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up; every bit of it remained embedded in my mind, like frames in a movie. It was somehow comforting, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it was simply because in a way I had gotten to spend more time with Jen, when I no longer expected to.
    I made myself coffee and tried to make some sense out of what had happened. I believed that Jen did, maybe does, exist. She was too real, my memories too vivid, for me to have made her up. I’m simply not that imaginative, nor do I consider myself that crazy. I say this knowing that if someone else told me this exact story, I would dismiss it as looney.
    I did a fairly thorough search of my apartment, which confirmed my fear and expectation that there would be no trace of Jen. I was already realistic enough to doubt that I was going to find her anywhere, except perhaps in my mind, but I simply could not give up looking. I was not yet ready to go on with my life as if Jen had never happened.
    I spent the next three days retracing our steps, talking to people who knew Jen, going to places we went together. I ran into one wall after another, and accomplished nothing other than convincing pretty much everybody that I was a lunatic. The jeweler who sold me Jen’s ring claimed never to have met me, and I had no financial record of my ever having purchased it. Sandy Thomas said that I looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place the face. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
    I was not doing too well.
    Willie’s sister set up an appointment for me with her shrink, Matthew Rawlins, a kindly gentleman who specialized in art therapy. He would have his patients draw pictures, artistic talent didn’t matter, as a way of opening up one’s feelings about the subject and related matters. He had me draw Jen, and I spent about thirty minutes of the forty-five-minute session crying.
    As we approached the end of the session, he said, “You’re in terrible pain.”
    “That’s not exactly a news flash,” I said. “I’ve known that for a while.”
    Dr. Rawlins said that it was the pain that was important, more so than the credibility of the cause. He suggested long-term treatment, it was a hundred and fifty an hour and he supplied the crayons. I told him I’d think it over.
    Lauren, the woman from the sports bar whom Willie and John told me I was dating, called to find out why I had stopped coming around. I apologized, but told her I had met someone else. She hung up on me, which was probably as smart a thing as she had ever done.
    After a few more days, I set up a meeting with Scott Carroll, an editor I’ve worked with at Manhattan magazine, since even a raving, mourning lunatic needs money to live. We met at a small Italian restaurant called Spumoni’s, on Second Avenue and Eighty third Street. Scott’s also a friend, and he and his wife once had dinner at this place with Jen and me.
    I didn’t ask him about Jen, since I dreaded the reaction it would get. Scott is funny, incisive, and brutally honest, and there was a chance he would cut me to ribbons with his comments, once he heard my story. So instead I pitched him ideas for pieces I could write for the magazine, none of which I was really interested in or motivated to write. He didn’t seem terribly impressed either.
    “Don’t take this the wrong way, Richard,” he said, “but why don’t you write about what you’re going through?”
    Since I hadn’t mentioned to him anything about what I was going through, I wasn’t sure what he was saying. “What are you talking about?”
    “I’m talking about this woman you’re looking for, Jennifer?”
    “Did I speak to you about her?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “No, but I’m the only person in America you haven’t.” He leaned forward. “Conservatively speaking, twenty people have told me about it.”
    “So I’ve become the laughingstock of the city?”
    “Why are you limiting it to the city?” he asked, smiling to soften the blow. “Richard, you’re screwed up, okay? Join the