Long Story

It's a Long Story

         She spoke before he did, but that wasn’t because she recognised him first. He’d been watching her for several long minutes, trying to decide if it really was her, and if so, what to do about it. He had been about to dismiss her as a convincing lookalike and walk away, when he realised that she was staring right back at him, and then all of a sudden there she is, less than a foot away, saying his name.
          “My God, is that really you?” she asks. “I didn’t recognise you!”
          “I didn’t recognise you either,” he says, half-truthfully. It was the suit that threw him. Last time he saw her – was it three years ago? Yes, because she’s saying that she can’t have changed that much in three years – she was in jeans and a t-shirt, with a string of pearls around her neck and her hair loose. Now she’s all dressed for business, like a smart city lawyer with a briefcase and black leather boots under her perfectly tailored trousers. She’s stopped just short of him, close enough that he could hug her if he wanted to, far enough away that he won’t look awkward if he doesn’t. He notices how perfectly judged the distance is as he asks why she’s there, and he wonders if it’s something she’s practised over the last three years.
          “I have a job interview,” she says. “Well, sort of.”
          “What do you mean?” he asks, just to keep the conversation going so she doesn’t notice that he doesn’t know what to say. She smiles, and he notices that her smile is the same. “It’s a long story,” she says, “but I have a couple of hours before I actually have to be anywhere. Feel like catching up over some coffee?”
         And, because he doesn’t have to be anywhere at all until university starts again in a month’s time, he agrees, and before he knows it they’re in Starbucks with a latte each and the squishy armchairs by the window. She keeps her jacket on, even though it’s hot, and he’s not sure whether to compliment her on how well it fits or to ask her why she’s still wearing it, so he settles for drinking his too-hot coffee and burning his tongue. She smiles again the way he remembers, without speaking, and then after a moment she seems to realise she’s still wearing the jacket and she takes it off, folding it neatly over the arm of her chair. “Hangback from boarding school,” she explains. “I could never find blouses that fit so I got into the habit of just wearing the jacket all the time. A well-cut jacket can cover a multitude of sins!” He stops himself just short of telling her he never thought she had that kind of sin to cover, and settles for saying something nice about her shirt.
          “Thanks,” she says, straightening it self-consciously. “I made it myself.”
         Three years ago he told her how he once wanted to go into fashion. He never made anything himself, though, and now he’s a classicist.
          “So, tell me your long story,” he says. “I thought you were in America,” he adds a second later, remembering that detail though he doesn’t know how.
          “Oh, I was,” she says lightly, raising her eyebrows. He wonders if she’s plucked them: they were always good, but now they look almost tailored, like her suit. Either way, it’s something that’s changed slightly, and he knows there are other things too but he can’t put a finger on them. As he tries to work out what they are she’s continuing to talk, and he has to concentrate to focus on what she’s saying.
          “I’m taking a year out for film school, and that doesn’t start for another couple of months, so I’m trying to make some money to pay for it in the meantime. I’ve got about six job interviews this afternoon, and then an audition in the evening. That’s what the suit’s all about; normally I’m not so well co-ordinated.”
         That’s not what he remembers, but after three years the details aren’t so sharp: just a haze of autumnal colours blending so perfectly against her honey-toned skin that he had to compliment her on it, trite as it sounded at the time. But back then he wouldn’t have imagined the suit, and now she wears it like she was born in it. There’s a softness he remembers that’s no longer there in the sharp creases and well-turned lapels, in the red pinstripes too thin to see unless you’re right up close. Then again, maybe it’s just the haze of old memory softening the edges.
          “Audition for what?” he asks, hoping he’s been paying enough attention.
          “A play,” she says, and like the symptoms of a terminal disease the memories come back again, of that play and the last time he was on a stage. He only had one line and he mucked it up once, but that was before she came to see it, later in the week when it was perfect. He’d had to work hard at not seeing her in the audience; doubly hard because she saw the play twice. It had done great things for his acting; everyone said he brought some much-needed intensity to the scene.
         He sips his coffee while she talks about the play. It sounds wildly ambitious, but he’s not surprised. He remembers the way she talked about going into film last time, how pragmatic she was and how she made it sound so simple, and so possible. It wasn’t until hours afterwards that he realised it wasn’t as easy as all that, and she’d probably fail and end up with a desk job like so many other people did. But he didn’t tell her, because she didn’t seem to consider failure a possibility. Or perhaps she did, but had decided in that odd way of hers that it just wouldn’t happen to her.
