Summer is beginning its long atrophy into barrenness. A woman is sitting for lunch with a man. They are very old friends who once might have been more than that. They are in a mid-sized middle western city that has been ravaged by industrial outsourcing. Good night, steel. Good night, auto. The city is foreign to him, but familiar in an elegiac way to her. Whatever initially compelled her to live here has long since languished, much as the season’s warmth, its robust green and diffuse sun spray. But, for reasons inarticulable, she has not left.

He thinks: maybe she is tired. Maybe she has stopped searching for happiness, or at the very least stopped chasing it. Or maybe things are not as bad as they seem.

He is passing through, having delivered his youngest son to college. His wife is dead, and her marriage has failed. These are a few of the minor entropies of existence, and neither of them is remarkable for their sorrow. Besides, they are reasonably happy on this supple afternoon that bridges two seasons.

For many years, this man thought he would marry this woman. Thought, no matter what he said, that fate, a thing he believed in only under extreme circumstances, would bring them together. Then, one summer she met a marine biologist while studying in San Diego. She sent the man a letter, and wrote that she’d met the man of her dreams. Well, he thought, fate doesn’t exist. Nor God.

Those years of unrealized desire, that longing, has transfigured into something neither of them can place. It’s a gentle, knowing affection; melancholy but often gracious. Intimacy, they have learned, often tarnishes things. And sitting here, while she eats a chicken Caesar salad and he messily devours a turkey burger with crumbled blue cheese, they have regained a luster that both of them thought was no longer attainable. Or, they manage moments where a passerby might see them and, for half a second before resuming their own life, think: how sweet that they are still this happy after all these years. They resemble, after many years apart, the fulfilled coupling that neither of them has found.

They move quickly through the practical matters. Her daughter studies poetry at an east coast liberal arts college. So impractical! she bemoans; yes, but dignified, he comforts. Her son lives with his father, and the two fight as only father and son can fight. It’s like they’re yelling into a mirror, she says, and not without a hint of triumph. His oldest son plays bass for a band touring college campuses and making little money. His youngest is newly on his own with what seems like his entire life ahead of him. It will escape him before he can understand a thing, he says, smiling wryly; it hasn’t yet escaped us, has it? she asks, while he thinks that perhaps fate works in protracted, strange ways.

They delve into more important things.

God, of course. Her faith was present, but has wavered. His faith never existed, and has not materialized. They discuss the scale of the world, which seems larger and more terrifying by the day. She mentions, strangely, love, and how it muddles after the irresponsible years of adolescence, knows nothing of clarity, and is best avoided beyond a certain age. Or, she specifies, is best avoided in the precipitous, indulgent sense. Neither will admit they are beyond the threshold of all-consuming love. Both still hold out hope.

Tell me about your writing, she says. He will always be perspicacious to her, slightly bedraggled, the world always wheeling from his control. His eyes, with their insouciant cobalt sheen, remind her that he is still the same man; still the familiar, precocious boy of her memory. They are the eyes of a flawed but decent man, and well acquainted with failure. I’ll never understand why you couldn’t find someone to publish you, she says. Well, he says, I was just never quite good enough. Though, he tells her, I’ve written a marvelous novel in my head, a real masterpiece, and she smiles, her body humming an elegy for his nostalgic peculiarities. And why don’t you write it? she asks. Well, he says, then it wouldn’t be perfect, and I don’t think my heart could handle that failure.

This leads them to the subjective perfections of art. He prefers his art expansive, messy, sprawled with the unruly mastery of death. She, scientific minded, enjoys linearity, circularity, strictness.

Have you spoken at all with James? he asks tentatively. No, she says, looking, for the first time, away from him. Not in years. I know nothing of his life anymore, the small details that fill his day. Which is always so strange, to spend all those years loving someone and then to realize you no longer know what books they read or what people they miss or what TV shows they watch. We become such strangers.

Do you miss him? he asks.

Of course. Time doesn’t change that. Although I don’t miss him in an active way. But there are moments when a scent, or a sound, or some other numinous thing springs from nowhere and I’m reminded of a time in my life when he was present. And I miss him then, she continues, looking just over his right shoulder now. But I think mostly I am missing that irretrievable point in my life, some breath of the past when certain threads were full of possibility and had not yet unraveled.

He marvels at the elegant, swift, and formal intonations of her hands that are very much like leaves lost on an incommensurable current. She did not moves her hands like this when she was a girl.

I miss that he knew me as a young woman, loved my ambitions and dreams, and those very dreams, long since dead inside me, will always have a home inside him. But that’s why our marriage failed. What he loved and adored was no longer true, and he couldn’t adapt. He loved a phantom, an apparition.

She finally meets his eyes again and smiles very sadly.

We all love ghosts, don’t you think? she says. Ghosts of ourselves, ghosts of others. At my age, I sometimes fear that they’re the only thing left.

Suddenly, they are outside themselves, into an exquisite lull, as if entering an unexpected meadow. They both smile like two kids fumbling with unexplored body parts, newly conscious of the circumnavigating world. I am too old for anything but pleasure, he thinks. She thinks, yes, this could not have been anything else.

I’ll be back in a minute, he says, I need to find the bathroom. She watches him through the crowd and feels the unassailable melancholy of so many frail bodies engulfed in the ocher hue of autumn. There’s not a thing any of them can do to stop its coming.

All this dying, she says when he returns, affects me in ways it didn’t as a girl. The falling off of things. You know, he says, somewhere the world is blooming. And she thinks, but does not say aloud: Yes, but it is such a brief flowering.

They talk until sundown. She walks him to his car, and he looks wildly expectant, like she might say something that could redeem his entire life. She leaves him with a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. He stands alone for a long time, listening to the invisible cicadas blanketing the earth with their sweet, dying lament.