She lives across from you, I say. He says that he thinks she just moved in. Nothing like meeting new neighbors, I say. In the back of the refrigerator, behind wrinkled carrots and jars of pickled onions and horseradish, I find a bottle of butterscotch sauce. I didn't buy this, I tell Jak over the phone. Who bought this? My father's diabetic. I know your father's diabetic, he says.

I've known Jak for seven years. Nikki has been married for three months now. He was in Ankara on an archeological dig when they broke up, only he didn't know they'd broken up until he got back to New York. She called and told him that she was engaged. She invited him to the wedding and then disinvited him a few weeks later. I was invited to the wedding, too, but instead I went to New York and spent the weekend with Jak. We didn't sleep together.

Saturday night, which was when Nikki was supposed to be getting married, we watched an episode of Baywatchin which the actor David Hasselhoff almost marries the beautiful blond lifeguard, but in the end doesn't, because he has to go save some tourists whose fishing boat has caught fire. Then we watched The Princess Bride. We drank a lot of Scotch and I threw up in Jak's sink while he stood outside the bathroom door and sang a song he had written about Nikki getting married. When I wouldn't come out of the bathroom, he said good night through the door.

I cleaned up the sink and brushed my teeth and went to sleep on a lumpy foldout futon. I dreamed that I was in Nikki's bridal party. Everyone was blond in my dream, the bridegroom, the best man, the mother of the bride, the flower girl, everyone looked like Sandy Duncan except for me. In the morning I got up and drove my father's car back to Virginia, and my father's garage, and Jak went to work at VideoArt, where he has a part-time job which involves technical videos about beauty school, and the Gulf War, and things like that. He mostly edits, but I once saw his hands on a late night commercial, dialing the number for a video calendar featuring exotic beauties. Women, not flowers. I almost ordered the calendar. I haven't spoken to Nikki since before Jak went to Turkey and she got engaged.

When I first moved into my father's garage, I got a job at the textile mill where my father has worked for the last twenty years. I answered phones. I listened to men tell jokes about blondes. I took home free packages of men's underwear. My father and I pretended we didn't know each other. After a while, I had all the men's underwear that I needed. I knew all the jokes by heart. I told my father that I was going to take a sabbatical from my sabbatical, just for a while. I was going to write a book. I think that he was relieved.

Jak calls me up to ask me how my father is doing. My father loves Jak. They write letters to each other a couple of times a year, in which my father tells Jak how I am doing, and whom I am dating. These tend to be very short letters. Jak sends articles back to my father about religion, insects, foreign countries where he has been digging things up. My father and Jak aren't very much alike, at least I don't think so, but they like each other. Jak is the son that my father never had, the son-in-law he will never have.

I ask Jak if he has run into his new neighbor, the blond one, again, and there is a brief silence. He says, yeah, he has. She knocked on his door a few days later, to borrow a cup of sugar. That's original, I say. He says that she didn't seem to recognize him and so he didn't bring it up. He says that he has noticed that there seem to be an unusually high percentage of blond women in his apartment building.

Let's run away to Las Vegas, I say, on impulse. He asks why Las Vegas. We could get married, I say, and the next day we could get divorced. I've always wanted an ex-husband, I tell him. It would make my father very happy. He makes a counter-proposal: we could go to New Orleans and not get married. I point out that we've already done that. I say that maybe we should try something new, but in the end we decide that he should come to Charlottesville in May. I am going to give a reading.

My father would like Jak to marry me, but not necessarily in Las Vegas.

The time that we went to New Orleans, we stayed awake all night in the lobby of a hostel, playing Hearts with a girl from Finland. Every time that Jak took a heart, no matter what was in his hand, no matter whether or not someone else had already taken a point, he'd try to shoot the moon. We could have done it, I think, we could have fallen in love in New Orleans, but not in front of the girl from Finland, who was blond.

A year later, Jak found an ad for tickets to Paris, ninety-nine dollars round trip. This was while we were still in school. We went for Valentine's Day because that was one of the conditions of the pro-motional fare. Nikki was spending a semester in Scotland. She was studying mad cow disease. They were sort of not seeing each other while she was away and in any case she was away and so I went with Jak to Paris for Valentine's Day. Isn't it romantic, I said, we're going to be in Paris on Valentine's Day. Maybe we'll meet someone, Jak said.

I lied. We didn't go to Paris for Valentine's Day, although Jak really did find the ad in the paper, and the tickets were really only ninety-nine dollars round trip. We didn't go and he never asked me, and anyway Nikki came home later that month and they got back together again. We did go to New Orleans, though. I don't think I've made that up.

I realize there is a problem with Las Vegas, which is that there are a lot of blond women there.

You are probably wondering why I am living in my father's garage. My father is probably wondering why I am living in his garage. It worries his neighbors.

Jak calls to tell me that he is quitting his job at VideoArt. He has gotten some grant money, which will not only cover the rest of the school year, but will also allow him to spend another summer in Turkey, digging things up. I tell him that I'm happy for him. He says that a weird thing happened when he went to pick up his last paycheck. He got into an elevator with seven blond women who all looked like Sandy Duncan. They stopped talking when he got on and the elevator was so quiet he could hear them all breathing. He says that they were all breathing in perfect unison. He says that all of their bosoms were rising and falling in unison like they had been running, like some sort of synchronized Olympic breast event.

He says that they smelled wonderful – that the whole elevator smelled wonderful – like a box of Lemon Fresh Joy soap detergent. He got off on the thirtieth floor and they all stayed on the elevator, although he was telepathically communicating with them that they should all get off with him, that all seven of them should spend the day with him, they could all go to the Central Park Zoo, it would be wonderful.

But not a single one got off, although he thought they looked wistful when he did. He stood in the hall and the elevator door closed and he watched the numbers and the elevator finally stopped on the forty-fifth floor, the top floor. After he picked up his paycheck, he went up to the forty-fifth floor and this is the strange thing, he says. He says that when the elevator doors opened and he got out, the forty-fifth floor was completely deserted. There was plastic up everywhere and drills and cans of paint and bits of molding lying on the floor, like the whole top floor was being renovated. A piece of the ceiling had been removed and he could see the girders and the sky through the girders. All the office doors were open and so he walked around, but he says he didn't see anyone, anyone at all. So where did the women go, he says. Maybe they were construction workers, I say. They didn't smell like construction workers, he says.