“No, I didn’t say a friend of mine has AIDS.” Mona looked up from the climatic-data summary. “At least not a friend I’ve already got. The AIDS buddy program matches you up with someone who has it, and you become that person’s friend and helper.” She gazed past Reid and out the window at a pair of reservations agents walking toward the airport’s main terminal, collapsible umbrellas dangling from their wrists. One word from me and the whole city takes an umbrella, she thought happily. And nobody was going to regret it. Thick clouds were moving in as if they were using her forecast as a road map.

“They think friendship can be dispensed on a need basis? Like food and clothing?” Reid was saying, and Mona admitted she had been tempted to ask that kind of thing herself, but she’d doubted it would go over well at the training sessions. “Anyway,” she added, “I know the answer. First of all, people who need AIDS buddies have nowhere else to turn, and second of all, yes.”

“Training sessions? They train you to be somebody’s friend?” Reid’s face, florid, finicky, and fortyish, was scrunched up over two upper-air maps as if they held the secret of the universe, which of course they did, but only for those in the know. The ace of hearts, Mona had secretly dubbed him. Not only was his face reddish and vaguely heart-shaped, but she figured everyone deserved a chance to be the ace of something, and it was as clear as the air behind a cold front that Reid was not the ace of forecasting. He knew he wasn’t. He didn’t mind. Or maybe he did—she was never sure how to take some of his remarks.

“They sure do train you. Four sessions. It’s half about how to help your buddy in practical ways and half how to really, really relate to him.” Mona pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. The glasses had bright blue rectangular frames, which were supposed to make her face look less pale and circular. Sometimes she suspected they had the opposite effect, but it hardly mattered. What mattered was that she was no longer fat, that she had left the Boston forecast office and come to Cleveland, where no one knew about her 200-pound past. “We had to start off the first session by giving our impressions of everyone else there,” she went on. “When I said I didn’t know the others well enough to have impressions yet, the trainer told me not to be afraid to open up and say what I really felt. I wanted to say I felt they all liked the word ‘caring’ a lot. That’s what they all called one another, ‘caring.’”

Reid laughed loudly, startling her; his fastidious intensity seldom left room for enthusiasm about anything but the weather. He was twirling his prep-school ring on his fingertip, a continuing reminder that he was the only person in the National Weather Service who had gone to Groton.

“The trainer also told us, ‘Never forget that your buddy is facing a major life crisis but still has the same hopes and dreams you have.’ Just imagine, the same hopes and dreams I have! My buddy is going to want to be the best forecaster in America!” Mona said, and Reid asked, “So if you think the program is so silly, why are you in it?”

I’d sooner swallow a live salamander than tell you, she thought. “Why don’t you do it, too?” she said. “Broaden your horizons. The program’s very big on horizon-broadening. Or do conservatives feel that those who get AIDS deserve it?”

“Let’s just say I doubt they would be my sort of people. And vice versa.” He gave a stiff little laugh and walked over to the window. “I don’t believe in picking my buddies on the basis of what disease they have. It’s like Gresham’s Law,” and the rain began with a thunderclap, making Mona shiver a bit with excitement and fulfillment.

“Gresham’s Law?” she said.

Reid had opened the window and was extending his hands into the first rainfall in nine days. “Gresham’s Law is that bad money drives out good. Just as fake affection drives out real.”

“Well. . . .” Mona couldn’t help wondering what Reid knew about affection. Probably the buddy trainer would say anyone with Reid’s negative attitude toward gays must subconsciously fear being gay himself, or at least be insecure about his own sexuality, but she supposed that, by the same token, you could say the trainer must subconsciously fear being conservative, or at least be insecure about his own political views. Still, in Mona’s eleven months of working with him, Reid had said nothing even suggesting he might have a love life. Could he actually have some secret? Or was the secret that there was no secret, that he didn’t have a love life, didn’t want one, maybe wasn’t even interested in sex? Surely that was the big taboo nowadays.

“So why are you in that program?” he asked again.

Because what you call fake affection doesn’t sound so bad to me, now that I’ve learned that even a trim forty-two-year-old woman isn’t much of a contender in the world of romance, Mona answered silently. I’ll even get to do some good, and if that’s not my only motive, so much the better for my buddy, because it makes the whole thing less unequal.

“Well,” she said aloud, walking over to the window, “it’s worth doing. And as an extra little inducement, the woman who got me into it told me being an AIDS buddy would change my life.”

Reid smiled. His lips were thin and scarcely redder than his face. “Did she mention if the change would be for the better?”