         That’s how she is today as she talks about her plans. She wants the part in the play, but she’s got the interviews lined up just in case. She’s worked through contacts, gone through channels, sent off letters and application forms and CVs…he finds there’s something almost ruthless about the way she describes her organisation. Hardly the last-minute rush of the last time they met, though she admitted then that she normally likes to plan further in advance. But the cold hard pragmatism is the same; it was always there, but it’s matured like she has, from the breathless blue-eyed girl of not-quite-eighteen to the young woman in the pinstriped suit.
         Her eyes are still just as blue, though. Bluer, almost. He didn’t get a good look at them last time, though in retrospect that seems odd. But all the same, he’s sure the colour is more intense. As she lowers her eyes to take another sip of her latte, he notices suddenly that they’re subtly made up: there’s a touch of eyeliner and a dusting of gold on her eyelids. He wouldn’t have noticed except that the yellow light inside sparkles off her eyeshadow, but he realises that that’s what makes her eyes seem more blue. Now that he’s noticing these things he spots the lipstick defining her lips and the mascara darkening her lashes. It’s so subtle he wouldn’t have seen it if not for that brief shimmer on her eyelids, but it makes such a difference. It makes her appearance so careful, sharp as the seams in her suit. It’s something else that has changed: she never wore makeup before.
         There’s something different, too, about the angle of her cheekbones and the line of her jaw. Both are sharper, better defined somehow. Her earrings, delicate drop pearls on slender gold threads, cast shadows on her neck, bringing out her jaw even more; the earrings match her necklace, which, he realises with a momentary shock, is the same string of pearls she was wearing three years ago. It twists his stomach slightly to realise that he can still remember the smooth round shape of the pearls under his fingers, and the thin hard nylon string that made them seem to float gently in the hollow of her collarbones. He tries to suppress the memory, knowing he must be blushing and aware that he’s completely lost the thread of the conversation, but now he’s remembering the sweep of her hair and the way it felt across his hand as the wind brushed it back to tumble almost to her waist. He remembers telling her it was a “glorious shade of red”.
         It still is glorious, maybe even more than it was. He knows she must have dyed it several more times in the last three years, and she must have found something that really worked in that time because even coiled up at the back of her head it shines in the yellow light like burnished copper. He’s not used to seeing it up like that, so carefully arranged, thin wispy curls falling perfectly judged around her face to bring out the shadows beneath her cheekbones and ears. It’s a plain style, just swept back and pinned in place with no kinks and no stray ends. Simplex munditiis, he thinks – “simple in its elegance” – remembering a line from a Latin poem he once had to study, about another redhaired girl. Pulled back so maturely, he can’t tell if it’s still long, so he asks her.
          “Past my hips now,” she says, reaching up to touch it. He smiles unconsciously, not quite believing it, and she reads the smile correctly and pulls it loose before he can protest, so that it tumbles down in a thick red cascade that spills over the arm of the chair and piles into her lap. She stands up to demonstrate; “See?” she says, tossing her head so that it ripples and gleams in the light, and he does see; for a moment he sees hardly anything but the mass of soft auburn silk that gleams dully in the light. She sits again, her hair piling back into her lap, and he toys with the idea of telling her that he preferred it shorter, but decides against. It’s the only thing he’s seen of her appearance so far that hasn’t been perfectly calculated, and while it did look better when it only reached her waist, there’s something comforting about the sight of the little girl who hasn’t quite disappeared yet behind the young woman, still playing princess with her hip-length hair.
         She’s still talking about herself, though it seems she can say a lot without sounding self-centred. Harvard has been good to her, by the sound of it. The last piece of the jigsaw clicks into place as he thinks that: she sounds different too. Of course, with two years in America and the way she picks up accents, he should have expected that her voice would change, but it’s not just the slight American accent he can hear clearly now. Her roommate and best friend is Romanian, she explains as though reading his mind, and now he understands the peculiar resonance that wasn’t there three years before as he slots the Eastern European lilt into place.
          “And of course,” she says, “I’m now an alto. I mean, I have been for a few years now, but I’ve been in denial. I’ve only just recently stopped pretending to be a soprano and admitted that the fact of being able to hit a bottom F without straining is probably meant to tell me something.”
