His cheek muscles are all that move his smile. This isn't going to be a fruitful conversation. She should back out now; say, "Sorry, thinking out loud." She should say, "I'd better be getting home." She should have left an hour ago.

"That guy." She points at the garishly inlaid end table. "He had the seat next to mine. We were stuck on the runway for three hours. He ate all the complimentary almonds and lectured me on Scientology. Amazing, running into him again like this."

The man shifts away. She hopes it's only the conversation and not that she smells. She hopes she hasn't wet herself again.

"It's Louis Quinze," he says.

Again makes it sound like this happens all the time. It's only when she drinks, which is only at parties these days, which means almost never. And in the mornings, after coffee, but that doesn't count, because 9 times out of 10 she makes it to the bathroom on time, or almost on time, and even when she doesn't it's just her nightgown, she can throw it in the hamper and take a shower, start the day over. It's just that with a few glasses of wine, she doesn't always notice it happening. She sends an exploratory hand down. Dry.

"Louie Krantz, maybe." She can see him debating with himself whether to educate her or run. "Look, the pot belly, the loud plaid pants, the little chicken legs."

Condescension wins out. "That is parquetry."

She closes her eyes. There is no one left to play with. All the party conversation now is about the real estate bubble, the cost of private schools, the best vacation spot, with "best" defined as "least likely to show up on Expedia."

Closing the eyes was not a good idea. She's dizzy, and they all probably think she's asleep, some tipsy old lady passed out on the couch. She forces herself back, grabs the arm of the settee and scans the room to orient herself. That child in the pink tank top holding court by the bar doesn't seem to be talking about real estate prices. Maybe that's just what people talk to Amy about now that she's no longer desirable. Maybe the charm and wit Amy has banked on all these years were really just sex.

Or maybe she actually used to say witty things, but she's forgotten how. She only thinks she's clever because she's in her dotage. Maybe "Louie Krantz" is an anti-Semitic slur. Is Krantz a Jewish name? Amy can't remember.

No, it was sex.

Face it, sparkling repartee has never been her forte. Even at her social peak, she never advanced much beyond furniture disparagement. In the old days, though, it didn't matter. She would throw down a few glasses of wine and say the first thing that came into her head, and people were charmed. Men and women, young and old. Did they all want to sleep with her? Okay, not literal sex, but excitement, possibility. "Libido," she says, and Mr. Parquetry does move away then. "Not you," she can't help saying, "him. Louie here." She stands up with all the dignity the wine and myopia allow her, grabs her cane, and makes her way to the bathroom, for insurance, as she used to instruct her son to do before a long trip.

The host of the party, a friend of that very son—no, not a friend, she reminds herself; a colleague, people don't have time for friends anymore; parties are for networking, or for connecting, she thinks, looking at the pink girl again; some things don't change; the host, who had to settle for just Amy at the last minute, kisses her goodbye without recognition, though they have attended the same parties for thirty years. If Amy actually had any dignity she would have canceled when Jamie and Lorraine did—as they think she did—but she never gets to put on a nice dress and meet new people anymore.

In the old days, god, she sounds like her own grandmother, but in the old days she wouldn't have been allowed to leave alone and drunk, to stumble down the subway steps as she is doing now. There would have been a cab, an escort, the offer of a couch. Back when she didn't need help; when she could run a ten-minute mile in party shoes and anyway, Brendan was never more than a phone call away.

That was part of it, though, wasn't it. It wasn't just sex. She was the wife of a Big Man, the mother of an Up and Comer. People couldn't afford to notice that her jokes were stupid. And she accepted it, accepted all that privilege, as if it attached to her DNA, would always be hers. She really thought that. Even now, she wickedly hopes the parquetry pedant will realize he snubbed the widow of Brendan Pointer, the mother of James Pointer. The grandmother of Jonathan Pointer, but nobody cares about that. Not even Amy, not anymore.

Amy has her own accomplishments, but they are more private; not the sort to earn her points on the party circuit. Therapy patients don't tend to give blurbs or awards. And she never cared, or thought she cared, for the acclaim that was so vital to Brendan, and then to Jamie. She was above all that. Yet here she is, slumped in the C train at 1 AM, feeling sorry for herself because she went to a party and nobody bowed down.

The face that stares back from the window looks tired and mean. The mouth pulls down at the ends. The eyes are dull. "I wouldn't talk to you either," she says. The old man across from her starts awake.