_____________

“Oh, this is much better than regular tea.” Mona took another sip of the herbal tea Henry Dural had prepared. It tasted so much like grass that she wondered whether some could have gotten mixed in by mistake, but she was afraid if she showed reluctance to drink it, he might think she was worried about catching AIDS from him, although he didn’t seem the sensitive type. He was a tall, blond, bony man with a manner so calm and mild it was making her pleasantly drowsy. But he didn’t seem drowsy. He barely seemed ill. He barely felt ill, he had told her, only a trifle weak since he’d recovered from last month’s bout with pneumonia.

Mona forced down a third sip, then tried to turn her head just enough to catch a glance through Henry’s living-room window without making him suspect he was sharing her attention with the sky. Yesterday she had put herself on the line with her guarantee of no rain today; so the clouds had better hold off until midnight, nine hours to go. She fixed her eyes back on Henry and reviewed what she had been told about him: age (forty), occupation (registrar at Cuyahoga Community College), hobbies (murder mysteries, which she liked, and bridge, which she didn’t).

She had also been told that Henry had had full-blown AIDS for three months.

“How did you get into weather forecasting?” he was asking, and Mona put her cup down and replied that it was almost by accident. “I mean, I had to take a science course in college, and I picked meteorology because I figured the labs wouldn’t have anything slimy or smelly. And then, well, forecasting the weather turned out to be what I’m good at. My own special talent.” She heard her voice thicken and swallowed hard. All through her first year and a half at Michigan, she’d been just the dormitory fat girl, and then she was the oracle everyone counted on to say, more reliably than the people on TV, whether a picnic or Softball game would get rained out.

Henry smiled and asked if she had managed to stay interested in meteorology—choosing a profession because you were good at it sounded like choosing a lover because he was devoted to you, nice for the ego, but after a while, you’d get bored and want more of a challenge.

This is definitely one person with AIDS who doesn’t have the same hopes and dreams I have, Mona thought. Henry was still smiling, but his face seemed to be changing, like a reversible picture she had seen of an old woman who turned into a young woman if you stared at her long enough. Now Henry’s sharp cheekbones and light blue eyes made his face the face of a man who could afford to spurn devotion, who could pick and choose. Who wouldn’t have given the gay male equivalent of fat Mona a second glance, who probably would have dismissed even the slim one as hopelessly unsexy. Who had probably had plenty of lovers. And one of them had given him AIDS. But she wasn’t supposed to think about that. “Gay sex does not cause AIDS. A virus does,” the buddy trainer had said, a half-hour before sobbing during the “sharing of losses” exercise that his greatest loss had been the death of his father, who had “smoked himself into the grave.”

“I never get bored forecasting.” Mona wondered what to say next. “How have you been doing? Are you afraid?” she said finally, feeling excited but also slightly preposterous. After all, she had just met this man today. What was she doing trying to walk into his innermost soul and make herself at home without a by-your-leave? But wasn’t that part of the program?

“Of course,” said Henry.

“What are you particularly afraid of?” Mona asked, forcing back the idea that she had no business asking such a question of someone she wouldn’t dream of telling she’d had all of four dates in the past ten years.

“If you know what happens with AIDS, then you know what I’m afraid of,” Henry said flatly. “I’m also afraid of facing it alone, now that so many of my friends are dead.”

His hands were at his sides, looking oddly exposed and inert. Mona supposed she ought to take his nearest hand in hers, but now it was she who was afraid—not of catching AIDS, but of making a fool of herself. She leaned over and grasped his hand.

“You won’t be alone,” she said. “I’ll be here.”

“Thank you,” Henry said, and the two sides of Mona pushed up against each other like the warm and cold sides of a stationary front. The cold side said, You’d each be doing this with anyone the program sent you, so how could it mean anything? He doesn’t seem like your sort of person, anyway. Don’t be a selfish jerk, said the warm side, he doesn’t have to be your type, and besides, everyone is everyone’s sort of person, that’s the whole point, remember? Everyone has a vulnerable core where he’s lonely and scared, so you can get close to anyone on that basis, if he lets you. And the cold side said, Oh, come on. But Mona ignored it and continued holding Henry’s hand.

_____________

It is changing my life, Mona found herself thinking during the next month, although she never would have admitted this to Reid, let alone to Henry. It sounded too much like an article she’d come across that called the AIDS crisis a great opportunity, without specifying for whom, people who had AIDS or people who didn’t.

“That’s how those types talk,” Henry said, when she told him about the article. Just last week, he added, he had gone to an AIDS support group where someone said confronting your own mortality taught you to value life so much you no longer feared death.

