Epilogue by Anne Roiphe Page A

yet. My lack of a traveling companion keeps me homebound, boringly homebound.
    Of course we went places. Best of all we went fishing in Alaska for fifty-pound salmon. H. would stare at the water willing the fish to take his lure. I would admire the puffins passing by. I shivered in the cold spray but the waiting was rewarded, the waiting itself on the gray sea, with the distant mountains, with the bear at the shoreline, with the dive of the dolphins at the boat’s side, was a memory I treasured. I also have a small stone with a fossil embedded in its center, it’s of a tiny fish, clearly a fish, now stained

    orange. The stone sits by my computer. I don’t want to talk about my past trips. I suspect that I have washed ashore and will so remain.
    This is not necessary. I could f ind a friend to travel with me. I could go alone. But I can’t, not yet. This conversation about f lights and exotic places—one couple has been to Bangladesh and another has met with the chief justice of South Africa—lasts and lasts, through the f irst course, into the second. I could change the subject but I don’t have the will. Also I am not sure it is fair of me to shift the subject when everyone else is enjoying the conversation. I am silent, which is rare. Then as I push the food about my plate, appetite gone, it comes to me, perhaps I don’t belong at this dinner anymore. Perhaps the coupled life of everyone else shuts me out in a way that I had not anticipated. This does not mean that I must lose my friends. It means that I need new friends who are not coupled, who have no trips planned. I see an advertisement on television for a cruise on a large white boat, a hotel with many stories that f loats across a brilliant blue sea. I see an orchestra, waiters bearing champagne on silver trays. A couple dances in the moonlight on the deck. She wears a pink chiffon dress and a wedding ring. If there are sharks swimming in that sea they are not caught in the camera lens. Where do widows go to pass the time? If only there were a camp for us like the camps for the overweight kids advertised in the back of the New York Times Magazine . I could start a camp, cabins in the woods of Maine for singles over a certain age.

    • • •

    V. calls again. He has waited a few weeks. I almost forgot him. He tells me he has been busy writing papers for his courses at his local university. We agree to meet on the next Saturday and go to the Metropolitan Museum after lunch. This is my favorite kind of Saturday. I think about the Universalist Church. I prefer a fiercer kind of religion if one is going to have a religion at all. I like a thundering Jehovah and can even understand a bleeding Christ, but a church that is nice and understanding and modern seems like a hospital lobby to me, an anteroom to the real story. At lunch he tells me about his family. He grew up on a poor farm in Nebraska. His mother had only a wood-burning stove until he was fourteen. He worked on the farm every day before he went to school. He went on scholarship to a liberal arts college in California and from there to graduate school to become a professor of history but at the time positions in academia were scarce and so he went into business instead. I think of him on the farm. This is the farm of my childhood imagination where Indians circled and good men and women worked with their hands to make a living from the earth while fighting off drought and locusts and the foreclosing bank and the storms that came each year. In my urban mind this farm was America, a real America. I could love a man who came from such a place, maybe.
    H. came from Brooklyn and his parents were immigrants who worked in a cigar factory and spoke Yiddish and had escaped the czar’s edicts. I understood that. I knew that world. V.’s farm was a mystery, an alien mystery. This was becoming interesting. He asks me if I like hiking. I do but have not done a lot of formal walking around in the woods, not since my