         They argued about music the last time they spoke, a month or so after seeing each other for the last time. He accused her of being pretentious, and she got angry for a moment – which was what he wanted – but then she admitted that she was pretentious and proved to him in the same breath that he’d got it all wrong anyway, which left her with both the moral high ground and the satisfaction of being right, and left him feeling more stupid and annoyed than he had when he’d tried to provoke her in the first place. She was always the sort to hate being wrong, but rather than being pig-headed, she got around it by being right almost all the time. To look at her now, he expects the “almost” has become pretty much redundant.
         She’s finished her coffee now, and she looks at the smart gold watch on her wrist. Still plenty of time, he knows; he sneaked a look at his own watch a little earlier, just wondering how much time had passed. Almost an hour since they sat down; where has the time gone? She excuses herself and heads in the direction of the toilets, her long hair rippling behind her; and he is left on his own for a few minutes.
         He has been dreading these few minutes. At least while she was talking he could concentrate on her words; while she was sitting there in front of him he could concentrate on her, but now she’s gone and there’s nothing except the empty space where she used to be, and the empty space fills with three years ago. She’s there, in the white skirt and black corset she wore to the party at the end of the summerschool where they met, and he’s there too, helping her back to her boarding house because she’s injured her foot and can’t walk properly, and she’s slightly drunk as well. She was so slight, the curve of her waist defined by the corset and warm under his supporting hand, just short enough that her shoulder fit under his as she leaned against him to stay upright. He’d thought it since the party the week before, when she wore that stunning Chinese dress and kept disappearing every five minutes, looking pale so that her lips and eyes stood out in vivid colour. She apologised each time she came back and didn’t offer an explanation, and a few minutes later she’d turn pale and leave again. He still doesn’t know why she disappeared so often, but she’s never offered to tell him. Yes, he’d thought it since then and he confirmed it as he helped her walk back to the boarding house – there was something about her he liked.
         He didn’t make a move then, didn’t allow himself more than a hand on her waist as he helped her walk, reminded himself he had a girlfriend and went back to his own boarding house admiring his own self restraint. And then the next day when it was time to leave he said his farewells as though he’d never see her again, and he saw the confusion cross her face like the faintest of shadows. She caught the subtext he wasn’t trying to hide, but stubbornly pretended she didn’t and insisted she’d stay in touch, and then she was gone, her white summer dress swirling around her knees as she limped away.
         He almost wishes now he’d found some way not to reply to her emails, or to avoid chatting to her online when she discovered he had MSN; he almost did. The first few conversations were brief, just a hello and how are you, and she had a photograph of herself that came up when she signed on and he had to struggle not to look at it. She’d edited it so that the whole thing was blue, and the contrast high so that one half of her face was almost black in shadow and her eyes were great dark orbs that stared back out at him. It was a haunting picture, and it reminded him of her not just because it showed her face.
         Now he can’t remember whose fault it is he got more involved. Perhaps it was hers, because she changed her screenname to something that was so obviously asking for an enquiry (“Males of the species, approach with caution: I am *not* a happy bunny”); then again, perhaps it was his, because he took the bait and enquired. She was angry, it transpired, because she wanted a boyfriend and all the men in her life were acting like idiots. Why, she asked him, did no one like her “like that”? Was it because she was unaccomplished or unattractive? No, he answered before he’d had time to think about how to phrase it; she was extremely pretty and full of talents. She blushed – or, at least, she typed that she did and he imagined it to be true – and after a few more minutes of talking about her love life and making jokes that were only funny if you forced them to be, she signed off, and he was left staring at her photograph for another ten minutes until his girlfriend came in and reminded him that they were leaving for the cinema soon.
         And then he invited to Edinburgh to see the play, and even after she’d accepted and sorted out her travel and accommodation he wasn’t sure if he’d been joking. He wanted to catch up in person, knew it would be refreshing to see a friend other than the rest of the cast, enjoyed the thought of seeing a familiar face in the audience. But there was more than that, and he wasn’t prepared to ask himself what it was or even admit that it was there yet. But the plans progressed and she seemed excited, and then one evening when he’d already been in Edinburgh for a few days and was getting sick of the rest of the cast, he called her and they chatted for far too long, with the kind of ease that left him feeling guilty when he had to hang up and go to a rehearsal, and made it hard for him to sleep that night for thinking of her.