Mona was walking toward Henry’s bed, her eyes focused on the bowl of fish chowder she was balancing on a tray. She peered up. Lying in bed, propped up against two pillows, Henry in the afternoon’s overcast light seemed nearly as white as the soup. It struck her that valuing your life so much you no longer feared death made about as much sense as valuing your job so much you wouldn’t mind getting fired. But she said only, “Do you believe that?”

“It’s like most things. It works best if you don’t look at it too closely,” he said, making Mona wonder whether he was counting her as one of those things. But she wasn’t really worried. Over the past few weeks she’d decided her initial impressions had been right: Henry wasn’t her sort of person, and it didn’t matter. She handed him the tray, sat down in the chair beside his bed, gazed at the framed Mapplethorpe print above the headboard—it was a tame one, just a calla lily—and was almost ashamed of how much she hoped he would want a long visit today.

“Do you like Mapplethorpe?” Henry asked.

Mona took a quick look out the window. Then she admitted she had never seen Mapplethorpe’s work until she decided to become an AIDS buddy, when she had bought a book of his photographs in roughly the same spirit she had gotten a guidebook before her vacation in Scotland last summer. “I made myself look at it a little longer every day, like getting desensitized for an allergy, till a picture of a man with a bullwhip up his posterior looked nearly as ordinary to me as a flower, and I felt so sophisticated and ready for anything. Then I get here and what do I find? Just a flower. . . . What’s so funny?”

“I put the erotic ones away before your first visit. I didn’t want to risk shocking you,” he said, grinning.

They stared at each other and soon were both laughing. “Risk it,” Mona said.

Henry hesitated. Then he began talking about how the 60’s really were the perfect moment to be young and gay, when sex was in the air everywhere. Sex in the air everywhere, try putting that in your forecast, it’s even better than raining cats and dogs, Mona said to herself, imagining pairs of writhing bodies falling from the sky. She was glad to be hearing about Henry’s past. It made her feel worldly and daring, not at all the type to fear the hidden Mapplethorpe prints, although, as Henry went on with increasing animation, she was grateful to him for not testing her by making his recollections very graphic. He sounded nostalgic rather than boastful, almost like an old man reminiscing. But he had never wanted monogamy. Few gay men did in those days, he was saying, though there was Dan, who had left in a rage when Henry admitted he still had other lovers. Poor Dan, Mona couldn’t help thinking. How terrible it must be to love someone who craved variety. What a heartbreaker Henry must have been. Even mortally ill, he was gracious and charming. She was hardly about to consider him dissolute, the way Reid would, but she had to push away the idea that he hadn’t been a very reliable person.

Henry stopped talking and sank back against the pillows, his face suddenly slack and exhausted. Mona reminded herself not to be alarmed; he often dozed off after eating. She picked up the tray, put it on the night table, then stroked his hair with all possible gentleness. He smiled, his long-lashed eyelids fluttering. Mona felt as if something soft were expanding within her, like a flower in a time-lapse movie. She knew you were supposed to enjoy touching your buddy, but were you supposed to enjoy it so much? Who made the rules, anyway? Henry’s eyelids closed, then snapped open as if jerked by a single cord.

“Please, let’s talk more,” he said. “I don’t want to sleep. The more sleep you get, the more you need.”

“Just like love?” Mona murmured, surprising herself as well as Henry, who gave her a quizzical glance. “I mean,” she continued, “when you were talking about Dan, I couldn’t help taking his side. It’s so horrible to be . . . betrayed in love.”

“Does that happen to you often?” Henry asked, and Mona felt a splash of ridiculous gratitude for his using the present tense, instead of assuming her love life was over, when actually it had never begun. But why not tell him her secret? Why not tell him right now? It was even in the instructions; hadn’t the trainer said you shouldn’t be afraid to open up emotionally to your buddy?

“I never had a chance,” she said. “I used to weigh 200 pounds.”

“What?” He sounded so bewildered she was about to repeat it, but then he was shaking his head, saying, “Amazing. Where did it go?”

“Oh, it goes into bakeries and ice cream parlors and candy stores, where it lies in wait for a chance to leap back on you.”

“How long were you . . . large?” he asked, and she laughed and said when someone told you she’d weighed 200 pounds, you didn’t have to be squeamish about the word “fat,” and she’d been fat since childhood, over 180 pounds since age sixteen, in fact.

“Was your mother always after you about it? At least you never had to worry about coming out.” Just last week Henry had said it had taken his parents years to accept his sexuality (“Mom, please accept my sexuality,” had fluttered through Mona’s head), but that they’d died in a car crash well before anyone ever heard the term “AIDS.”

