Familiar. I turned to get a better look.

Sharon. Definitely Sharon. In a tailored linen suit, matching purse and shoes.

She saw me, waved as if we’d had an appointment.

“Alex!”

All at once she was at my side. Soap and water, fresh grass…

She sat down on the stool next to mine, crossed her legs, and pulled her skirt down over her knees.

The bartender winked at me. “Drink, ma’am?”

“Seven-Up, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

After he handed her the drink and moved down, she said, “You look great, Alex. I like the beard.”

“Saves time in the morning.”

“Well, I think it’s handsome.” She sipped, toyed with her stirrer. “I keep hearing good things about you, Alex. Early tenure, all those publications. I’ve read quite a few of your articles. Learned a lot from them.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Silence.

“I finally graduated,” she said. “Last month.”

“Congratulations, Doctor.”

“Thanks. It took me longer than I thought it would. But I got involved in clinical work and didn’t apply myself to writing the dissertation as diligently as I should have.”

We sat in silence. A few feet away, the bartender was whistling “ La Bamba ” and tinkering with the ice crusher.

“It’s good to see you,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

She touched my sleeve. I stared at her fingers until she removed them.

“I wanted to see you,” she said.

“What about?”

“I wanted to explain-”

“There’s no need to explain anything, Sharon. Ancient history.”

“Not to me.”

“Difference of opinion.”

She moved closer, said, “I know I blew it,” in a choked whisper. “Believe me, I know it. But that doesn’t change the fact that after all these years, you’re still with me. Good memories, special memories. Positive energy.”

“Selective perception,” I said.

“No.” She inched closer, touched my sleeve again. “We did have some wonderful times, Alex. I’ll never let go of that.”

I said nothing.

“Alex, the way we… it ended. I was horrible. You had to think I was psychotic- what happened was psychotic. If you only knew how many times I’ve wanted to call you, to explain-”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m a coward. I run away from things. It’s my style- you saw that the first time we met, in practicum.” Her shoulders drooped: “Some things never change.”

“Forget it. Like I said, ancient history.”

“What we had was special, Alex, and I allowed it to be destroyed.”

Her voice stayed soft but got tighter. The bartender glanced over. My expression sent his eyes back to his work.

“Allowed it?” I said. “That sounds pretty passive.”

She recoiled as if I’d spit in her face. “All right,” she said. “I destroyed it. I was crazy. It was a crazy time in my life- don’t think I haven’t regretted it a thousand times.”

She tugged at her earlobe. Her hands were smooth and white. “Alex, meeting you here today was no accident. I never attend conventions, had no intention of going to this one. But when I got the brochure in the mail I happened to notice your name on the program and wanted suddenly to see you again. I attended your lecture, stood at the back of the room. The way you spoke- your humanity. I thought I might have a chance.”

“A chance for what?”

“To be friends, bury the hard feelings.”

“Consider them buried. Mission accomplished.”

She leaned forward so that our lips were almost touching, clutched my shoulder, whispered, “Please, Alex, don’t be vindictive. Let me show you.”

There were tears in her eyes.

“Show me what?” I said.

“A different side of me. Something I’ve never shown anyone.”

We walked to the front of the hotel, waited for the parking valets.

“Separate cars,” she said, smiling. “So you can escape any time you want.”

The address she gave me was on the south side of Glendale, the down side of town, filled with used-car lots, splintering, by-the-day rooming houses, thrift shops, and greasy spoons. Half a mile north on Brand, the Glendale Galleria was under construction- a polished brick tribute to gentrification- but down here, boutique was still a French word.

She arrived before me, was sitting in the little red Alfa in front of a one-story brown stucco building. The place had a jaillike quality- narrow, silvered windows bolted and barred, the front door a slab of brushed steel, no landscaping other than a single thirsty liquidambar tree which cast spindly shadows on the tar-paper roof.

She met me at the door, thanked me for coming, then pushed the buzzer in the center of the steel door. Several moments later it was opened by a stocky, coal-black man with short hair and a corkscrew chin beard. He wore a diamond stud in one ear, a light-blue uniform jacket over a black T-shirt and jeans. When he saw Sharon he flashed a gold-jacketed smile.

“Afternoon, Dr. Ransom.” His voice was high-pitched, gentle.

“Afternoon, Elmo. This is Dr. Delaware, a friend of mine.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir.” To Sharon: “She’s all prettied up and ready for you.”

“That’s great, Elmo.”

He stood aside and we entered a waiting room floored with oxblood linoleum and furnished with orange plastic chairs and green tables. To one side was an office labeled RECEPTION and windowed with a square of yellowed Lucite. We walked past it and up to another steel door, marked NO ENTRY. Elmo selected a key from a heavy ring and sprung the latch.

We stepped into brightness and pandemonium: a long, high room with steel-shuttered windows and a fluorescent ceiling that radiated a cold, flat imitation daylight. The walls were covered with sheets of emerald-green vinyl; the air was hot and rancid.

And everywhere, movement. A random ballet.

Scores of bodies, twitching, rocking, stumbling, brutalized by Nature and the luck of the draw. Limbs frozen or trapped in endless, athetoid spasm. Slack, drooling mouths. Hunched backs, shattered spines, nubbed and missing limbs. Contortions and grimaces born of ravaged chromosomes and derailed neural pathways and made all the more cruel by the fact that these patients were young- teenagers and young adults who’d never know the pleasures of youth’s false immortality.

Some of them clutched walkers and measured their progress in millimeters. Others, contracted stiff as plaster statues, bucked and fought the confines of wheelchairs. The saddest among them slumped, flaccid as invertebrates, in high-sided wagons and metal carts that resembled oversized baby strollers.

We made our way past a sea of glazed eyes as inert as plastic buttons. Past witless faces gazing up from the leather sanctuary of protective headgear, an audience of blank faces unperturbed by the merest flicker of consciousness.

A gallery of deformity- a cruel display of all that could go wrong with the box that humans come in.

In a corner of the room a rabbit-eared console TV blasted a game show at top volume, the shrieks of contestants competing with the wordless jabber and inchoate howls of the patients. The only ones watching were half a dozen blue-jacketed attendants. They ignored us as we passed.

But the patients noticed. As if magnetized, they swarmed toward Sharon, began flocking around her, wheeling and hobbling. Soon we were surrounded. The attendants didn’t budge.

She reached into her purse, took out a box of gumdrops, and began distributing candy. One box emptied, another appeared. Then another.

She dispensed another kind of sweetness, too, kissing misshapen heads, hugging stunted bodies. Calling patients by name, telling them how good they looked. They competed for her favors, begged for gumdrops, cried out in ecstasy, touched her as if she were magic.

She looked happier than I’d ever seen her- complete. A storybook princess reigning over a kingdom of the misshapen.