         He still hadn’t worked out what he expected when she called to say she’d arrived, and they arranged to meet and see a play once she’d checked in at the youth hostel. They went out for dinner afterwards at an Italian place, where the service was bad but the food good, and they talked politics and caught up. He realised as they ate that he hadn’t got a good look at her in the light before; at summerschool it had all been the haze of dark evenings and the dim lights of the parties in the bar. That was the first time he noticed that smile that hadn’t changed in three years. He escorted her back to the youth hostel and insisted on paying for the taxi, and he hugged her before he left. As he rode back to the flat where he was staying with the rest of the cast he wondered why he’d done it, and couldn’t find an answer except that it felt nice to put his hand on her waist again, and feel her shoulder fitting snugly just beneath his.
         It was on his mind when they met the next morning, and while they were watching plays and handing out flyers, and while he was trying not to notice her in the audience when he performed just after lunch. It was on his mind when they sat next to each other in the small theatre in the afternoon to watch the strange one-man play about the Irish hit-man, and when she shifted position so that her arm was touching his and she didn’t move away. She’d taken off her jacket so that her arms were bare, and he thought he could feel the touch of her skin through the thin cotton of his shirt. He wanted to take her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders, but for some reason he wasn’t sure how, so he just let her sit like that, enjoying the warmth of her arm through his shirt.
         They went for coffee after the play, to a Starbucks similar to the one they are in now. They even took the same squishy armchairs by the window. They talked more, about the relative merits of comic book movies, and he remembers smiling a lot, which is unusual for him, and even laughing sometimes, which is even more unusual. He mentioned that when he’d called her it had been from the self-same chair in the self-same Starbucks, and almost kicked himself for being nostalgic, knowing it was a sign of danger. From the way she smiled, almost coy, and the girlish flutter to her long eyelashes, he was sure she was beginning to see what he was thinking; it should have worried him, but he found he didn’t care. She took off her jacket – ivory silk from China, he recalls in a sudden flash of detail – and stretched, her ribs momentarily defined against her tight t-shirt. It suited her so well, both in colour and cut, that before he gave himself time to think (she made him do that somehow) he murmured, “So much taste,” and had to backtrack and make up an actual observation about her clothes when she pretended not to have heard.
         He kept on doing that, giving compliments that were what he thought but didn’t mean to say, enjoying her smile as she didn’t try to field them with false modesty but took them in her stride and walked a little taller, looked a little more beautiful. Because he did think she was beautiful, he finally admitted to himself. It wasn’t that she was hot or sexy or cute in the conventional sense; he just genuinely thought she was beautiful. For her smile, for her blue eyes, for her honey-coloured skin, for the way she dared to have long hair and wear it loose and the way her colours all matched so perfectly. As he took her out of Starbucks and into the fast-falling night, he looked at the way her red hair matched the red of the sunset and wished she were a picture and not a person, so he could keep her without feeling guilty or unsure.
         They walked side by side as darkness fell, finding a park that was shut for the night and feeling joyously rebellious when they ducked under the fence and walked out onto the grass. They went downhill into the little valley in the middle of the city, until the urban lights were all above them and the sounds of traffic and the crowds of people were muffled and distant. There was a bench, and they sat there for a while side by side, not quite touching and not quite looking at each other.
         He said he was cold to explain why he put his arm around her, and she accepted the explanation even though she must have known it to be a lie and rested her head on his shoulder. He felt the warmth of her arm against his ribs and the curve of her waist under his hand, less defined without the light boning of the corset, but softer and moving gently with her breathing. He could smell her hair, which he knew she’d washed that day – it had been wet when she’d met him in the morning – and it was a sweet, slightly spicy smell that suited her. He breathed in the scent of it, and he knew he wanted to kiss her.
         With any other girl, he thinks now as he looks back on it, it would have just happened, like in a movie where their eyes meet and then suddenly they’re fastened at the lips. He even knew some moves, some gentle nudges in the right direction, and he tried them, taking her hands, moving closer so his cheek touched hers and she could feel his breath on her face. But she’s not any other girl; nor was she then, and that was why he wanted to kiss her and what made it so hard. He asked her what she was thinking, and she proved she was more wise to his ways than she pretended to be by admitting she knew where they were headed and then, because he was afraid if nothing happened that he’d admit he thought he might be in love with her, he asked her if he could kiss her.
