her a new name, fettered her in ways she cannot consciously combat. She is afraid of leading him on. She knows from her experience with Owen that it doesn’t matter how well-informed everyone might be about who is or isn’t available for a relationship. It is not enough to say the words; romantic disinterest needs to be shown in brief flashes of cruelty, and hinted at with a degree of reticence, a reluctance to confide. Words are never enough to make the situation clear. She tells herself that the most important thing will be to remember not to kiss him. Then everything will be okay.
* * *
—
Over the next week, Owen sends Ed five longing texts, ostensibly while his wife is at Zumba class. Ed tries hard to believe in the existence of said wife but agrees to meet him at a motel across town. She spends her subway ride uselessly vowing to turn around, and when she at last spots his car pulling up to their motel room, she is trembling and still resentful.
For some reason he refrains from his standard dirty talk, and in the absence of their usual collaborative and profane narration, they lapse into silence, leaving only grunts and the moist sounds of slapping as their words fall away. With Owen’s hands on her hips, Ed closes her eyes. The din of their lovemaking begins thundering in her ears until she drops to the sheets, muffling her head in the pillow. Owen’s deep breaths are a Morse code of exhalations on her neck and shoulders. Ed realizes they are having a cold conversation: a back-and-forth of when they will finally end it.
* * *
“The way that you talk about Owen makes me think that you still love him,” says Jericho.
The day before, after a marathon session of movie-watching at his tiny apartment, Ed finally leaned into Jericho’s patient, looming face—and into the kiss that had always seemed inevitable. It was better than she thought it would be. Soft and insistent, urgent and sweet. But Jericho has seemed sadder since the kiss, as though whatever his daily burdens, they have become harder to bear.
“I don’t,” she says. She never loved him, but Owen is still with her, the thought and shape of him, the things he says and writes. He seems to linger in these ghostly traces, like something that might show up in a photograph—a dark mark, a smudge somewhere behind her head. Though their affair was already bound to end in a matter of days, when Ed returns to Lansdowne, Owen has abruptly cut off contact again. This, more than anything, has shaken her. Before, she had his words to cling to, if nothing else. But it is as though by kissing Jericho she has severed whatever invisible and improbable thread used to exist between her and Owen. “It’s not that at all.”
“I know.” Jericho turns his head away. They are at his apartment again, just two blocks away from cipolla, and lying close together on his mattress on the floor. It’s the only place to sit, apart from his desk chair. “In my heart I believe you, but the things you say make me doubt my true instincts.”
“I’m sorry,” says Ed, and she is. She knows Jericho is preoccupied by her imminent departure, though they’ve avoided mentioning it since the kiss. “I don’t know what else to tell you.” She reaches for one of the cold beers they brought back from the bodega downstairs and takes a sip. The cool, blank white walls of Jericho’s apartment seem to stretch up forever towards the ceiling.
“Don’t you see?” His eyes are fixed on the floor, a pink and blue Afghan carpet swirled with rings of roses. “It’s what you’ve told me that’s the problem. We shouldn’t have to say anything to one another.”
His books are stacked around the room, surrounding his mattress in piles divided according to subject: Buddhism, evolution, philosophy, opera, Esperanto. Ed sits up and examines them, running her finger along each title in turn, pretending to be absorbed. Earlier, she thought it might be convenient to stay over, given how close Jericho lives to the restaurant. Now she is starting to reconsider.
“Let’s put on some music,” she says, and she can hear him moving behind her, getting up, heading for the computer. “Do you have any Dove Suite?”
He makes a strange, choked noise in his throat. “Told you before–we don’t share that particular obsession.” He puts on an electronic album by a band