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boomerang of erotic attachment). Presumably by taking action rather than just dreaming of it, I had got rid of myself in the process.
    I'd brought something to read, just as I used to do when I ate at Pierluigi's by myself. Living alone, I'd become habituated to reading with my meals, but on this night I set the paper down on the table and instead looked around at those eating their dinner in New York City on the evening of October 28, 2004. One of city life's notable satisfactions: strangers fostering the chimera of human accord by eating together in a good little restaurant. And I was one among them. Late in the day to find so commonplace an experience momentous, but I did.
    Only with my coffee did I open the paper, the current issue of
The New York Review of Books.
I hadn't seen a copy since leaving New York. I hadn't wanted to see one, though I'd been a subscriber since the paper's inauguration in the early sixties and, in its first years, an occasional contributor. In passing a newsstand on the way to Pierluigi's I had caught a glimpse of the top of the front page, where above a set of David Levine caricatures of the presidential candidates there was printed an unfurled banner on which yellow lettering announced "Special Election Issue"—and beneath that, above a list of some dozen contributors, the words "The Election and America's Future"—and I had paid the newsdealer four dollars and fifty cents and carried the paper off with me to the restaurant. But now I was sorry I'd bought it, and even when curiosity got the best of me, instead of starting with the table of contents and the opening pages of the election symposium, I began my reimmersion by tiptoeing in at the back, reading the classified advertisements. "beautiful photographer/art educator, loving mother..." "complex, thoughtful, desirous and desirable woman, legally married..." "energetic, fun-loving, fit, established man of many interests..." "green-eyed, funny, kooky, curvaceous..." I skipped to "Real Estate," and in the brief "Rentals" column—above the much longer "International Rentals" column, where the residences available were mainly in Paris and London—I came upon an ad so pointedly addressed to me that I felt myself being urged on, as though with a whip, by chance, sheer chance that seemed brimming with intention.
RELIABLE writing couple in early thirties wishes to swap homey, book-lined 3-room Upper West Side apartment for quiet rural retreat one hundred miles from New York. New England preferred. Immediate exchange, ideally for one year...
    Without waiting—as precipitously as I had gone ahead with the collagen injection I'd intended to think about back home before committing myself to having it, as precipitously as I'd bought
The New York Review—I
went down the stairway alongside the kitchen to where I remembered a pay phone hung on the wall across from the men's room. I'd copied the phone number onto a piece of scrap paper on which I'd written the name "Amy Bellette." Quickly I dialed and told the man who answered that I was responding to his ad to exchange residences for a year. I owned a small house in rural western Massachusetts, located on a dirt road atop a mountain and across from a large marshy swamp that was a bird and wildlife refuge. New York was a hundred and twenty-eight miles away, my nearest neighbors were half a mile away, and it was eight miles down the mountain to a college town where you could find a supermarket, a bookstore, a wine shop, a good campus library, and a convivial bar with edible food. If that sounded like what he had in mind, I'd be interested in stopping by, I said, and seeing the apartment and discussing a swap. I was only blocks away from the Upper West Side; if it wasn't an inconvenience I could be there in minutes.
    The man laughed. "You sound like you want to move in tonight."
    "If you'll move out tonight," I told him, and I meant it.
    Before returning to my table, I stopped off in the