I guess I’d told that story so many times that I’d begun to give it word-for-word the same - a polished performance, so to speak. But then, it meant something to me: a little, unimportant piece of my life that was still unfinished.

It started on the night bus out of Providence, the one time I ever took it, coming back from the Newport Folk Festival. It started promisingly, too. I’d already missed the connecting bus from Newport and feared the friend driving me wouldn’t find the Providence bus station in time, but here I was, and there was a vacant seat available---not only that, but it was next to an attractive young woman. And instead of coldly turning her back on the empty space to glare out the window and radiate the hope she’d stay alone, she gave me the ghost of a smile. A very non-committal ghost, but at least as hospitable as a stranger could hope for.

“Mind if I sit here,” I asked.

“Go right ahead,” she said.

And that was it until the bus filled up, the door clunked shut, the airbrakes hissed release, and we rumbled off into the darkness. Then, we started to talk.

I honestly don’t remember a word of that conversation, or even what we discussed. That was a long time back—more than 60 years. I do remember that we were only about ten minutes from the terminal when we swapped names and that we were on first names for the rest of the night: Ben and Susan. Or maybe Carol. Or one of those names shared by sixteen girls you knew, if you’re in my generation. I don’t recall just what we talked about—oddly, not much about the Festival, although she’d been there, too—but I know we found topics in common. What I do remember about the conversation, though, was its warmth and ease ... and a definite, if tiny, spark of romance.

That doesn’t happen to me, much, traveling. God knows, romance is the traveler’s dream-- at least, this traveler’s. It rarely works that way.

I remember my first trip to Paris: sitting down at cafés, spotting some attractive young lady, studiously thinking through some gambit I could offer her in French and then continue from in French ... and always being answered by a blank, uncomprehending “Bitte?” or “Prego?” I realized, after a while, that any young women you see sitting at a Paris cafe by day are probably tourists, foreigners like yourself. The Parisian girls are probably all at their jobs, working.

Still, there’s romance and romance. This wasn’t one of those steamy stories you sometimes read, about fast, impersonal sexual encounters in a bus or airliner. I think it was an hour and a half, at least, before we started holding hands. About the most physical thing between us, after that, was when she started leaning on my shoulder a bit.

The bus went on through the night. The streetlights and road lights were mostly out, but the full moon sketched landscapes for us in dark shades of silver-blue ink. Ahead of us, the bus’s headlights made the roadside trees look like gray-green tunnel walls.

When we got to the New York terminal, the sun was barely up, and the city was still, basically, asleep. There was no one on the streets except dazed wanderers, looking like they hadn’t seen a sunrise before, though they were probably among the very few who saw them regularly. I think there must have been rain during the night: the air was almost electrically clear.

Without saying where, or even exchanging questioning glances about it, we went home together to her place, an apartment in a whitewashed brownstone on the Upper East Side. We went to bed, made soft, sweet, sleepy love, and then slumbered just as the rest of the city was waking. It was the most natural thing in the world--we’d been talking all the night before.

Mid-afternoon or so, I woke up, realized I had things to do, and gave her a last kiss and cuddle. She responded fuzzily, if warmly, as I kissed her goodbye between her shoulder blades, tiptoed out, and went home.

When I got home, I realized there was actually just one thing to do that couldn’t be put off: I fed the cats. Then I took off my clothes again, and went back to bed, fondling my pillow and calling it by her name.

When I woke up, the air was about the same color it had been when we got off the bus, only it was sunset, now. I wanted to call her and say something nice to her--I hadn’t anything particular in mind, yet, but I knew I’d think of something when I heard her voice again.

Suddenly I realized I didn’t have her phone number. And I couldn’t remember her last name.

Names have always been a problem with me. And I’d only heard her last name once, maybe eighteen hours before. I knew her first name perfectly, of course, but you can’t find phone numbers by that. I didn’t even remember her exact address.

But I knew where to find her building, more or less. And I would have wheels--my very first--in a few days. I’d go look for her and find her then.

That Friday night, right after work, I walked down Madison a block or two, picked up the first motor vehicle I’d ever owned--a clean, white Honda motorcycle--and set off immediately to Sue’s (Carol’s?) neighborhood.

I homed in on the neighborhood unerringly. I found her block with just a few minutes of side-street cruising. But her house? There was some difficulty. I hadn’t really paid attention that nice morning, but Sue’s whitewashed brownstone with the peeling paint was just one in an endless row of similarly white and similarly peeling brownstones.

No sweat: I’d recognize her name as soon as I saw it on her doorbell or her mailbox.

And so I walked from one end of the block to the other, and then back again, looking at every doorbell (when the buildings had them), looking at every mailbox (when the mailboxes weren’t inside buzzer-locked doors).

I made some interesting discoveries: That an awful lot of New York doorbells and mailboxes don’t have names. That many of them have six names. That many of the names are penciled ones, long since faded into unintelligibility. And that my Susan’s name was not on any one of them.