“My parents were professors,” she said, “the old-fashioned sort who really lived the life of the mind. They scarcely noticed what I weighed. They only noticed my ideas. It was a nice way to grow up, but they expected me to become a scholar; so they’re not too thrilled with what I’ve ended up doing.” It occurred to her that she had this last in common with Reid, who had once mentioned he’d been mildly estranged from his parents ever since he made it clear he would never go back to New Hampshire and join the bank his great-grandfather had founded. Not that Mona’s parents were the type for estrangement, they never went beyond gentle perplexity that any daughter of theirs could choose to spend her life forecasting the weather rather than studying Chaucer. “I guess I’m sort of coming out now, just to you. Would you believe you’re the only person in Cleveland I’ve told about my past? No kidding!” she finished, feeling as giddy and elated as if she’d been up all night forecasting in a blizzard.

_____________

There were no blizzards in sight when she arrived at the weather station an hour later for the afternoon shift. There was only Reid, comparing two maps and humming Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song,” although it was October. He had a large repertoire of weather melodies, all from classical music, the only kind of music he liked or even approved of. Once he had told Mona he thought rock music appealed to people’s cruder impulses, and she’d been tempted to reply, “Yes, it’s good that way, isn’t it?” Now she found herself speculating about him again. Could anyone really be as dried-up as Reid seemed? “Reid,” she said, sitting down at a computer a few feet away from him, “what’s your life like outside the weather station?”

“Excuse me?”

Mona giggled. So perhaps this was how being an AIDS buddy changed you, by filling you with so much fellow-feeling toward the people in your daily life that it periodically oozed all over them, whether they wanted it to or not. “Well, I’ve been working with you for a year, and I know almost nothing about you except that you’re a . . .”

“Hopeless reactionary.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way,” Mona said, although she had, to other people.

“I would,” said Reid. “I am a hopeless reactionary. And my life outside the weather station is fine, thank you. I don’t need the services of an AIDS buddy.”

Mona swung around in her swivel chair, her face burning. A moment later Reid, who hardly seemed the type to go around touching people and certainly had never touched Mona before, was touching her on the shoulder, making her nearly jump out of her seat.

“Mona?” He was peering beyond her, out the window, as if watching for the rain to end. “I’m sorry. It’s just, well, you know I don’t care for this benevolent outreach. And my life outside the weather station is fine. I’m . . . involved with a wonderful person.” His tone was conciliatory, but he was back at his maps before she could reply.

“Well,” she said, “that’s great,” and it wasn’t until she was midway through her forecast that it struck her what he had said.

Wonderful person, not wonderful woman. So maybe her speculations had been right. Maybe this was the closest he would ever get to letting her know, and come to think of it, what would it be like to be a gay conservative, a gay so conservative you kept your private life entirely private? Don’t get carried away, maybe it didn’t even cross his mind you could think “wonderful person” meant a man, she told herself. But she could hear his breathing and even his neck was red. She was filled with pity and certainty and wanted to say, Your secret is safe; I will never tell.

_____________

“Did you think it would stay the way it was?” Henry said, “a cross between The Joy of Dying and Gidget Gets AIDS?”

His voice was as mild as ever and his face scarcely more gaunt. But for the past ten days, an infection had kept him almost constantly in bed, which at least beat going to the hospital. “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” he was saying.

“You won’t.” Mona clasped his hand, which felt warm and strong, as if his closest connection to death were the murder mysteries she kept bringing. “You won’t if I can help it.”

“You and whose army?”

“Yours.” She mentally reviewed the troops. There was a home-health aide who came every morning. There was Henry’s doctor. There was also Gary, a good-natured shoe salesman who often dropped by after work. Gary was Henry’s new AIDS buddy.

“Could you get the tape now?” Henry asked.

Mona nodded, although she knew he would be shut off from her while New Age music clogged the room. She hoped the music wouldn’t make her doze off. She was so tired. Yesterday she had stayed past midnight, and afterward she’d been too worried to sleep. Anything could happen, it could go either way, the doctor had warned, and who were those fools who said the cure for unhappiness was to think about others instead of yourself? Did they think you couldn’t be unhappy over what was befalling the others? She put the tape on, then sat down again as the music began and Henry closed his eyes. The tape was from Gary, making Mona recall her flare of panic when she learned Henry had acquired another AIDS buddy. “You mean you won’t be needing me any more?” she had managed to get out, and Henry had replied that of course he still wanted her as a buddy, but why have one buddy when you could have two? Certain things he could discuss only with another gay man. I’m no longer squeamish, she had wanted to cry, didn’t I put both your sexy Mapplethorpes back up and don’t I face them every day without flinching? But she’d known it would be futile.

When the tape ended, Henry opened his eyes. “You probably think meditating is silly,” he said.