         She could have said yes or no and had done with it, and later they might have argued or laughed about it and said nothing more thereafter. But he should have remembered how she prided herself on her integrity, how she talked about principles as though they were a disease but was proud to have them, and how she’d said before that she’d never been kissed. In the moment that she hesitated he realised he’d been wrong; while she murmured the quickest explanation of her hesitation that she could he understood that she wanted more than he could ever give her, and he played for time by murmuring back something comforting and nonsensical while he felt guilty for not thinking further ahead, for not wanting more than to feel her lips on his.
         They were both at fault in the end, he thinks miserably as the details file back into his memory, one by one like a parody of Noah’s ark. He’d taken things too far and knew it, but she was the one who turned to him, the moonlight reflecting off her eyes with a come-hither gleam; she didn’t move or turn away or disentangle her fingers from his, and when he leaned in and kissed her anyway, she didn’t argue but kissed him right back. He kissed her passionately, all the more so for knowing it was a mistake, running his fingers through the lustre of her hair while his other hand slipped down to her waist and held her close to him. He could feel her tense violently at his touch, but he could also feel her fighting the tension and trying to relax, and she twined her arms around him and pressed close for warmth, shivering in the chilly night air. He was desperately afraid that he loved her, and he tried even harder to lose himself in the feel and the smell of her so that he didn’t have to think about how he was bound to hurt both of them in the end.
         She didn’t ask anything of him, not that evening or ever. She acted like his girlfriend all the rest of that night and the next day, but she never pressed herself on him or asked any questions he didn’t want to answer. She let him lead, so naively trusting that when he took her hand or kissed her again it was for her, not to push his guilty conscience into a corner and avoid thinking about love or the long term. At two in the morning, when they stood in the taxi rank with the rest of the cast and he wanted to hit them for not being where they said they’d be and leading him on a wild goose chase all over Edinburgh, he put his arm around her and they listened to Iris on his iPod, and after a while he kissed her again and he saw in her eyes that she could tell he was angry and wanted to make it better. He kissed her to forget about that, too.
         He left it as long as he could before he tried to end it, almost to the moment she had to leave to catch her bus home. Then he teased her along with excuses and half-truths, not quite lying about the girlfriend he’d never told her he had. He could tell she wasn’t satisfied, but she never asked any questions he didn’t want to answer, and he didn’t offer more information than he had to because he was still afraid he was in love with her. Then, when she left, he resolved to forget all about it. For a few months she tried to keep in touch over MSN, even though she must have known that he wasn’t going to ask her out properly. He kept the conversations short, protesting work and occasionally trying cheap shots to anger her and make her leave with a grudge, like the argument about music. Those always ended with him feeling like an idiot, though, and she never got angry enough to give up. She always argued, gently if she could, and she always ended up right; sometimes he even wondered if she enjoyed it.
         He is remembering how the conversations finally petered into a three-year silence, in which he often thought of her and broke up with four girlfriends in quick succession, when she comes back from the toilets. The elegant sweep of her pinned-up hair tells him why she took so long; by the look of things, she’s touched up her makeup as well. She sits and smiles and fiddles with the handle of her empty coffee cup.
          “So,” he blurts, controlling himself just in time that it doesn’t sound too much like a blurt, “have you met any nice American boys?”
         She laughs wryly, examining her fingernails in a curiously feminine gesture. “Plenty,” she says with a light tone. “I even went out with one of them for a little while.” He feels a stab of disappointment, though he doesn’t know why. “We never got past the hand-holding stage, though. No, I have the same old problems as ever. I get lesbians falling for me right, left and centre, but guys just don’t seem to like me that way.”
          “I’m sure they do,” he protests, fighting hard to keep the colour from rising to his face. “If you’re anything like you were three years ago you could have any guy you want.”
          “You’re still an unconscionable flatterer,” she says, her words sounding coy even though he’s sure that coyness isn’t part of her nature.
