Katherine visits Henry in Los Angeles after he invites her to come, turning a tentative romantic possibility into a brief, consequential encounter. Her arrival brings Henry into close companionship with a woman he regards as exceptional, and makes him imagine marriage and domestic life. Yet the visit also exposes the distance between that imagined future and his established habits. After several days together, Katherine departs; Henry is left with the belongings she forgot and resumes drinking.

Invitation and Arrival

The visit follows Henry’s earlier effort to reassure Katherine that she is different from women he has known. When she raises the possibility that another woman might attack her, Henry says that this cannot happen because that woman has moved to Phoenix, then asks Katherine to trust him. Katherine agrees to make arrangements, including finding someone to care for her cat. The exchange places reassurance and risk side by side: Henry is trying to secure her confidence, while her practical preparations make the proposed visit real.

The next day Katherine tells Henry that she has obtained tickets and will land at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday at 2:30 p.m. Henry then admits there is something he must tell her. He later reads and waits by the telephone after the difficult conversation, convinced she will not call again and interpreting the loss as his own fault. When the telephone rings, however, Katherine laughs and tells him to forget Joanna Dover. Her return to the conversation changes the visit from a plan in danger of collapse into an imminent meeting.

At the airport, Henry sees Katherine walk down the ramp in a blue dress and a wide-brimmed white hat. He focuses on her composed appearance and contrasts it with his own self-deprecating account of his heavy build, disheveled hair, and confusion. The reunion is not presented as an even exchange of self-images: he idealizes her poise while making himself the comic, ungainly counterpart. He greets her, asks about her baggage, and suggests stopping at a bar, bringing his familiar drinking into the first moments of her visit.

Making a Home Together

Henry asks Katherine to go out for dinner, but she first has to finish washing the floor. He waits in a chair until she comes out, bends to kiss him, and laughs that he is a dirty old man. The ordinary household task and her teasing give their reunion a domestic texture distinct from the airport encounter. Henry’s response is immediate: he says inwardly that he is in love again and in trouble.

After dinner, they talk. Katherine eats carefully, avoiding meat other than chicken and fish, and Henry notices that her habits differ from his. On another evening, she tells him there are about six days when sex is safe before they will need to think of another arrangement. The detail places practical considerations within their intimacy, rather than leaving their time together as pure romantic fantasy.

Henry describes their first night together as a moment when desire overwhelms his restraint. The encounter is narrated through his perspective, which casts his behavior in possessive and violent terms; that framing complicates the tenderness he later associates with the relationship. Afterward, he holds Katherine while she sleeps and thinks, for the first time, about marriage, a house, a dog and a cat, and shopping at supermarkets. The domestic future appears in a sudden list of ordinary possibilities. He also recognizes that the beginning of a relationship is the easiest stage and that the other person’s flaws will emerge over time, even as he lets himself imagine a life with her.

The next morning, Katherine brushes her hair and tells Henry, laughing, that their relationship is just sex. He rests his head against her leg, still uncertain about what their closeness means. Her joking remark does not settle the question; instead, it sets her lighter appraisal beside his sudden thoughts of marriage. Their relationship thus holds two meanings at once, without either one becoming a settled agreement.

The Life Henry Brings to the Visit

Henry takes Katherine to the boxing matches at the Olympic Auditorium, where they sit at ringside before the first bout. He drinks beer and smokes while they wait. Katherine has never seen a live fight, and when Henry remarks on the crowd waiting for two men to punch each other, she agrees that it seems awful. The outing introduces her to a world Henry treats as familiar entertainment, while her response registers distance from it.

After the match, they return to the parking lot beneath the freeway and discover that Henry’s blue Volkswagen has been stolen. The car is an immediate practical loss as well as a disruption to the evening. Its recovery later allows their time together to continue, but the incident also anchors the visit in Henry’s precarious, unsettled circumstances rather than in the smooth sequence of a conventional courtship.

The sharper divide emerges in Henry’s reflection on Katherine’s response to his surroundings. After she drinks red wine and becomes quiet, he thinks she is connecting him with the people at the racetrack and the boxing crowd. He describes himself as drawn to drinking and laziness, without religion, politics, or ideals, and settled into a kind of nothingness. He wants a soft, hazy space in which to be left alone, yet acknowledges that when drunk he can become loud and uncontrolled. He recognizes that these modes of behavior do not fit together, but says that he does not care to reconcile them.

Henry calls that night the one in which he lost Katherine, although the relationship does not end with an explicit declaration between them. His certainty grows from the contrast he sees between her and the life he leads. The narration places the claim beside their continued physical intimacy, sharpening the distinction between being together for the moment and sharing a durable future. Henry can imagine a household with her, but he also sees that his habits and indifference remain intact.

Departure and Aftermath

Katherine stays four or five more days. As the period when sex is risky approaches, she obtains contraceptive foam because Henry says he cannot stand condoms. Meanwhile, police recover the Volkswagen. It is intact apart from a dead battery; Henry has it taken to a Hollywood garage and repaired. The restored car becomes their transport to the airport, tying the visit’s practical disruptions to its final journey.

At the airport, they sit together without saying much until Katherine’s flight is called. They kiss, and Henry jokes that everyone has seen a young girl kissing an old man. Katherine says she does not care, kisses him again, and invites him to visit her at the nice house where she lives alone. Henry promises to come and to write. The exchange preserves the possibility of seeing each other again, but the visit itself ends when Katherine walks into the boarding tunnel and disappears from view.

Henry walks back to the parking lot and thinks that at least he still has the Volkswagen and has not lost everything. The thought reduces the emotional aftermath to a remaining possession: the repaired car is tangible, while Katherine has gone. That evening he starts drinking, expecting life without her to be difficult, and finds earrings and a bracelet she left behind. The forgotten jewelry makes her absence concrete, but does not lead him to act on the invitation or change the habits he has identified as a barrier between them.

Narrative Significance

The visit is structured as a short ascent into imagined domesticity followed by a return to Henry’s solitary routine. Katherine’s arrival, household gestures, shared outings, and invitation to visit her home give the prospect of partnership practical form. At the same time, Henry’s attention to boxing, the racetrack, alcohol, and his wish to be left alone keeps exposing the incompatibility he senses but does not address. The gap between his fantasy of marriage and his conduct is the visit’s central tension.

Henry’s first-person recollection makes that gap especially visible. He reports moments of tenderness and practical care, but also frames Katherine through idealizing comparisons and interprets the relationship’s likely failure from within his own habits and assumptions. His belief that he has lost her precedes her departure, while her invitation at the airport leaves the future technically open. The final movement toward drinking and the discovery of her jewelry, rather than a new commitment, determine the visit’s immediate outcome: intimacy has interrupted Henry’s isolation, but has not displaced it.