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“I’m not nervous, Simon. At least I wasn’t before I went into that bar.”

“What did you do when this dream girl talked to you?”

“I said some boring stuff to her and felt pathetic when she left.”

“My lab rat is discovering the side effects of the marriage potion, which is quite strange considering he hasn’t even been fed it yet.”

“Exactly!”

“Look, you won’t even remember what this woman looks like tomorrow morning. Here’s what we’re going to do: we’ll just forget all about this evening at Novecento, and everything will go back to normal.”

“I wish it was as simple as that.”

“Do you want us to go back there tomorrow night? With any luck your stranger will be there, and maybe when you see her again you’ll be able to think straight.”

“I won’t do that to Valerie.” Simon was probably right; he had drunk far too much to be thinking straight, and fear was making him go off the rails. Valerie was an exceptional woman and one of life’s unexpected strokes of luck, as her best friend, Colette, kept telling him.

Andrew made Simon swear he’d never tell anyone what had happened that night, and thanked him for making him see reason.

They climbed into the same taxi. Simon dropped Andrew off in the West Village and promised to call him the next day to find out how he was doing.

* * *

Andrew woke up the next day feeling the exact opposite of what Simon had predicted. The face of the stranger he’d met in Novecento and the smell of her perfume were crystal clear in his memory. He shut his eyes again and the sight of her long hands toying with her glass of wine, her penetrating gaze and the sound of her voice came flooding back. As he made himself a coffee, he felt an emptiness, or rather an absence, and the urgent need to see the woman whom he imagined could fill it.

His telephone rang. Valerie brought him back to a reality that wrenched his heart, asking if his evening had been up to expectations. He told her he’d had dinner with Simon in a good restaurant and a drink in a bar in SoHo. Nothing special. He hung up, feeling guilty about lying for the first time to the woman he was about to marry.

Then he remembered the little white lie he’d told when he’d come back from Buenos Aires and sworn to Valerie he’d already taken his wedding suit to be altered. As if to right his wrong, he called the tailor immediately and arranged to take it in during his lunch break.

Perhaps that was the reason for the unfortunate episode in the bar. In life, every little thing had meaning, and that incident had only happened to remind him he needed to get his wedding suit pants rehemmed and jacket sleeves shortened, so his future wife wouldn’t be bitterly disappointed when he showed up for their wedding looking like he’d borrowed his big brother’s suit.

You don’t even have a big brother, you jerk,
Andrew mumbled to himself.
And, as jerks go, you’re hard to beat.

Andrew left the office at noon. As the tailor chalked the alterations on the jacket sleeves and darts on the back that he said were vital if his client wanted to look stylish, and complained for the umpteenth time that this really was leaving it till the last minute, Andrew felt a deep sense of unease. Once the fitting session was over, he took off the suit and hurriedly got dressed again. Everything would be ready the following Friday, the tailor assured him; Andrew could drop by at the end of the morning.

When he checked his phone, he found several worried messages from Valerie. They’d arranged to meet for lunch over on 42nd Street and she’d been waiting for him for an hour.

Andrew called to apologize, citing an impromptu work meeting. If his secretary had said he was out, that was only because no one at that paper ever paid attention to anyone else. His second lie of the day.

That evening, Andrew turned up at Valerie’s with a bouquet of flowers. Since he’d asked her to marry him, he regularly had mauve roses, her favorites, delivered to her. But he found the apartment empty and a hastily scribbled note on the coffee table in the living room.

Called out to an emergency. Back late. Don’t wait up. Love you
.

He left the building and walked to Mary’s Fish Camp for dinner. He didn’t stop looking at his watch during the meal, and asked for the check before he’d even finished his main course. As soon as he was out the door, he jumped in a taxi.

Back in SoHo, he paced up and down the sidewalk in front of Novecento, longing to go in for a drink. The doorman, who doubled as a bouncer, took out a cigarette and asked Andrew for a light. Andrew had quit smoking years ago.

“Want to go in? It’s real quiet tonight.”

Andrew decided the invitation was another sign.

