I met Phoebe at a glassed-in Starbucks on Sunset Boulevard, just a few blocks from the WELCOME TO UCLA sign. I’d flown out to visit the campus, lured by the promise of graduate funding, which was more than UT-Austin and Arizona State were offering me. Then add posh departmental offices, palm trees and eye-candy coeds — and like the cherry on top, Phoebe. A busty redhead with crow’s feet and amazing calves. She was ordering coffee — just plain coffee, thankyouverymuch — and backlit with squiggly neon letters that spelled out ESPRESSO. Not a knockout, but cute. Oozing sexual availability. Smiling at me.

Two mochas later I was cramming myself into the passenger seat of her gunmetal blue Miata. Whiplash tour for the Iowa farmboy. She laid rubber through the 90210 zip code, O.J.’s old killing grounds, I forget what else. Her hand kept slipping off the stickshift and onto my knee.

I figured her for a fling. A few dissolute weekends together. Months even, if the horizontal surfaces stayed fun. But we kept hooking up, again and again, until the calendar looks all wrong. It’s four years later? Neither of us is four-years-later material. She’s a nightclubbing trade lawyer who spends more time in the Eastern Hemisphere than this one. I’m a self-centered grad student with no money and half a tank of gas. Sex introduced us, but inertia gave us a future.

“You want to go out for dinner?”

She asks the question without turning her head from the gigantic wall-mounted TV. Relaxing on the couch. Naked. Most chicks I’ve known are self-conscious about their bodies. Not Phoebe. She’s no pornstar, just resigned to herself. A woman with torpedo tits and a blocky waist.

Now she’s looking at me. Her brow dents in irritation. “Nick. I’m talking to you. You want to go out, or stay in?”

“Go out, probably.” I’m in the kitchenette contemplating an empty refrigerator. Traveling as much as she does, Phoebe never bothers to keep food around. “Yeah, let’s go out. But not to that new place.”

“Veruca? Don’t you like their ambiance — ”

“Ambiance isn’t fashionistas,” I interrupt. “Ambiance isn’t drinks that cost $15. Ambiance isn’t so much indirect lighting that you can’t lay eyes on a single honest-to-god lightbulb.”

“Come on. We’re supposed to be celebrating. Veruca’s dessert menu is awesome. Right?” Channels flicker and hiss as she thumbs the remote. “We could get the praline cheesecake, or maybe the tiramisu.”

I peek out the slatted window above the sink. The view hasn’t changed much in four years. Across the street is a Ducati dealership that sells car-priced motorcycles. Adjacent is a meditation center called Inner Fitness. Posters in the center’s windows implore me to save biodiversity and fight global warming, neither of which is in my job description. I let Greenpeace take care of those things.

“Well?” Phoebe sighs. “What are you thinking? That sushi place instead?”

I’m thinking, we feel like two people who are almost done passing through each other. But I don’t say that. I just grab my clothes off the floor and start dressing.

After a while the TV clicks off and she joins me. It takes her a few tries to step into her panties. “Wherever we go, it has to be walking. I’m too buzzed to drive.” She tugs a hoodie-dress over her head and wriggles into it.

“How about Damto?”

“Damto? That Korean restaurant down the block?” Phoebe wanders into the bathroom and poses in front of the mirror, tits out and hip cocked, inspecting herself. “Sure, I can do Damto.”

Outside the neighborhood is dimming into night. Above the designer rooflines I can still see the sunset, squished flat and receding toward the Pacific. Twilight makes the freshly-watered lawns appear slick with blood, or maybe oil. Somewhere a car alarm bursts into rhythmic honking. Next to me Phoebe is doing her Blackberry trick, simultaneously walking and thumbing through emails from work.

Damto is known for its traditional cuisine, which is Korean food just like your Korean grandmother would make, if you had a Korean grandmother. All the prices are celebration-sized, so Phoebe rarely takes me here. Somehow we get the prime table right at the front windows, giving us a view of the army of runners circuiting the block in lycra and spray-on tans.

We order the panchan platter and hundred-flower wine and talk about nothing, same as always. Our conversations are a relaxing superficial place where nothing really matters. Even politics can’t rile us. I toss out names to get her reaction. President Bush is worth a nose-wrinkle. Governor Schwarzenegger only merits a dismissive wave of her wineglass. “I’d pay to see him drop trou, just to know if his dick is all shriveled up from the steroids.”

Our heads track a pair of runners as they dash beneath a streetlight. Phoebe watches the guy’s ass. I watch the girl’s.

“When are you going down to Tijuana?” She tries to ask the question casually, but that’s not how it comes out.

“Next week sometime. Tuesday or Wednesday, probably. I’ll just go down for the day.” I push kimchi around my plate with chopsticks. Go for a day, plan for a year.

Phoebe is staring at me intently, as if trying to remember something. “We had a good run, didn’t we?”

I almost blow wine through my nose. “God, don’t say it like that. Like you’re Greta Garbo without the accent or something.”

“I’m being serious, Nick. This has been fun. Right?”

I nod. And keep nodding, until it feels like my head is going to fall off. Our communication has been reduced to trite scripts and rote gestures. Finally I say, “It’s been more than fun.”

That makes her smile wistfully. “But not more enough. Or enough of more than fun. Or whatever I’m trying to say. We’re still having this conversation.”

“Yeah. I guess we are.” I always knew this moment was coming, but the timing could be better. She’s fast-forwarding to the end credits and skipping over a bunch of sex scenes. “We could put this off, you know. I’m not moving to Mexico yet.”

“But then you’re gone for a year, and I can’t wait for you.” Freckles hover in the emulsion of her pale skin. “I’m 36, Nick. Did you even know that?”

More nodding. But I don’t admit that I found out by riffling through her purse after our first hookup.

“I’ve been thinking it’s time to make some changes. Maybe quit this job. Settle down and get some friends, a couple cats, a boyfriend.” Phoebe gives me an apologetic hair-flip. “You know what I mean.”

I know what she means. A real boyfriend, not whatever you’d call me. I’m more like a fuckbuddy with social pretenses.

The waitress arrives to refill our wineglasses. It looks like she’s cradling a ball of dried bamboo leaves wrapped in twine. The spout gurgles a liquid that’s fragrant and pinkish and cloudy. Hundred-flower wine. Would fifty-flower wine be half the proof? Is there even such a thing as fifty-flower wine? The crap you think about during a breakup.

“You know what’s going on with me?” Phoebe murmurs into her wineglass. “What it really, really is?”

“Tell me.”

“My favorite shopping arcade in Hong Kong got torn down. This place I used to visit on Kowloon Dock Road. I think it was just a dead-end alley that the vendors took over. They were squeezed in on top of each other, selling all this old-fashioned stuff like prayer sticks and chickens tied up by their feet. The colors and noises and smells, I can’t even describe how intense it all was.” She makes blotting motions with her napkin, but not at her eyes. She’s noticing a spill on her dress. “I always thought I’d bring my husband there, you know? Share it with him. Except it’s gone now. I waited too long.”

Her unexpected confession is paralyzing. We don’t do poignancy and emotional connection — or not much, anyway. I cover my discomfort with a gulp of wine, then another. Phoebe gazes into the night, playing absentmindedly with her strawberry mane, cleavage stacked on the edge of the table like a jutting continental shelf. Wondering what she sees, I glance out the window too. She smiles brightly at our reflections in the glass. I can’t decide if it’s the same look that beguiled me four years ago, when she was the cherry on top of UCLA, or not the same look. All I know is that I’m a long ways from Iowa. Even longer than it looks on a map.