saw an empty space on the street less than a block from La Cucina, so he decided he had better take it. He pulled in and walked. They certainly weren’t sexually incompatible, he thought. That had been another possible obstacle that she had not given time to develop. But he had to admit that he was congratulating himself on nothing: the one thing that even the most monstrously mismatched pairs seemed perfectly capable of doing was having sex. It was only afterthey’d had enough time to talk and get to know each other that they wondered what they were doing together. Then he was at the deceptively plain front entrance, just a varnished wooden door with
La Cucina
over the lintel and a few windows with white curtains. He pushed his cogitations about the girl’s intentions out of his mind so he could concentrate on feeding her.
    Mallon stepped inside, sat at the bar, and picked out five different dinners. He knew nothing about the girl’s tastes. He did know that all women ate salads and were more likely to want seafood than meat, and the fresh, clear memory of this one’s body told him she watched her weight. Some people were allergic to shellfish, so he got some fish and chicken too, but then decided she might even be a strict vegetarian, so he got some pastas, stuffed and unstuffed. He stopped at a liquor store on Carrillo Street to buy both red wine and white. He reflected that it would have been best to take her to La Cucina, where there were happy people and a pretty garden, lights and music. But he knew that it would have been impossible to win the struggle about her clothes.
    Mallon came to the front of the house, carrying two of the big white bags full of boxes and the brown paper bag with the wine bottles, and knew instantly that he had been wrong to go to the restaurant. The door had been opened and then pushed shut carelessly, so the latch had not caught. He pushed the door open with his foot, walked into the kitchen, and set the bags down. He called, “Are you here?” He saw the empty water bottle on the counter. He listened, but there was no sound. He walked up the stairs and looked past the open bedroom door. She had hastily and clumsily straightened the bed before she had left.
    He hurried outside, got back into the car, and drove around the neighborhood in ever-widening rectangles. After twenty minutes, he drove back to the house to see if she had returned. He went upstairs, then back down to the kitchen to put the food into the refrigerator, moved to the living room, sat on the stairway, and looked out the frontwindow, waiting for her. After a few minutes, he felt the panicky worry coming back, so he left the door unlocked, went out, and drove along the ocean. He went out to the cliffs where he had found her, surveyed the beach until it was too dark to see, then drove home the way they had walked together.
    When he got home, he turned on the porch light and the desk lamp, climbed the stairs again, went to his bedroom, lay on his bed, and closed his eyes. The physical strain of saving her and the mental stress of negotiating with her afterward, then making love to her and being abandoned so quickly had left him feeling drained of energy. He had not been this tired in years. If she had just gone out for a walk and wanted to return, he would hear her come in. The door was unlocked.
    He slept for three hours, awoke, turned on all of the lights, and examined the house and yard, but saw no sign that she had