The doorman had been right. One quick glance was all it took for Andrew to realize the beautiful stranger from last night hadn’t returned. Feeling ridiculous, he downed the Fernet and Coke he’d ordered and asked the bartender for the bill.

“Just one drink tonight?” the man asked.

“You remember me?”

“Sure. You knocked back five Fernet and Cokes in a row last night. I wouldn’t forget that in a hurry.”

Andrew hesitated, then asked for another drink. He watched the bartender pouring it and asked him a surprising question for a soon-to-be-married man.

“The woman who was sitting next to me—do you remember her? Is she a regular?”

The bartender looked pensive.

“I see a lot of pretty women in this bar,” he said. “No, can’t say I do. Is it important?”

“Yes,” said Andrew. “Actually, no. Look, I have to go. What do I owe you?”

The bartender turned away to ring up the total.

Andrew slipped three twenty-dollar bills over the counter. “If she stops by again, and asks you about the Fernet and Coke man, here’s my card. Please give it to her.”

“You’re with the
Times
?”

“Like it says on the card.”

“Hey, if you want to do a write-up about this place someday, feel free.”

“I’ll do my best to remember,” Andrew said. “You too, please.”

The bartender winked at him as he stashed the card away in his till.

Andrew checked the time as he walked out of Novecento. If Valerie’s emergency had run late, maybe he’d be home before her. Otherwise he’d tell her he’d been working overtime. One more lie hardly mattered.

* * *

From that evening on, Andrew could feel his composure progressively cracking with each passing day. He even got into a heated dispute with his colleague Freddy Olson when he caught him prying through his desk. Olson was envious of Andrew and an overall creep. But Andrew usually never lost his cool. He told himself he was stressed out because he had so much to do during the last two weeks of June. He still had to finish writing the article he’d researched on his two trips to Argentina; he was hoping it would be as widely read as his report from China. It was due to go to press the following Monday. Olivia Stern was a very punctilious editor, and he knew she’d be even pickier than usual when it came to an investigative story to be splashed over several pages in Tuesday’s paper. She would spend all of Saturday reading through the story and making changes, which she would e-mail him that same evening. What a strange weekend it would be, Andrew mused; on Saturday he’d be making his marriage vows before God, and on Sunday he’d be apologizing to Valerie for putting off their honeymoon because of his damn job and this story that was so important to his boss.

Meanwhile, Andrew couldn’t get the stranger at Novecento out of his head. His desire to see the woman again was turning into an obsession, and he couldn’t understand why.

He was feeling more lost than ever when he went to pick up his suit on Friday. The tailor heard him sigh as he stood looking at himself in the mirror.

“You don’t like the cut?” he asked unhappily.

“No, Mr. Zanelli. You’ve done a perfect job.”

The tailor surveyed Andrew and hitched up the right shoulder of the suit jacket.

“But you’re upset about something, aren’t you?” he asked, sticking a needle into the bottom of the jacket sleeve.

“It’s complicated.”

“Hmm. One of your arms is definitely longer than the other,” he remarked. “I hadn’t noticed that at the fitting. Give me a few minutes. We’ll fix this right away.”

“Don’t bother. It’s the kind of suit I’ll only wear once in my life, isn’t it?”

“I hope so. But it’s also the kind of photograph you’ll be looking at all your life, and when your grandchildren tell you that your jacket didn’t fit properly, I wouldn’t want you telling them you had a bad tailor. So let me get on with my job.”

“It’s just that I’ve got a very important story to finish by tonight, Mr. Zanelli.”

“And I’ve got a very important suit to finish in the next fifteen minutes. You were saying something’s complicated?”

“That’s right,” Andrew sighed.

“What kind of thing, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I guess you’re bound by professional secrecy too, Mr. Zanelli.”

“I will be if you say my name properly. It’s Zanetti, not Zanelli. Take off that jacket and sit down. I’ll fix it while we talk.”

So while Mr. Zanetti adjusted the sleeve of Andrew’s suit jacket, Andrew told him how he had been reunited with his high school sweetheart as she was coming out of a bar a year ago and how, days before his wedding, he’d come across a woman in another bar who he couldn’t stop thinking about ever since he had set eyes on her.