Mona swallowed so hard it hurt. “I’m not so sure what’s silly any more. Anyway, they told us in the training program we mustn’t be judgmental. They said people with AIDS are entitled to do whatever brings them solace. Aside from joining the Moral Majority, I guess,” she added, and was rewarded when Henry chuckled. She just hoped Gary couldn’t come up with anything like that.

_____________

When she got to the weather station later that day, instead of Reid there was a note. “At the radar site. Back around 8—RHL.” She picked up a map, felt her energy revive, and for the next few hours thought about little but the weather.

“You must be Mona,” said a voice.

Mona turned around. Facing her was a woman with glossy strawberry-blond curls, deep-turquoise eyes, and about 50 surplus pounds. No doubt she could have modeled for Big Beautiful Woman, the magazine a friend in Boston had shown Mona, as if the fact that some fat women were beautiful had any more bearing on her life than the fact that some fat women were opera singers.

“Yes, can I help you?” Mona said.

“Actually, I’m looking for Reid.” The woman had a lively voice with a slight Southern accent. “I expected to find him right here, eyes glued to the maps, pouring his whole heart and soul into his forecast.”

Mona started to laugh, then checked herself and said Reid would be back in about an hour. “Do you want me to tell him you—”

“Sure, I’m Elaine—no, I think I’ll surprise him. I just flew in from California.” She glanced at the wall clock, then back at Mona. “Maybe you could come and eat with me at that cafeteria in the main terminal? I feel as if I know you already, after all I’ve heard about you from Reid.”

“What have you heard?” Mona couldn’t resist asking.

“Come with me and I’ll tell you.”

“Reid’s told me all about what a terrific forecaster you are,” Elaine said once they were seated at a rather isolated table overlooking the runways. “He can’t get over it. He calls you the queen of forecasting.” She propped her chin on her fist and beamed at Mona.

Mona couldn’t help beaming back. “How do you know Reid?” she asked.

“His great-aunt lived across the street from me. She was his favorite relative—a marvelous, elegant old lady like someone in a Victorian novel.” Elaine launched into an appealing tale of the old lady’s final years and her faithful grandnephew.

Mona looked out the window. Two days ago, she had predicted rain for today, but yesterday she’d reversed herself; so whatever happened, she was bound to be right. Not to mention wrong. And eventually Elaine, following Mona’s gaze, was saying that when Reid was expecting rain, he liked to drive to the approaching front and meet it head-on. “Unless he’s with me, and I’m really not in the mood. Thank heaven, he knows enough to put his girlfriend ahead of his forecasts,” she ended in a rush.

“You’re Reid’s girlfriend?” Mona said.

“Yes, I know that sounds as if I don’t have to worry about a date for the prom, but. . . .”

“But—”

“But he’s never mentioned me.” Elaine was still gazing outside, her face now delicately pink, like the inside of a seashell. “He’s . . . being a gentleman.”

“A gentleman?”

“Yes.” Elaine closed her eyes. The lids were dusted with silvery powder. She was silent so long Mona started casting about for something to say. “You see, I’m married,” Elaine almost whispered, opening her eyes but not looking at Mona.

Mona’s fork stopped in mid-air. “Reid’s involved with a married woman?”

“Yes, he’s shocked, too. We both are. In fact, it was years before we even admitted we were in love with each other. I took the initiative, of course.” Elaine took another sip of coffee, her upraised hand smooth and pretty, with pink polished nails. And her left hand, curled up on the table, had a golden topaz on the fourth finger; did this replace a wedding ring she wore in California? “This isn’t how I set out to live,” she was saying, “but I won’t break up my home until both my children are grown. So we’re waiting. Six years down, four to go. Not many men would wait anywhere near that long,” she added, her expression brightening back up a little. “I suppose you think it’s odd, my telling you this? There’s no one else I can tell.”

“Is he going to be surprised?”

“Reid? He thinks having an illicit relationship is even worse than I do. We don’t tell anyone, can’t you see? I wasn’t planning to do this. But then—an AIDS buddy, a semi-official confidante, what could be safer? And now he won’t have to worry about letting anything slip with you.”

Mona tried to picture Reid letting anything slip and suppressed a giggle. “Are you a conservative, too?” she asked.

“God, no.” Elaine laughed so richly and exuberantly that a man two tables away turned and smiled for a moment. “But it’s fine with me that he is,” she continued, lowering her voice again. “At least when a conservative loves you, he loves you more than he loves the oppressed masses. Anyway, if your husband teaches at Stanford and you live practically on campus, a conservative is a breath of fresh air. You know what Stanford people are like? They’re so PC, they’d think my real sin is being in love with a Republican.”