"Sorry," she says. "Woolgathering." He nods off again. They are the only two people in the car. Everyone else is out enjoying themselves, or home with their families. Everyone but Jonathan, who is probably out drinking and making people miserable, and Amy, party reject, and this old man.

He's an old man, but he's Amy's age. How the hell did this happen? He's an old-fashioned old man, though, like her father was, shapeless in a shiny gray suit and battered brown oxfords. She knows what his feet look like: big, swollen toes, nails fungal and misshapen from a lifetime of cheap shoes. Amy isn't old like that. She goes to the gym; she gets nice haircuts. She keeps up. She could wear open-toed shoes without shame, if it weren't for the bone density thing. Another fall and she'll land in a nursing home, wearing Depends. She'd rather drink bleach.

Then what is she doing on this jerky, twisting train, what possessed her to do the granny two-step down the cement stairs, cane hooked over her arm, clutching the railing with both hands, when god knows there's plenty of money for a cab? She can hear Jamie's willed patience, his thinly veiled panic over her mental state, if she told him about this, which she won't.

She has never been able to resist a train ride. She was put out that nobody cared if she died, but she would have said no to a taxi, to a spare couch, even to that idiot Jonathan, who used to insist on driving her places. There is nothing like swirling through the night as the brakes screech and the tunnel lights streak past. It's like flying. And flying, she would have probed a patient, is like…?

In her childhood, coming into Manhattan—The City—was as exotic as flying to another planet. Her father would bring Amy and her brother, Joey, in for the Macy's parade every Thanksgiving. The passage over the Manhattan Bridge was better than the Cyclone, because you weren't strapped in. She and Joey would shriek and twirl around on the poles to make themselves even dizzier (an effect that Amy now has to resort to wine to replicate), annoying all the adults, but nobody stopped them because her mother and grandmother were home basting the turkey and sniping at each other. She remembers a red wool coat with a black velvet collar, a matching red and black velvet stewardess cap. Another year, later, a double-breasted navy reefer, with anchors embossed on the gold buttons. How could that be, though? Navy is a spring color, or it used to be. Her grandmother would never have allowed her out in a navy coat in November. Yet she can feel the chink of the hollow gold buttons against the hollow silver pole. If it were spring, the Easter show at Radio City, her mother would have been there, and Amy would have had to sit with her white-gloved hands folded over her patent leather purse, a little lady.

There is no one left to ask about this. Even the cranky commuters must all be dead by now. When Amy dies, so will the smell of tobacco and old sweat in her father's jacket; so will Joey's leather aviator cap, the flaps flying out from his head as he orbited the pole. If these excursions are remembered at all—if by some fluke they have lodged in Jamie's memory banks (Jonathan she won't think about) they will be fleshless stories, and it will be Amy's voice, Amy's smell, that fills and threatens to overwhelm the senses.

Jonathan started torturing Amy right after Brendan died. (All right, then, she will think about him. She just won't invest any emotional energy.) He thought she should have saved his grandfather, from an aneurysm; he thought she was going to abandon him, too; he thought—he wasn't thinking at all, but for once she was too raw to care what Jonathan felt, what Jonathan needed, and she hated him right back. For ten months he browbeat and bullied her with rehab talk about "clearing the air" and "achieving closure," as if Brendan hovered between them like Casper the Ghost and all they needed was to exorcise him and spackle over the hole and all would be dandy again. Which she would have tolerated if he had absorbed anything else from that focus-group-driven hash of platitudes besides its pretentious language. But he continued to show up belching Gallo, blaming her for his misery, and Amy, who, let's be honest, was not exactly holding back on her own consumption right then, not to mention the Ambien, would free-associate all over him, calling him a loser, a crybaby, a dandruff-ridden narcissist, everything she had censored all those years, through the abandoned graduate program, the job layoff, the divorce and the custody hearings, when she and Brendan were the only ones who never gave up on him. Amy, who never raises her voice—who is known for her ability, transmitted from her grandmother, to communicate offense through erect posture, pointed stares, and beautifully modulated vocal tones—found herself in screaming matches with her grandson. Once she took the raspberry sherbet she had been about to serve him—in her grandmother's cut-glass footed dish—dumped it on his head, and heaved the dish to the floor, shattering it. Thick red slime everywhere, on the walls, the tablecloth, sticky red footprints down the hall when Jonathan stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door.

