He picked up the TV remote before anything else and clicked through the news stations. CNN, MSNBC, C-Span. On CNN, Dan Quayle was being an idiot. Nothing new there.  McHone said the Secret Service had orders to shoot to kill if anything happened to George Bush. On C-Span as usual, nothing particularly compelling. He muted the sound, and picked up another remote to switch on the Cape and Islands soft rock station. Then he hung his jeans jacket up on the hook and put on water for decaf.

         There was a knock at the door. "Be right there." He put the carafe down, and hustled to the door.

         "Hey." Hey, sweet cheeks, he wanted to say. A McHone-ism, but it fit her.

         Meghan McAuley stood in the doorway. "Hi."

         He moved out of the way, feeling cumbersome. "Come on in, I got some decaf on."

         "Long time, no see. That's summer for you."

         Meg McAuley. Megs.

         They were friends, though it hadn't started out that way. They'd dated in the spring. Had a brief fling. No, he'd courted her, made love to her and fallen in love with her and at the moment of maximum bliss she'd pulled the plug on it. But insisted on seeing him, on dropping by, on confiding in him. She had terrible taste in men, by her own admission. He hoped that hadn't included him.

         Better to be friends. She explained that she had a lot to work out. Her childhood. Her self-esteem. "I don't deserve you." How's that for a line? He cultivated the friendship, desperately.

         For his part, he was always straight with her. Only partially malicious. It was frustrating, she was so damn beautiful.

         Tonight she was wearing her winter plumage. She'd dyed her naturally strawberry blonde hair auburn and found some fashionable artistic black. She stepped in on high heel lace-up boots, and unwrapped a dark sweater coat and a long burgundy velour scarf with fringe, to reveal an off-shoulder charcoal mohair sweater with a peek of a red bra strap. A black miniskirt and black textured stockings finished the effect. She had those legs that went on forever...to great places...he'd been there. Not recently, unfortunately. She was made up to minimize her freckles, very pale, dark plum eye liner, brick red lipstick which he would have loved to kiss off of her. Oh, Megs.

         She stood, the fringe trembling in her hands, sighed and two tears appeared in her green eyes and coursed down her cheeks. It was a thing she did, and he always fell for it. A new love affair gone sour, no doubt.

         "Talk about it?" He tried to look sympathetic, magnanimous, confide-able.

         "No." She never gave details. He didn't press. He didn't really want to hear them, anyway, it would have driven him crazy. "Why am I so unlucky?"

         "Come in, take off your coat and stay awhile. Are you hungry? I have leftover pizza."

         She shook her head, and sat in one of his mismatched kitchenette chairs. When he set the cup of decaf in front of her, she started to weep. "I feel so ugly..."

         He planted himself in the other chair. "Come here. Sit in my lap." Sit on my lap, and we'll see what comes up. Another McHone-ism.  She must have been pretty distracted, she got up and came right over to him. He put an arm on her shoulder, offering comfort, trying not to spook her. "The first time I saw you, you were utterly beautiful. You were wearing that little flippy number...how are the cobblestones treating you?"

         Bull’s-eye! She blushed. She flushed like an exotic octopus. She'd complained when they were dating about navigating the cobblestones in high heels, and then realized how it must have sounded to him. She'd put her lovely foot in her mouth so many times. He wished he were that flexible.

         "I'm not only lousy at being an artist, I'm lousy at being a woman." She fished a Kleenex out of her freckled cleavage and blew her nose.

         "Hush." His arms were loose around her, she'd relaxed a bit. "Megs, would you ever consider..."

         "No."

         "I didn't even ask the question."

         "We're not good for each other."

         "How do you mean?"

         "We're always fighting."

         "I don't buy that bull about low self-esteem, if that's what you mean."

         "I'm--I'm not you."

         "I sure hope not." He sniffed. "You changed your perfume. It's not as fruity."

         "Harpo mixed it for me."

         "It's lovely. Spicy..."

         "Stop smelling me!"

         "That's the point, isn't it? What is it?"

         "Vanilla, mainly. I'm…vanilla. I'm such a failure."

         "You just haven't found your niche yet. Plenty of time. Well, you look like hell, hon, but you smell wonderful."

         She scowled at him. He took that as evidence that he'd cheered her up. She wriggled in his lap. "I need to..."

         "Sure, you know where it is." He fought the urge to touch her ass as she got up. He listened as she went to the can, and flushed. He heard the faucet running, she was splashing some water on her face. The door opened. Then she reached around for the switch, and hit the bedroom light by mistake.

         "Oh, Johnny!"

         "What?" He knew what. He grabbed his canes and got to his feet.

         "Johnny! You didn't!"

         "I didn't what?"

         "I thought someone off-island..."

         "Yeah, a friend of mine. Well, Megs, it's my backside!"

         She was standing by the bed, looking at the framed drawing hung on the wall above it. It was her artwork, a nude study titled "Vulcan." She'd drawn him in the spring, over the course of a couple of weeks. They'd wake at dawn and make rapturous love. Then he'd roll over and sleep, she'd put on coffee and draw him until eight-thirty, when they'd throw themselves together and scatter in different directions to work.

         She turned to him, utterly furious. "You weren't--why didn't you tell me?"

         "It was a surprise. I was waiting for you to come over."

         "It was summer!"

         "Why are you disappointed? It's where it's supposed to be. At the scene of the crime."

         "Your girlfriends see it."

         "I don't have girlfriends."

         "But you see women, they..." She gestured, “they see it!"

         "Yeah. You see men, as I recall. I don't see the problem. It's not exactly pornography."

         She burst into tears again. Most conversations with her ended that way, more than he'd like to admit, anyway.

         He looked at the sepia drawing. He was vain enough to love it--his back, his crooked spine, his deltoids, his glutes. Others thought it was good, too--it had gotten a second place ribbon in the Artists Association's Fourth of July show, after a pastel landscape by Pam Pindell. But it was more than a good drawing. To look at it, the way she had seen him--it was as if he could feel her caress. With her hand she had revealed the beauty of his less than perfect body, and made it divine. She'd touched him making that drawing. When she'd finished it, she'd broken up with him.

         "All right. I was angry, Megs. I didn't want--you drew this when we were together and then you put it up for sale--"

         "Oh, Johnny--"

         "You wanted other people to see it. If you were not going to keep it, I wanted it!"

         "I couldn't bear to look at it."

         "Well, you got five hundred dollars out of it."

         "Two-fifty. The gallery took half."

         "Our relationship turned a profit."

         Back to anger. She gave him a look that would have withered his legs the rest of the way. "Why do I come here?" She brushed past him in a cloud of vanilla. Before he could maneuver to turn she had whipped her sweater coat off the couch and stomped out the door.

         Her red velour scarf trailed on the floor in her wake, like a gash of dried blood. He leaned over carefully and snagged it from the floor. The fringe tumbled over his hands. There are mental traps one falls into, especially when one is disabled, as debilitating as any physical challenge. Self-pity, self-contempt, passive aggression. He allowed himself to hate his behavior. Otherwise, he managed, as he had all his life, not to take it personally.