An Atypical Affair

Long enough to remember the girl who proposed love to me in the neon light of the Park Avenue Drugstore (while her girl friends walked giggling in the night) who had such eerie mental insight into my coldness, coupled with what seemed to me an untrustworthy character, and who died a few months later, perhaps a month after I ceased thinking of her, of an unforeseen brain malignancy. By hindsight, I should have known that only such a state of deathliness could bare in a local girl such a luminous candor. I wish I had been kinder. This hindsight is the opposite, after all, of believing that even in the face of death man can be no more than ordinary man.