have to stay inside?”
“Just be grateful it isn’t you, boxed into a couple of hundred square feet.” He stood up and moved towards the treadmill. “You start to feel like a rat.”
Quarantine Day Nineteen
As the quarantine wound down, Elliot came up against the limit of his own self-sufficiency. When the woman who delivered his food lingered for five minutes to talk from the hallway, Elliot cried in gratitude. The sight of his tears made her draw back down the corridor.
Quarantine Day Twenty
He was expecting another food delivery when there was a knock on the door instead of the usual text message alert. Curious, he peered through the peephole. It was a tall woman with long, blond hair and a huge bulge of a stomach under a paisley shirt. She looked both vaguely familiar and like an apparition in the dark hallway, her whole person bright with colour and something that bore a terrible resemblance to hope. Elliot opened the door a crack, keeping it on the chain.
“Did you read the sign?” he called, still behind the door. Everyone stopped to read the sign. He preferred to watch people recoil from him only through the funhouse mirror of the peephole. It was a lens that matched his current perspective on life: circumscribed but far-reaching, and consequently distorted. Exposure to a deadly virus had a way of helping you see the big picture, even as it simultaneously cut you off from doing anything about it.
She looked at the notice then. “Quarantine.” She glanced down at her stomach and took a step back.
“So you can’t come in, do you see?”
“I see.” She took another step back, sideways this time, but didn’t leave. “Elliot.”
“Yes,” he said, and before he’d closed his mouth, he knew who it was. Julia, Dory’s wife.
“Dory misses you,” said Julia Katherine Gibbs. JKG. “But she doesn’t think she deserves to be forgiven.”
“We have a lot in common, me and my ex-wife.”
“You shouldn’t blame her.”
“I don’t,” said Elliot. “I blame you.”
The faint smile that had already begun to bloom evaporated at once. Julia nodded. “Right.”
“You went after her when she was already taken.” It was Julia who had provoked the romantic and sexual awakening—in their breakup conversation, Dory had referred to it as a “flowering”—that had upended their lives. Elliot blamed himself, too, though it irked him that he couldn’t get past it. Nothing major had happened to him besides losing his wife in the most anodyne way possible.
“It was wrong,” said Julia. “The way it happened. And I’m sorry about that, I am. But it was the right thing for Dory. And for me.”
“Sounds ideal,” said Elliot. As Dory had said in that same conversation, as though it might actually be a comfort, their breakup had “nothing to do with him.” According to that logic, he didn’t need to feel bad about what had happened. And in fact, the past three weeks had dismantled some of the scaffolding of his resentment: his usual emotions on the topic came back to him as if through the wrong end of a telescope. He knew that there was no logical reason for him to keep feeling bad about his divorce. It was an insult to his dead friends and their families, to the terrible unfolding of catastrophic events the world over, to retain any feelings about it at all. “I guess I’m the only one who still thinks that vows are supposed to mean something. Or, you know, that words matter.”
Julia seemed taken aback, glancing around as though she’d accidentally stepped into a yard with a snarling dog. “I do,” she said, hesitating. “We both—”
“I saw your wedding announcement in the Times last year,” he went on. He had allowed himself to wallow in a pleasurable fury about it for a day or two. Dory Karen Applebaum and Julia Katherine Gibbs exchanged vows at four o’clock in the afternoon on the grounds of ABC Winery in Rensselaer County, New York. He and Dory had married in his parents’ living room. “Congratulations.”
“Dory wished you could have been there, but didn’t want to invite you,” said Julia, finding her voice and shuffling her weight from foot to foot. She probably needed to sit down. Strands of hair clung to her cheeks, which were shiny with sweat. “I mean, for you to feel like you had to come.”
“Well, that’s something.” He leaned his head against the door and closed his eyes. Everything about her—her protruding belly, her clammy, beseeching face—made him want to relent.
“And I didn’t