in the street while a parade of drunks and late-night revelers ambled by. Her sinewy back as I unclasped her bra. Eggs Benedict. Watching someone make enormous bubbles in McCarren Park. The pillows with the zigzag stripes on her little lofted bed.
We were a We. And we had to last, we just had to, because how many fucking stars had aligned to bring us together in the first place? She delighted in telling people the story of how we met, pausing for effect in the same places, raising both hands to recount how she’d never, never posted anything on Craigslist before, not even for furniture or anything. I took so many photos of her with my Mark II—at the beach, over dinner, at the park, on my love seat—and put a few of the best onto my phone, an iPhone back before everyone had them. Sometimes I’d pull up an image I’d shot of her and just stare, taking in the details like I was sizing up an especially impressive building.
I discovered I wasn’t the only one enchanted by her; her little roommates, thin and sparkly eyed, worshipped her as well, including the creepy brunette Edie counted as her closest confidante. Men of all ages went googly-eyed when she let out her laugh. She had her own gravitational pull, the calm black hole at the center of a swirling galaxy. I’m not sure if she knew it. She floated through life, the air bending toward her in her wake.
Four months became five, then six. I kept snapping photos of her, trying to capture what I’d lose when I couldn’t see her. I had dinner with her odd, unbalanced mother and her spooked, distant father in their Upper West Side apartment. We took our first big trip together, a week in Berlin coinciding with an architecture conference I was invited to attend, right in that last aching stretch of winter when you stare at the skeletons of trees and just long for them to be leafy already. The city delighted her, with its white asparagus and crisp museums and citizens who were just like us Brooklynites only they stayed out later and spoke multiple languages. On the flight home, she slept in my lap while I stared at the TV screen in front of me, a head cold gathering in my skull like storm clouds. By the time we landed, the congestion had commandeered my lungs. We collapsed into bed that afternoon, and I woke up the next morning with a ridiculous combination cold/flu.
I didn’t want her getting sick, too, so we spent the week in our own beds, her stopping by late at night to bring me Sudafed or soup. But something changed that week. It was the same dimming of intimacy that’d begun in our email exchange so many months before. She had less to say at dinner and interesting new reasons to crash alone in her own apartment. I observed it helplessly, like a passenger watching his boat recede into the distance.
She came over one night with the sole intention of breaking things off; I knew it the second she walked through the door. I was washing out a bowl lined with vinaigrette and thinking that the little flecks of spices looked like undigested food. We’d made vague plans to rent a documentary, but when she walked in and closed the door and draped herself over a chair at the kitchen table, I thought, Well, fuck. I don’t remember anything she said, just the tunnel-like feeling of multiple gunshot wounds as she fired off lines about stagnancy and not growing and something being different and just not right. I actually teared up and she hugged me close, letting the drops gather on her sleeve. When it was all over, she picked up her purse and walked miserably out the door.
* * *
About three weeks later I figured out that she was dating Alex, a friend from her building whom I’d never liked. The fact was painfully easy to gather from a little Facebook stalking. I was shocked and then totally alarmed that I was so shocked. And then I just felt really stupid.
“God, so she’s one of those girls who’s always seeing someone,” Lexy said. “That makes so much sense. You didn’t pick that up from talking about exes at all?” We’d both ordered whiskey neat in a dim new bar in Lexy’s neighborhood. Sometimes I appreciated her refreshing lack of sympathy—from everyone else it was