When they returned to the weather station, Reid was at a long table, his back to the door. He was humming “Fall” from “The Four Seasons.” Elaine pressed her finger to her lips, then tiptoed over to him and put her hands over his eyes. “Surprise!” she said.

He spun around, his face glowing. “I had no idea.”

Neither did I, Mona thought. I work so hard, I lose 80 pounds, and all I get is to be an AIDS buddy to someone who doesn’t think I’m enough for him. And here’s this woman who lets herself stay fat and isn’t even faithful to her husband—why have one man when you can have two?—and she has someone who loves her so much, he. . . . Mona realized she was furious. “How’s the marine outlook?” she asked.

A hint of Reid’s intent forecasting expression crossed his face, but he handed Mona his worksheet and turned back to Elaine. This looks way off, Mona noted gleefully. And I’m the queen of forecasting! She sat down. Soon her heart was gliding seven miles above the earth, in the rushing winds of the jet stream.

_____________

The following month, Henry went into the hospital. You weren’t supposed to get too emotionally involved, Mona reminded herself as she drove from the hospital to the weather station; the trainer had said that over and over, although you weren’t supposed to be too uninvolved, either. You had to be just right, caring about your buddy as a person but not to the point of jealousy that he wanted to spend tomorrow with his other buddy, let alone deep depression because this person you cared about precisely the right amount was dying. Mona’s eyes filled; she blinked and wiped them. She switched on the radio to an oldies station, and Brenda Lee’s voice suffused the air. “I want to be wanted.” Wrong attitude, of course, and wasn’t that another wonderful thing about meteorology?—nobody cared about your attitude as long as your forecast was correct.

By the time she reached the weather station, she had decided that even AIDS buddies were entitled to whatever attitudes they damn well pleased, provided that they managed not to burden the patient with them. She walked over to the satellite display and another idea struck her: Henry wanted to be wanted. All his life he had been wanted. So why not give him the comfort of knowing that mortal illness hadn’t dimmed his appeal, that he was going out in a blaze of romantic glory, an object of jealousy rather than charity, even to someone who was, by his standards, the wrong sex? Again her eyes began to fill and she wiped them, willing them to stop before Reid could notice.

Reid, however, had other things on his mind. He was engrossed in an oncoming cold front he and Mona had been arguing over for two days, and he barely looked up until the telephone rang. “National Weather . . . oh.” His voice dropped nearly to a whisper, and he turned so she could not see his face. “Of course. I have tomorrow off. . . . Anything you want. You know that.”

Anything you want, Mona repeated inwardly. She wanted to walk into this picture like Mary Poppins—well, not quite this picture; after all, she didn’t want Reid. And now he was hanging up and telling her he’d be leaving a bit early; he was going to California.

Mona was surprised at his saying even this much; he hadn’t mentioned Elaine since the visit. “Do you get to see each other often?” she asked.

“No.” His voice was becoming more distant, as if he were already on his way.

“Did you ever think of, uh, getting a job out there?” It was like walking ahead of him along a narrow bridge. At any point he could push her off. But he replied quietly that Elaine thought it was better this way, without the constant temptation to spend too much time away from her family. “It’s a hard situation for her,” he added.

Hard for her! “Isn’t it hard for you? Don’t you . . . get jealous?”

Reid’s lips tightened. “I just put up with it.” He turned to the maps.

Well, Mona thought, I’ve learned it’s not so hard to ask someone about jealousy. I just hope Henry’s in a reminiscing mood on Friday—and it turned out that he was.

So it was easy, sitting at his bedside in the hospital room, to ask about Dan, who had wanted fidelity. Easy to ask if Henry hadn’t found it just a bit thrilling to have someone be jealous and possessive about him. Easy, even, to keep her expression neutral when he said it hadn’t been thrilling at all—he hated hurting people’s feelings—and she saw that her jealousy would not be a gift. It would be a problem. It would have to stay hidden. She’d just have to put up with it.

“Could you bring more tapes next time?” Henry asked.

“Of course.” The blood rushed to Mona’s face. “Anything you want. You know that. Tomorrow?”

But then she recalled that over the weekend Gary would be here. Again. Doing what? Could they possibly. . . . She didn’t let her mind finish the sentence. But all through the next two days, through the drive in the country, and the lunch with a neighbor, and the blind date that was such a poor match it struck her and the man both as funny, she kept giving herself little bulletins: 48 hours to go, 30 hours, 24, until it was Monday morning and she was at the weather station for the day shift. “Eight hours to go.”

“Excuse me?” Reid glanced up from the sounding chart.

“I was talking to myself.”

