“I warned you I wasn’t the Sandra you heard each night on the radio serial,” Sandra says.

“It wasn’t like that,” I say. “Maybe we should order more wine before we get into this again.”

“Then what was it like?” she asks.

This puzzles me. At first, I admit to myself, it was her voice on the radio show. It was beautiful and vulnerable, like Vivien Leigh, an old Hollywood actress whose voice shook coyly behind a relentless force. Later it became more than her voice, more than her conviction. She intrigued me. I never knew what she was going to do next, and not knowing drove me crazy. I wanted to know, and my desire to know scattered the reason from my head.

Before I answer, she says, “It’s worse than you think.” She squeezes the table’s edge and leans away from me as if she’s tethered to the table and afraid of flying away from the table and my life. “I led you to believe I was something I wasn’t. I liked your wit and maturity, but it was your youth which I fell in love with. Isn’t that a horrible thing? I hated old people, old people like my friend Ben and his wife, who doted on the young as if to regain youth by association. I didn’t think I was like them. But I am.”

Sandra stands, neatly folds her napkin, and places it on the table. She is nothing if not proper at all times, even times like this. I try to look at her eyes, to see if this is hurting her, but her eyes are downcast and her large eyelashes hide her feelings.

“You could just love me for who I am,” I say. I taste the cliché as it escapes my mouth and I wonder if I’m lying to myself. I’ve fantasized about this break up with her many nights while we lied in bed and I suffered her holding me. She’s too old for me. At twenty, eleven years is enormous. She has a history: been married, sworn off children, and, now that she mentioned it, she has given words to a silent worry of mine: maybe she is trying to relive her youth through me. These thoughts flash through my head as I continue my formulaic response. “Must there be an analysis, an accounting of the whys?”

“Such a great kid you are.” Sandra reaches over and pats my cheek. I never felt so childish, and her motion sold it for me. Each time her palm patted my cheek, I felt ten years younger, until I was the toddler pulling on a mother’s apron strings. When Sandra realizes what she had been doing, she removes her hand. The motion looks calculated and I begin to have doubts about its sincerity.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that,” she says.

“I think you do,” I say. “Did it take you long to script it? Is it going as well as you imagined?”