puzzled glance.
Owen turns his attention to Josh’s scattered scrawls on the whiteboard. If they have been working on the project for months, how are they only just now having these sorts of conversations? He says something to this effect.
“We usually do the story last around here,” says Ryan. “It’s the fastest part.”
Josh, perhaps catching Owen’s look of alarm, says quickly, “The VR environment build isn’t quite ready, but if you come back next Monday, I’m sure we’ll have something to show you that will really knock you out.”
Though he’s unsure of what he is being told, Owen nods. A visible relief permeates the room.
* * *
—
Afterwards, Owen catches the subway, gets a seat near the door. Standing close by is a twenty-something model-thin blonde, chic in jeans and a white T-shirt. Then a woman sitting opposite catches his attention: a fiftyish brunette with a battered briefcase and terrible fashion sense, totally absorbed in a highbrow, prize-winning novel that until as recently as last week outranked How to Avoid the Plague on the New York Times bestseller list. Almost certainly an academic. But he appreciates the seriousness of her face, the slight flare of her nostrils as she frowns at the page. Her lack of self-consciousness as she shifts in her seat, sending the lower flounces of her tiered jade skirt cascading over the feet of the next passenger. Women are always surprised to discover that Owen has a very expansive sense of the beautiful. Younger women in their twenties and thirties. Older women in their forties and fifties. Every woman is a secret waiting to be unlocked. And the key, the tantalizing key, is sex, and the means of getting it.
With an intellectual like the brunette sitting across from him, Owen’s conversational gambit might be something about the inadequacy of reason in the face of primal urges. It was a tactic that worked before, and had the advantage of being something he actually believed. Owen would lean in, and at a certain attentive moment would run his index finger over an inch of her wrist and contend that it is neither laughter, planning, nor cooperation that define humanity. Rather, a Cartesian project of mind and body separation has undermined the unity of how human beings see themselves, to their detriment. Owen would muse, as if for the first time, that the culture is only sex-obsessed because it is essentially prudish, and that sex is human and natural and not to be controlled or repressed—in fact, the instincts they share with the so-called lower orders are valuable and profound. Though it was also possible, Owen would acknowledge to her, with a longing and complicit glance, that he was just rationalizing.
The subway car slows and lurches as it enters the station, and Owen sees the blonde coughing into her hand. Then she grabs at the pole to steady herself before hurrying through the doors, leaving behind a smear so wet it seems to sparkle under the light.
He stares at the smear, then gets off at the next stop and starts walking the fifteen blocks to his apartment, trying to avoid thoughts of the mystery virus. When he stops at an intersection, he pulls out his phone and sends a message to Edith. He knows she would prefer to be called Ed, which he finds absurd, so he avoids calling her anything at all. I need you, he writes. Do you have time this afternoon? He might as well meet her; the day has been squandered and he’s too agitated to write, anyway.
By the time he gets home, Edith has written back: Okay. When he sees her response, he gets into his car rather than going inside. He tries to avoid driving in the city, but the train ride has unnerved him.
Edith is a good example of Owen’s comprehensive taste in women. She is of average height, average prettiness, though with a nice body and an intelligent face. She is of Asian heritage, a fact he notes only for his record, which is diverse. They met at a book signing ten weeks ago. She was a fan and made that fact known. He made it known in turn that he found her attractive. The normal things ensued. Then an abnormal thing ensued: a repetition of the normal things, over and over again, with Edith.
In his old life, he would have avoided repeat encounters with the same woman to protect his relationship with Rachel. But one irony of his divorce is that he