I met Meredith when I was thirty-four. Almost mid-span. I wasn’t viewing the number as significant but my mother was, and she and my dad decided to take their first-born on a trip before the thirty-fifth anniversary of their parenthood. We booked two rooms on an Alaska cruise.

My divorce from Jim had been finalized a few months earlier. We were less easy friends but still friendly, and I felt comfortable leaving the kids with him.

My parents had an outside stateroom, with round windows looking out on gray water and blue ice. Mine was an inner single room. It was dark like a sensory deprivation tank when the lights were out, quiet like a grave. I didn’t want to be in that room except to sleep and dress, so immediately after unpacking I took to the deck. On my third revolution I saw Meredith, in a deck chair gazing westward. On my fourth revolution we began to speak. By the sixth time around, pacing in natural unison, we were M & M and infatuated.

We made a corny pair. M was the child of a Jewish mother and a Yiddische character actor, raised in New York hotels and Catskills resorts while I was sampling suburbs. We were the piano player for the cruise and one of the guests.

M was then thirty-eight, tall, with thick brown hair. Long-faced, sad-eyed, wide-mouthed. His teeth were white as milk. We stayed up most nights for hours after the show, for hours after we closed the upper bar that swelled with passengers requesting old favorites on the piano and then exhaled them to their staterooms happily humming what they sought. We drank gallons of coffee and retired to M’s room, better than mine, where we cuddled like a braid and told each other old bad jokes and gossiped about Henny Youngman.

We had exhaustive, exploring, incomplete sex. Perhaps it was the coffee or the clean strangeness of the Alaskan air, but we spent most of our time adoring each other’s face. I took an obsessive interest in lovely teeth, and then had to learn that a mouth of such beautiful enamel was anchored in disease-ridden gums. It was my first exposure to lurking periodontal disease. M in turn became fascinated with my eyelids.

We stayed up almost all night, but we always separated a few hours before dawn. It wasn’t that we were being discreet, although we weren’t blatant either. It was that M needed a few hours, between playing and sleeping, in which to compose music.

There was a climactic concert on the last night of the cruise. That was the evening the meal ended with a parade of baked Alaskas (really), and the show pulled out all stops. Afterward, M sold cassettes of past piano performances, autographed of course. I didn’t have to pay for mine. But when I asked for an autograph, M looked up at me with surprise and cracked, “And what should I write? ‘Best Wishes’?”

Because of course it made no sense for M to autograph it. Of course we were going to see one another again. Of course.

That was twenty-five years ago. We never even talked again. I think we each got busy with our separate lives. I stopped missing M and started writing lyrics to the music I imagined him composing. Softly imagined piano.

I wasn’t done with pianos or with men. In my mid-forties I met Robert. We were introduced by a mutual friend who was his partner in their small law firm. Our friend was an incurable romantic and hoped we’d fall in love.

That didn’t happen. Robert had a compact body and a way of crossing his arms over his chest and his legs knee-over-knee that seemed too feminine to me. He had the biggest vocabulary I ever encountered, but he also couldn’t resist correcting my grammar, which I found obnoxious. And except for a petulant kind of fussy anger, he didn’t seem to have any passions.

But he was well-read and voiced intelligent opinions. He knew art, wines, fine rugs, and opera, and he liked to teach what I wanted to learn. We were both single and living in the same town, and there were five years when we saw one another regularly, for walks, dinners, shows.