Greetings from Below. David Philip Mullins

      “OK,” he whispers, trying his best to keep from coming. “I love you.”

      He stayed until the restaurant closed, then walked Annie home to her apartment in North Beach, fifteen blocks away. In Nick’s back pocket was the short letter he had written to Ricky, the coaster creased into a half-moon beneath his billfold.

      “Why don’t you come up,” she said as they approached her building. She shrugged her shoulders, a breeze riffling the ends of her hair. “It’s only eleven. I could use a glass of wine.”

      “Great,” said Nick, excited by the invitation: Annie had never asked him up to her apartment before.

      It was warm and spacious, a one-bedroom with high ceilings and a recessed balcony. Against one of the walls stood what appeared to be an arts-and-crafts project of some sort. Two yellow pipe cleaners sprouted like antennae from a white Styrofoam ball the size of a desktop globe. As on a tee, the ball sat atop a Quaker Oats container that rose like a little silo from the inside of an orange Nike shoe box.

      “Mi casa,” Annie said with a sweep of her hand. She took off her hat, her coat, hung them on a hook beside the door. “Welcome.”

      “Nice place.”

      “Rent control and tips,” she said. “How else could I survive in this city?”

      Nick nodded at the arts-and-crafts project. “Interesting furniture.”

      “Ricky’s first sculpture. ‘Evolution,’ he calls it.” She clicked her tongue. “I’ve been meaning to get rid of that thing for a while now.”

      Nick had always assumed that Ricky’s medium was either plaster or ceramic, not cardboard or Styrofoam. He looked the sculpture up and down, tapping his chin. Then their eyes met and they both broke into laughter.

      “Fine,” Annie said. “So he’s not the best sculptor in the world.”

      She opened a bottle of merlot, poured them each a glass as they settled in next to one another on her small leather couch. The cushions were dry as saddles, faded to a light coffee-brown, and creaked whenever he made the slightest adjustment of his legs. They were talking about the letter to Ricky when Nick noticed the Atari 2600 on the bottom shelf of her television stand.

      “Read it to me,” she said, nosing the wine. “It was sweet of you to write it.”

      She had been busy closing up the bar, and Nick hadn’t had a chance to show her the letter. But he could tell that he had managed to charm her, that she had taken as some kind of gallantry his juvenile wish to make her ex-boyfriend jealous. He thought about kissing her, which he hadn’t tried to do in a couple of weeks. Not yet, he imagined Annie saying. It isn’t the right time. “You’re into video games?” he asked, pointing to the Atari.

      “Kind of,” she said. “I don’t know. I bought that thing at a garage sale in Berkeley. It made me nostalgic. They threw in a bunch of cartridges for free.”

      “Let’s play something,” Nick said. “What do you have?”

      “First the letter. Get it out.”

      “Only if you promise to send it.” He sipped his wine. “I hope I didn’t write it in vain.”

      “We are not mailing that coaster to Ricky.”

      “You haven’t even heard what it says yet,” he said, and took the coaster from his pocket. He unfolded it, straightened his back against the noisy couch. “‘Dear Ricky,’” he began. By the time he had finished the letter—the gist of which was that Annie and Nick were engaged to be married, that Annie hadn’t deserved to be cheated on, and that Ricky would do well to leave her alone—Annie had her head on Nick’s shoulder, her arm draped across his leg. She had never been so physically affectionate with him before. Nick waited for some sign of arousal—a tingle in his groin—but he only felt happy. It was a relaxing sort of happiness, a concentrated warmth that trickled into every crevice of his body, like the slow pervasion of heat from a shot of bourbon: what an elderly man might feel for his wife, he imagined, after half a century of marriage, sexual desire replaced by the comfort of long-term commitment. To call such a feeling anything less than love seemed to suggest a limited interpretation of the word.

      “What if I start asking people to call me ‘Nicky’?” he said, tossing the coaster onto the coffee table. “Actually, my mother calls me that, so who am I to judge?”

      She patted his knee. “Jungle Hunt,” she said, sitting up from the couch. She refilled their glasses, setting the bottle down on the coaster. “How does a little Jungle Hunt sound to you?”

      “Haven’t played it in eons, but I’m sure I can hold my own.”

      Annie crawled across the carpet to the television stand.

      “You shouldn’t wear makeup,” he told her, watching her thumb through a plastic box of cartridges. A thin layer of foundation coated her cheeks, giving her skin the appearance of fine suede, and her lip gloss made her lips look as though they were wrapped in cellophane. “You’re pretty anyway.”

      “If that doesn’t sound like a line.”