          “No, I’m not,” he says, regretting it almost instantly; the words he’s thinking, that she could have him again in a second, hang unspoken in the air like misty breath on a cold day, despite the warmth inside. The slight arch of her eyebrows tells him that she caught the subtext, and she doesn’t try to hide that she understood. “Thanks,” she says simply, and leaves it at that. He feels the colour bleed into his cheeks again, and remembers that she never used to make him blush. Three years back there was something younger about her, a spontaneity that meant he could pretend he was the one in the driver’s seat; now that’s gone and he feels smaller in front of her, even though he’s still the taller by almost six inches. He imagines that spontaneity now, transmuted just the way she is, into something sharper at the edges and more ruthless. He pictures her taking a sudden decision, her eyes alight with the same fire they had at summerschool when she did the concert and the play; he imagines getting in the way of that fire and being burned by it.
         She’s a creature of blades and of cold fire now, he thinks as she looks at her watch again, surprising himself with the metaphor. Like a goddess, an Indian devi with six arms who dances on a lotus flower. He has to make an effort to keep from screwing up his face in disgust at the image, which he knows he’s taken too far now (she’s still human, after all); all the same, he can’t help but run with it, because like a man in the presence of a goddess he worships he knows that she is out of his league no matter how much he loves her still, and she frightens him with that.
          “I need to make a move,” she says, picking up her jacket and brushing away an invisible crease before she puts it on again. “I have an interview in twenty-odd minutes and I want to get there early if I can. I’ve got some papers I need to go over.”
         She stands, the movement just as businesslike as her comment about going over papers, and picks up her briefcase. “Will you walk down the road with me?” she asks, offering him her hand.
         He takes it and stands hurriedly, the part of him that insists on being a gentleman annoyed at his lapse; he should have been the one offering her his hand. But he would have been afraid she might take it, and perhaps afraid she might not, and in the end he’s glad she was the one who made the move, formal and chaste as it is anyway. They leave Starbucks, she ducking under a low beam on their way out in a way that makes his stomach clench because he remembers her doing exactly the same thing in Edinburgh, with the same quick, elegant twist to her narrow waist as she slips around a chair. She obviously remembers too, because she shows her teeth in a smile and says, “I always take the difficult way out, don’t I?”
         Not like me, he thinks as they make their way down the stairs and out onto the street. I take the easy exit and disappear for years – alright, so the metaphor’s tenuous, but it’s true nonetheless.
         They walk together a while, conversing in fits and starts, she seeming so comfortable when silence falls while he has to concentrate hard to stop his mind racing. After a while he’s not sure where they are, though she seems to know what she’s doing; the streets of London all look the same to him after two years in Cambridge. The area is high-rise, a maze of buildings that tower upwards and look like they employ well and pay better. Three years ago he’d never have seen her in a place like this, sure it must embody everything about the working world she hates, but now the suit and the briefcase and the red hair pinned back so smartly make her a part of the scenery. He hasn’t asked her what job she’s interviewing for, but he can guess the type from the look of the revolving door in front of which she stops and turns to him, telling him that this is her stop.
          “It’s been nice to see you again,” she says with finality in her voice and a smile on her face, and she puts her hand on his arm unexpectedly, making his heart leap into his throat and stay there, fluttering. “Maybe this time you’ll stay in touch,” she adds pointedly. “My e-mail address is still the same.”
         It is all he can do to nod and say lightly that he’ll try; he wants to kiss her again, to turn the clock back three years and tell her he’s fallen in love with her, to take back the lies he didn’t tell and let out the truths he so carefully omitted. But she’s already turned to go, and he catches her hand as she starts towards the door and lets it slip just as quickly, her fingers brushing his palm and leaving a tingling that won’t go away. There’s a tightness in his chest as he watches her go, and at the very last minute, because he just can’t stop himself, he says her name – not the nickname he knows she prefers, but her full name. She stops, turns slowly, walks back and looks up at him.
          “The last time anyone used my full name,” she says, “the next words out of his mouth were to ask if he could kiss me. Do you remember that?”
          “Yes.”
         She smiles, lowering her eyes so that her eyelids shimmer, and he finally realises that her smile is not the same any more. Just like the rest of her, it’s changed, and become something he can no longer touch.
          “I want to be swept off my feet,” she reminds him gently, looking straight at him again. “Three years ago you almost managed it, but now…you don’t get two shots at that kind of thing.”
         She stands on tiptoes and kisses him on the cheek, and with a smile that sparkles cold and hard as diamonds she turns and leaves him where he stands.
         What he doesn’t say as he watches her go through the revolving door, the weak city sunlight turning her hair to liquid fire, is that she ceased being the sort of woman who could be swept off her feet a long time ago.