I NEVER FOUND out what Hanna did when she wasn’t working and we weren’t together. When I asked, she turned away my questions. We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have. I had to be content with that. Wanting more, even wanting to know more, was presumption on my part. If we were particularly happy with each other and I asked her something because at that moment it felt as if everything was possible and allowed, then she sometimes ducked my questions, instead of refusing outright to answer them. “The things you ask, kid!” Or she would take my hand and lay it on her stomach. “Are you trying to make holes in me?” Or she would count on her fingers. “Laundry, ironing, sweeping, dusting, shopping, cooking, shake plums out of tree, pick up plums, bring plums home and cook them quick before the little one”—and here she would take hold of the fifth finger of her left hand between her right thumb and forefinger—“eats them all himself.”

I never met her unexpectedly on the street or in a store or a movie theater, although she told me she loved going to the movies, and in our first months together I always wanted to go with her, but she wouldn’t let me. Sometimes we talked about films we had both seen. She went no matter what was showing, and saw everything, from German war and folk movies to Westerns and New Wave films, and I liked what came out of Hollywood, whether it was set in ancient Rome or the Wild West. There was one Western in particular that we both loved: the one with Richard Widmark playing a sheriff who has to fight a duel next morning that he’s bound to lose, and in the evening he knocks on Dorothy Malone’s door—she’s been trying, but failing, to get him to make a break for it. She opens up. “What do you want now? Your whole life in one night?” Sometimes Hanna teased me when I came to her full of desire, with “What do you want now? Your whole life in one hour?”

Only once did I ever see Hanna by chance. It was the end of July or the beginning of August, in the last few days before summer vacation.

Hanna had been behaving oddly for days, moody and peremptory, and at the same time palpably under some kind of pressure that was absolutely tormenting her and left her acutely sensitive and vulnerable. She pulled herself together and held herself tight as if to stop herself from exploding. When I asked what was upsetting her so, she snapped at me. That was hard for me to take. I felt rejected, but I also ............