“Maybe you should stop going out,” the tailor said. “That would make your life easier. I have to say it’s an unusual story,” he added, hunting through a drawer for a spool of thread.

“My best friend Simon says exactly the opposite.”

“He’s got a strange way of looking at things, this Simon. Can I ask you something?”

“Anything you like, if it’ll help me see things more clearly.”

“If you could replay the whole thing, Mr. Stilman—if you could choose between not getting back together with the woman you’re about to marry and not meeting the woman who’s obsessing you, which would you prefer?”

“One of these women is my soul mate. As for the other one . . . I don’t even know her name.”

“So you see, it’s not that complicated.”

“Well, when you put it that way . . . ”

“I’m a lot older than you, Mr. Stilman, so I’m going to take the liberty of talking to you like a father. But I should confess I’ve never had children, so I have no experience in the matter.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Well, since you’re asking. Life isn’t like one of those modern gadgets where you just press ‘rewind’ to listen to your favorite song again. There’s no going back. And some actions can have irreparable consequences—like falling for some total stranger, however mesmerizing she may be, right before your wedding. If you continue, I fear you’ll regret it, not to mention the damage you’ll be causing the people you love. And if you’re going to say you have no control over your heart, just remember you have a head too, and remember to use it. There’s no harm in being attracted to a woman, so long as it doesn’t go any further than that.”

“Have you ever felt like you’d met your soul mate, Mr. Zanetti?”

“A soul mate? What a delightful idea. When I was in my twenties I thought I’d met her each time I went out dancing on a Saturday night. I used to be a very good dancer, and I fell in love with every partner I had. I’ve often wondered how people know they’ve met their soul mate before they’ve built a relationship with that person.”

“Are you married, Mr. Zanetti?”

“I’ve been married four times, so I should know what I’m talking about!”

As he said goodbye to Andrew, Mr. Zanetti assured him that since both sleeves of his jacket were now the right length, nothing could get in the way of the happiness awaiting him. Andrew walked out of the tailor’s firmly resolved to wear his wedding suit with pride the next day.

V
alerie’s mother came up to Andrew just before the ceremony began, brushed his shoulder gently and whispered into his ear: “Ben, you old devil! Just goes to show you can always get what you want if you are persistent enough. I remember you mooning over my daughter when you were sixteen. I didn’t think you had a snowball’s chance in hell with her. And now here we all are in church!”

Andrew began to understand why his wife-to-be had been so keen to get away from her folks when the first chance came along.

Valerie had never looked lovelier. She was wearing a simple, elegant white dress. She had her hair up under a small white pillbox hat like the ones the Pan Am stewardesses used to wear, except theirs had been blue. Her father led her up to the altar where Andrew was waiting for her. She smiled at him, her eyes brimming with love.

The priest’s sermon was perfect and made Andrew very emotional.

They said their vows, exchanged rings and gave each other a long kiss. Valerie’s parents, Colette and Simon burst into applause as they walked out of the church. Lifting his eyes to the sky, Andrew couldn’t help thinking his own parents were looking down on them.

The little procession walked down the path through the garden of the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, where climbing roses bent under the weight of countless flowers and the tulip-filled flowerbeds were a riot of color. It was a beautiful day. Valerie was radiant, and Andrew was happy.

Until, as they came out on Hudson Street, he glimpsed a woman’s face at the window of a black SUV stopped at a red light. A woman he wouldn’t recognize if he bumped into her again, his best man had assured him; a woman with whom he’d exchanged a few trite words in a SoHo bar.

Andrew felt a lump in his throat, and a raging thirst for a Fernet and Coke despite the early hour.

“Everything okay?” Valerie asked, concerned. “You’ve turned pale all of a sudden.”

“I’m just feeling emotional,” Andrew replied.

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the SUV at the lights. His gaze followed it as it was swallowed up in the flow of traffic. Andrew felt his heart constrict. He could have sworn the stranger from Novecento had smiled at him.