The poster in the theater lobby gave him a little shock on the way out: I paid to see that? He could barely remember -- in fact he didn't remember a thing about the film, except thinking he could have done better himself. Unfair, maybe. He was imaginative and often bored, and had been distracted during the movie by trying to remember the name of the woman beside him, who seemed to be his date.

He tried to imagine himself as a man with amnesia. No memories. Not: I'm fifty, I live in Chicago, I'm an ad agency writer, I'm odd man out in this year's family quarrel -- none of it. Just: I am.

She smiled at him now and he smiled back, trying not to look as if he were looking. Grey eyes, kinky yellowish hair, a little fat. To an observer it would appear that whoever's friends set up this blind date had needed to go pretty far afield in both cases, but she had put on a nice dress and high heels that made her pigeon-toed. He said, "Have you ever had a nickname, or have you always been...?"

She laughed. "With a name like mine, you don't need a nickname."

"Even your mother...?"

"Even Mom always called me Janel."

Two questions -- damn, he was good! And the name let him place her: light-skinned black. Unless she had a thing for scrawny bald pale men, they'd crossed each other off their possibility-lists by now, and could relax. The way she took his hand as he hailed a cab felt like consolation for not planning anything more, but when the driver asked "Where to?" she gave it a squeeze. He recited his address. When they got there she followed him right up the stairs. Maybe this was standard; he hadn't been out with her type before.

He felt impatient. When was he going to meet somebody instead of just sorting through types? And it would be embarrassing when she realized he hadn't retained a word of whatever they discussed at the dinner that surely preceded the flick. So his line came out less polished than usual: "I can offer you something to eat or a drink or just coffee, but you must do two things. One, ignore the mess, and two, tell me your intentions."

She glanced down, caught herself, froze and looked embarrassed.

He laughed. "Yep, those were the intentions I meant." She laughed, too, and that set the tone. They made coffee and popcorn and giggled like school kids about the Chicago single life.

SheÕd probably told him where she worked already, so instead of asking directly, he mentioned office parties. She said, "My place had the annual Christmas hostilities last week. I didn't go. Too much hustling and bustling and watching everybody watching everybody else watching. I could go back to McLeodville for that stuff."

Holiday party last week? This must be on an Orphan's Christmas date. The season had quite blessedly slipped his mind.

He said, "You know, I'm having a great time."

Faux pas. They might start discussing other Christmases, the time each of them had stayed drunk for the season, the times they'd debased themselves and wangled invitations home, the dark evening they'd contemplated suicide. Luckily she grinned and said, "Better than sex?"

Her bluntness made him feel protective. He took her hand. "I feel like we have more friends potential. You're young. If you sleep with all the guys you date, you'll burn out. On the other hand, you're an attractive woman and I'm a man and we like each other, so go ahead. If you say yes I'm at your cervix."

She giggled but didn't answer.

"Maybe later?" he prompted, and they let it drop. He'd established the password; if ever she wanted to, she could say, "It's later now." Meantime, it was Christmas Eve, and his mind as quiet as a snowy night. By this time most years it roared with the fights the relatives had picked so they wouldn't have to give each other presents. He must be having fun.

Janel yawned, "Almost time for Santa," and got up.

She wouldn't think he wasn't sleeping with her because she was darker, would she? Anyhow, he should quit talking about Christmas. The next thing out of his mouth, though, was, "Ever been to a midnight mass?"

Within minutes he was putting on a tie and she had done herself up so elegantly in a print bedspread that she looked, as he told her, like an Ethiopian queen. She kept the bedspread afterward to go home in, and he was pleased at the excuse it would give her to return, because as soon as the trumpet sounded in the rafters and they carried in the Savior, he perceived that his habitual inattention was rooted in despair.

The world didn't interest him. HeÕd forgotten the name of this woman wrapped in an obvious blanket. He was alone and wretched and had borne himself a long time in a frozen denial of life. If he died this instant, not even a lawyer would call his workplace about a late alimony check.

He turned to the woman and looked at her closely, but all he could see was his own face reflected in the moist curve of her eye. Then the image vanished as tears swelled over her lashes. She dabbed them with a corner of the bedspread.

"Tell me," he said.

"It's the same old thing I've been boring you with all evening."

"Tell me again. I haven't listened to anything anyoneÕs told me for years. Come outside and tell me again, and I'll listen."

The story she told him, as they walked down the aisle to the high doors and the frozen Chicago night, wasn't Shakespeare. A church-choir prodigy, family troubles, a hopeful young move to the City of Jazz, then nothing in particular but the slow accumulation of disappointments and little victories and the gradual deterioration of what had probably never been more than a middling good voice. And the one he told back, with his imagination and his quondam poetry, was nothing special, and yet he walked all the way to her place in a tumbledown outskirt, both of them under the bedspread, she singing, he reciting, both of them remarking that this kind of thing was the oldest in the world. He walked home very slowly, stopping often to look at the clouds and the stars and the houses as though he might never see them again, and mounted the steps to his apartment as the sun began to rise.