He was twirling his Groton ring. But he wasn’t all bad; he had been wrong about the cold front and he’d acknowledged this in his usual way, with the good grace she found almost touching. And he knew about jealousy. He just put up with it; six years down, four to go, Elaine had said. Of course, this could be partly the same mulishness he so often displayed once he’d taken a notion about a forecast, but maybe one man’s mulishness was another man’s dedication. At least he wasn’t counting the cost. He wasn’t joining support groups for men who loved too much. He still said, Anything you want. The way I did to Henry, Mona thought, gazing at Reid, who was gazing at the chart. Okay, you hopeless reactionary, she said silently, inspire me again.

_____________

A week later to the day, Mona was at the weather station, beaming at a snow advisory. Henry was going home tomorrow. “We lucked out with the antibiotics this time,” the doctor had said. Mona felt as if she had taken an antibiotic for the soul; she was planning a special dinner for Henry’s homecoming, and she barely minded that Gary would be present. Soon I’ll be so ferociously wholesome and mature I’ll get bottled so they can sprinkle me at Girl Scout troop meetings, she thought, wrapping herself more tightly in the paisley shawl she had bought after hearing the news. She had gotten the shawl for herself and an enamel copper bowl for Henry. She even had something for Reid. “Get a load of this,” she said, handing him a newspaper clipping. “Stanford woman student accuses professor of ‘smoldering glances,’” said the headline.

Reid gave it only the briefest of glances himself, then stared outside at a sky so gray it seemed almost an act of faith to suppose anything blue above it.

“I guess Elaine wasn’t kidding when she told me what Stanford people were like,” Mona said. “She must be having a field day with this. Did she tell you about it?”

“No.”

Mona waited, then concluded he wasn’t going to say more. Probably he had decided that someone who trafficked in fake affection was unworthy of alluding to his sacred surreptitious adulterous love affair; well, the hell with him.

“You might as well know,” Reid’s voice was like freezing rain, “Elaine and I are no longer seeing each other.”

_____________

For several weeks, Mona heard nothing about Elaine. But as the days grew colder and the snow season intensified—the season Mona loved because it meant that everyone, everyone had to take an interest in the weather—stray facts about Elaine began wafting through Reid’s conversation like floaters drifting across a visual field. Elaine was practically the only person in Palo Alto who didn’t jog, bike, or play tennis, the only woman who wasn’t modeling herself on Jane Fonda. Elaine knew whole paragraphs of Jane Austen by heart. Elaine had a beautiful alto voice but no desire to sing professionally—Elaine thought her talents should be used to enrich her life, not to build a career. Did Mona realize that Elaine was nearly the only intelligent woman in America who still felt that way? “The others have all become lawyers,” Reid said, laying out several maps.

All those past rebuffs, and he supposed Mona would be willing to listen now that he wanted to keep Elaine in his life by talking about her. Well, he was right. Thick snowflakes swirled outside; the sky was as white as the ground. All the color was right here inside the weather station: the green patches on the radar screen; Mona’s paisley shawl; Reid’s face, red as ever, but thinner and tighter than before the break-up. She opened the window, scooped some snow off the sill, rolled it into a ball, and threw the ball out into the twilight. “Did her husband ever find out about you?” she asked, turning around.

“Not that we knew of.”

“But now she’s going to stay with him for good and never see you again.”

“I always knew it was a possibility.” A muscle twitched under his left eye.

“Fake affection drives out real?”

“This is her family,” Reid said evenly. “It’s not like setting yourself up to be the soulmate of a stranger.” He went back to the maps.

“But I thought you and she—”

“You thought everything had to be 50-50, the way they say in feminist support groups?” He didn’t look up. “Well, I’ve got news for you, nothing’s 50-50. Why should it be? Think about it.”

“I did and it doesn’t have to be.”

He raised his eyes and stared at her. “Then you’re practically the only person nowadays who realizes that.”

Ten minutes later, he was again reminiscing about Elaine, Elaine at the lakeside, arms full of flowers, and not a trace of Palo Alto in anything she said. Eighteen years in California, and she remained impervious to its ideas and jargon; she was like the Bermuda high whose strength rebuffed tropical disturbances. He can’t say anything nice about Elaine without saying something mean about everyone else, Mona thought. Then another thought struck her. True, Reid talked about Elaine rather than his feelings, and his reminiscences were nothing like Henry’s. But there was no getting around it; he was using Mona as an AIDS buddy.

_____________

“Well,” Mona took a final sip of the lemonade she had prepared, “is there anything else I can do before I go to the weather station?”

“How about a story about your life?” Henry swung his feet up onto his coffee table.

