share the meal. She checks the refrigerator. The prospects are abysmal. She hasn’t eaten for ten hours, but she decides to hold out a little longer. If she can wait to eat until after her private party, eating will be like dancing with demigods.
“Got divorced today,” she announces.
Scattered cheers and clapping. “Took you long enough,” says the least favorite of her former soul mates.
“True. Been getting divorced for longer than I was married.”
“Don’t change your name back. This one’s much better.”
“What were you thinking anyway, getting married?”
“That ankle looks bad. You should at least clean off the grease.” Another round of stifled giggles.
“Love you guys, too.” Olivia steals a bottle of somebody’s nut-brown ale—the only thing in the refrigerator not rancid—and squirrels it away into her rehabbed attic room. There, in bed, she knocks back the contents of the bottle without lifting her head. Acquired talent. Grease and blood from her ankle smear the bedspread.
SHE AND DAVY met in court one last time, that afternoon, between her Econ and Linear Analysis. Now they’re done, and the final decree has no power to sadden her further. She does have her regrets. Tying her life to another’s—a whim of sophomore spring—felt so all-in, so sweeping and innocent. For two years, their parents raged at the idiocy. Their friends never understood. But she and Davy were determined to prove everyone wrong.
They did love each other, in their way, even if their way consisted mostly of getting high, reading Rumi out loud, then screwing each other senseless. But marriage turned them both abusive. After the third time through the fun-house werewolf act, which ended up with her fracturing her fifth metacarpal, somebody had to sober up and pull the plug. They had no property to speak of, and no kids except the two of them. The divorce should have taken a day and a half. That it took more than ten months was mostly a function of nostalgic lust on the part of both litigants.
Olivia sets the empty beer on the radiator with the other dead recruits and fishes in the nest of crap by her bed until she finds her disc player. Divorce requires a memorial service. Marriage was her adventure, and she needs to commemorate. Davy kept the Rumi, but she still has scads of their favorite trance music and dope enough to turn the regrets into laughs sufficient for today. There’s her Linear Analysis final to worry about, of course. But that’s still three days off, and she always studies better when a little loose.
It should have occurred to her two years ago, even in the initial thrill, that any relationship where she lied three times in the first two hours might not be a great long-term bet. They walked under the cherry blossoms in the campus arboretum. She professed a deep love for all flowering things, which was a flavor of true, at least right then. She told him that her father was a human rights lawyer, again not entirely false, and that her mother was a writer, which was pretty much bullshit, though based on a fact-like scenario. She isn’t ashamed of her parents. In fact, she once got suspended from grade school for punching a chick who called her father “flaccid.” But in the world of satisfying stories—her preferred domain—both of Olivia’s parents are so much less than they should have been. So she spruced them up a tad, for the man she’d already decided she would spend the rest of her life with.
Davy lied, too. He claimed he didn’t need to graduate, that he’d done so well on the civil service exam the State Department had offered him a job. The fib was outrageous enough to be kind of beautiful. She did have a thing for fantasists. Later, under the cherry-blossom snow, he’d flashed her the little Victorian tin with the mustache-wax ad on the top and the six long thin bullets of weed inside. She’d never seen anything like it, except in high school anti-drug films. And soon enough, she was sold on the fine art of hang gliding above the busy earth. So began her still-unfolding romance with a gift that kept on giving, a romance that, unlike the one with Davy, was sure to last a lifetime.
She cues up the trance playlist, sits in her beloved window seat, opens the sash to the frigid night, and blows puffs of smoke onto the death-trap fire escape. The phone rings, but she doesn’t pick up. It’s