They are sitting at opposite ends of the old horsehair sofa waiting for something to happen. A rainy summer night, or is it a rainy autumn night, smelling of wet leaves. A muffled reedy music permeates the room like remembered music in which rhythm is blurred. One by one enormous soft-winged insects fly toward them, or scuttle above their heads on the ceiling. Several clocks tick in unison, sounding like a single clock.

Her lover is the most conventional of men which is one of the reasons she loves him but today on the street he seems not to recognize her – though he raises his hand politely in response to her greeting, and smiles in response to her smile, and may even have said "Hello" in response to her "Hello." There is a distance of approximately thirty feet between them as she crosses the street at an intersection and steps up onto the curb and he continues at his usual quick pace without looking back at her.

Of course she is hurt at the time – she is a woman frequently hurt "at the time" – but afterward she concludes that her lover was simply distracted and did not see her; hadn’t time to place her in context (since it was in another part of the city that the encounter, or the pseudo-encounter, occurred, not the neighborhood in which they both live); or that he could not acknowledge her ("her" as she appeared on the street, not "her" in the larger sense – that confluence of physical, historical-genetic, spiritual elements that constitute her existence) at that moment for reasons one day to be supplied, should she press for an explanation.

Another possibility is that the man she saw was not her lover but another man who so strongly resembled him as to have been his identical twin brother. Yet another possibility, that the man she saw was in fact her lover’s identical twin brother, whom she has never met, and whose existence her lover has not acknowledged. Though the genetic replicant of her lover his twin brother could not have recognized, or been expected to recognize, her, in any context familiar or unfamiliar.

These several possibilities compete for her attention, now one most reasonable, now another. She suspects that the incident will simply evolve, as such things do, into an anecdote; and then, with the passage of years, into one of those severely abbreviated, highly codified allusions husbands and wives frequently make, often before company, or before children and other family members who have heard them numberlesstimes before but out of politeness, or out of actual bemused affection, tolerate yet another reference.

There was a day this man passed me on the street without recognizing me! she will say if asking them to believe such a thing, and everyone will laugh, and he will laugh too, embarrassed, protesting, saying to the company She knows it wasn’t that at all. It was ...

Should she press for an explanation.