It was great, actually. Those fights were the only events that interested her, from the moment Brendan's EKG went flat until her birthday, ten months later, when Jonathan kidnapped her.

She had plans for the day. Jamie and Lorraine were in London, but her dear friends Suzanne and Marsha had invited her to lunch at Armando's; were, in fact, waiting for her there, she later learned, with roses and Valrhona and special instructions to the maitre d' regarding a chocolate mousse cake, as Jonathan ushered her—forced her, as she would tell her friends, though all he really did was whine and plead—into his bashed-up Honda, buckled her in, and sped off for god knew where.

When he pulled onto the BQE, she stiffened. Every morning during those months, she awoke chasing wisps of dreams, of Bay Ridge, of her mother; her days were haunted by the image of an empty, abandoned house, decaying, collapsing from within. No matter that every December Amy receives a picture of the perfectly nice family from Sunset Park that bought her childhood home; she knew her very bones would dissolve if she had to face the glossy front porch, the stylish faux-antique swing where her rusty blue Schwinn used to take shelter. She was trying to formulate an excuse that wouldn't offend Jonathan (since it was early yet; both were still sober) when he turned off onto the LIE. For the rest of the trip he wouldn't engage with her at all except to smile in his self-satisfied way and repeat, "Just wait-you'll love it." She tried to play along, until she saw the signs for the Cradle of Aviation Museum. For this she was standing up dear friends who empathized and supported—who, in fact, when informed of the kidnapping (thank god for cell phones) responded with alarm and offers of rescue (laughable, since, like her, they had both stopped driving years ago and neither could see worth a damn, but still)—who did not kidnap and abuse.

The anticipated pilgrimage to Bay Ridge would have been dreadful, but she had fielded Jonathan's well-meant "gifts" since his toddlerhood, and she never held them against him. This, though, she felt, was intolerable—to use her birthday as yet another chance to push her face into his decade-long resentment, the source (according to him of every subsequent disappointment: Amy's failure to prevent his parents from shaming him out of his one and only vocation. In Jonathan's version, he and Grandpa Brendan—the Only Person who Really Understood him—were no match for the scorn of the Goddamn Snobs who insisted that he was letting the team down, starting with his petition to join the Civil Air Patrol at 16; that in Our Family we go to college, become professionals or highbrow artists, not glorified bus drivers; and their combined elitist pressure caused him to cave and ruined his life. Never mind that Amy's paternal grandfather spent his entire working life collecting trolley tickets; that the regretted bus driver remark referred only to Jonathan's notoriously low threshold for tedium; and that, in any event, nobody had kidnapped him; that even now the only thing stopping him from enrolling in flight school was his preference for nursing his beloved grievance over facing up to his responsibility for his own life–and she opened her mouth to say so but Jonathan laid a hand on her shoulder and said, "No, Grandma, really. You will love this."

So she allowed herself to be dragged past the atrium where early-model planes dangled like the bluebird mobile that used to hang over Jonathan's crib; past the 60's-era TWA passenger cabin that sparked fond memories of meal-displacing turbulence; to the aluminum capsule where a turbaned, worried looking young man monitored their approach. FLIGHT SIMULATOR, the banner read, with a checklist of disqualifying medical conditions that read like the notes from Amy's last doctor visit. "Oh, no," she said. "Absolutely not."

"They have to post those lists, in case of lawsuits," Jonathan told her. "This is no more dangerous than driving—or riding the Cyclone.

"This is Abdul. I was here last week with the kids, and I told him I'd come back with my grandma—I don't think he believed me."

"Ahmed," the young man said. "Pleased to meet you. But I don't believe—"

Amy didn't believe, either. "No," she repeated, but her heart beat so powerfully it set the ruffles on her blouse shaking.

"I took Simone up," Jonathan said. "Now she wants to learn to fly."

This was insane, impossible. "I cannot allow this," Ahmed put in, and tears sprang into Amy's eyes. It was too much, the kidnapping, the buildup, the aborted argument, this ridiculous scheme, and now the pronouncement that she was past the age for adventure.

"There are other laws," she heard herself say, "against age discrimination."

Which is how she came to be buckled in next to Jonathan, the guard rail snapped in place, her purse left in Ahmed's reluctant care. "This is a huge mistake," she said, but not before the capsule was sealed and her idiot grandson had gunned the engine.

