Yet time had given us a common reference and respect. We talked as old friends, and quickly discovered we were both grandparents.
“Do you remember this?” She handed me a slip of worn paper. It was a poem I’d written her while still in school. I examined the crude meter and pallid rhymes. Watching my face, she snatched the poem from me and returned it to her purse, as though fearful I was going to destroy it.
I told her about the snapshot, how I’d carried it all through the war.
“It wouldn’t have worked out, you know,” she said.
“How can you be sure?” I countered. “Ah, Colleen, it might have been grand indeed - my Irish conscience and your Jewish guilt!”
Our laughter startled people at a nearby table. During the time left to us, out glances were furtive, oblique. I think that what we saw in each other repudiated what we’d once been to ourselves, we immortals.
Before I put her into a taxi, she turned to me. “I just wanted to see you once more. To tell you something.” Her eyes met mine. “I wanted to thank you for having loved me as you did.” We kissed, and she left.
From a store window my reflection stared back at me, an aging man with gray hair stirred by an evening breeze. I decided to walk home. Her kiss still burned on my lips. I felt faint, and sat on a park bench. All around me the grass and trees were shining in the surreal glow of sunset. Something was being lifted out of me. Something had been completed, and the scene before me was so beautiful that I wanted to shout and dance and sing for joy.
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