“How about a story about someone else’s life?” Mona said. “This is a man who many years ago fell in love with a beautiful woman who lived far away. It wasn’t just her beauty. He loved everything about her. But she was married and he was very upright; so he didn’t say anything. Then one day she told him she loved him. But she wouldn’t leave her husband until her two children were grown. For six years, the man lived for his telephone conversations and rare meetings with the woman, although their consciences plagued them. Then she decided she could no longer live a double life. He offered to wait and have no contact with her until the remaining four years were over. But she said it had to end right then, forever. So now he’s living in his memories, living in the past like a widower, except that he’s living in the future, too, hoping that in four years she’ll change her mind and come back and get him.”

“This is a real person?” Henry said.

“The man I work with. What do you think of him, Henry?”

“I think he sounds like a fool.”

“I don’t.”

“Do you like him?”

“I’m afraid so,” Mona said; she realized she meant “afraid” literally.

_____________

She tried to tell herself it was a trick of the imagination or that maybe she was turning into emotional flypaper—the sort of person who fell in love with anyone crossing his path. But it was like trying to reason your way out of a sunburn. Whatever she had felt and still felt for Henry no longer seemed romantic, any more than midnight-blue shoes looked black once you held them next to black ones. So Reid was wrong about Gresham’s Law—Mona leaned back in her living room’s softest chair—fake affection didn’t drive out real. It opened you up so you became dangerously receptive to real, even if it wasn’t directed at you. Or maybe that had nothing to do with it. Maybe any forecaster should have foreseen that a woman who valued, above all, constancy and devotion would be drawn to a man who had demonstrated these qualities, against all odds, for the past six years. And a man like Reid, what should he be expected to want? A traditional woman, of course, one who wasn’t politically correct and perhaps who would also bring glamor and excitement into his life. But who could ever consider Mona glamorous or exciting? Well, she said to herself, he calls me the queen of forecasting. Maybe that’s a start—oh, come on.

But she rose, walked into the bedroom, and rummaged through her top dresser drawer, her fingers trembling a little. In the first glow of her weight loss, she had experimented with cosmetics, enjoying the idea and feel of them, but in the end she’d decided the effect verged on the pathetic; it was so obvious how hard she was trying. She had not worn makeup in over a year. Now she put on blue eyeshadow, coral lipstick, and blusher. She wrapped her paisley shawl around her and secured it with the cameo brooch her parents had given her for her fortieth birthday. She took off her glasses and peered at her agreeably blurred reflection in the dresser mirror. “I am the queen of forecasting,” she said, and began laughing at how absurd she was being and how much fun it was.

_____________

At the outset, Mona had resolved to wait six weeks before trying to settle on a first step. But when the six weeks were up, she had no idea what to do. Reid was talking about Elaine much less now, but Mona had no idea what it meant. Play it by ear, she decided. “I have something to tell you, Reid,” she said almost as soon as she walked into the weather station. “You were right.”

Reid was standing near the satellite display, but he wasn’t studying the screen. He wasn’t gazing out the window. Incredibly, he seemed to be waiting for her.

“I know,” he said. “The front’s already over Detroit.” He looked excited and happy. Could you really feel that way about a forecast when your heart was broken? Well, maybe she would soon find out for herself, or maybe . . . Reid’s heart was not so broken any more. Mona had a surge of confidence and vigor, all her energy focused as if she were forecasting in a tight situation.

“Oh, I didn’t mean the front,” she said, striding toward him until she stood barely a foot away. “I meant you were right about fake affection. Not that it drives out real, exactly. It’s just nothing compared to real. I see that now, and I’m never going to be an AIDS buddy again.”

“You mean you’re going to stop visiting that man?”

“Oh, no,” said Mona, with a large emphatic gesture that almost hit the screen. “I have a responsibility to him. Besides, I like him. I’m just never going to sign up for another buddy. It’s stupid, thinking you can be someone’s kindred spirit just because he’s in trouble.”

“I have something to tell you, too.” Now Reid looked almost dizzy with happiness, and Mona had a flare of wild hope that lasted just long enough for her to notice it. “I couldn’t bear to say anything until it was definite,” Reid continued, “but Elaine got back in touch with me eight days ago. We’ve been talking. We’ve decided . . . she’s decided . . . we’re going to go back to the way things were. We’ll talk on the telephone when we can, and see each other occasionally, and it’s only four years now until we can get married.” He laughed. “You know how everyone thinks he’s part of an oppressed minority nowadays? Well, I think people who love someone they can’t be with ought to unite and demand affirmative action to give them the person they love, because if you love someone you can’t have, that makes you truly oppressed, you know?”

“Yes,” said Mona. “I know.”