Then they were suspended over a cartoon landscape, trees and fields and the ocean, and Amy felt herself become virtual as well, weightless, unreal. "Let me know when you're ready for a loop-the-loop," Jonathan said.

"You have lost your mind," Amy retorted. "All right—now."

And they were turning, inverted, Amy's skirt flying over her head, billowing out and blinding Jonathan, who laughed and batted it back at her, yelling, "Oh, my god, we're going to crash!"

Amy gasped, "Let's!" and Jonathan lurched them forward into a somersault, then over to the right, and there was nothing left of the earth, the universe, of love or hope or grief, no Brendan, no grandparents, just the rolling and the shrieking and the colors whirling, like the Cyclone, the subway, like the end of the world, until suddenly it was over and Ahmed was unbuckling her. She nodded to the assemblage of uniformed men who had evidently been summoned to witness her adventure on the video screen she hadn't noticed on the way in. "That was very amusing, thank you," she said, as she collected her purse.

On the way home she started to say, what, she has no idea now, but the words caught in her windpipe and she clutched her chest and then Jonathan was on his cell getting directions to North Shore Hospital and the next thing she knew Jamie and Jonathan were shouting at each other and a nurse was shushing them, and that was the last time she saw Jonathan. Four months and three weeks ago. He doesn't pick up the phone for Amy. "I'm fine," she told his machine as soon as she was released. "It was just a warning—a blessing, really," though she knows he heard differently from Jamie. She talks to Janine, his ex-wife, every morning, as always, and kisses the children through the phone wire before they leave for school; she knows from Janine that Jonathan has a new job and from Simone and Josh that they never went back to the museum. She and Jamie don't mention him anymore. She doesn't call Jonathan anymore, either, for two months now, since she shouted into his machine, "I don't care about my heart, if you don't call me I will hate you forever," which is what she plans to do. She is finished with him. She wouldn't have called him for a ride tonight if the entire transit system had shut down. The doors close on 23rd Street. It's a buckdancer's choice, whether to stand up and risk falling when the train takes a sharp curve, or wait until after the swerve and possibly miss her stop. She's slow enough tonight to warrant gathering herself early. She clutches the pole and braces herself, but the wine must have dulled her reflexes: as the train rights itself, she finds herself sprawled on the lap of the old man across the aisle, who turns out not to be old, or a man, after all. It is a big, bald woman in a silver suit and men's shoes-or maybe a man with breasts and lipstick? After more than six decades in the West Village, Amy is fairly adept at divining gender from subtle cues, but she's stumped. The person stares back at her. "So sorry," Amy says. "The train-I slipped—" She is babbling. There is no indignation in the smooth, blank face, nothing to read or accommodate. Her cane has landed on the empty seat next to him, and she reaches for it.

A silver-clad arm grips her tightly around the waist. Amy braces herself to be snapped in two. Jamie is right; she takes stupid risks, riding the deserted trains at odd hours; she tries to think whether she even has identification in her small evening bag. Her cell phone, of course; Jamie's number is programmed in, and she hasn't deleted Jonathan's yet, though she should have, too late now. They will be notified when her body is found, if he/she doesn't steal her purse, too. The other arm reaches over to Amy's cane. The person hands it to her, smiling, and says something in a language she doesn't understand.

It dawns on her that she does not have to worry about gender anymore. She will never have sex again. Nobody in their right mind will ever flirt with her again. She is free of all that, as free as this person seems to be, "like an angel," she says. The wan, moman, her savior looks at her uncomprehendingly. She laughs and flaps her arms like wings. "Angel," she repeats.

The angel laughs too, and flaps its free arm in imitation. "You fly," it says, in an accent that could be Eastern European, but maybe it's Asian, and she realizes she doesn't have to care about that anymore, either.

"Fly," she repeats, and they sit, Amy cradled in its lap, flapping their arms and laughing as the train slows to a stop.

"Louie Krantz, Jet Blue!" she shouts.

The angel helps her to her feet and steadies her as the doors open at 14th Street. "Bye-bye," it calls, and kisses its hand to her.

Upstairs, she leans against the cement wall of the old bank to catch her breath. From habit, she scans the empty sky for airplane lights. Jonathan could name every model of plane from the time he was eleven. She takes out her cell phone and presses 1#. "This is Jonathan Pointer," she hears. "I'm not available."

"I just want you to know," she whispers, but she hangs up before the beep.