things, as did I, and we hugged, and I waited for my heart to open. But as she led me into their apartment, the thought that came unbidden was: Here is someone that I used to love. Or even: Here is someone who resembles, to a large degree but imperfectly, someone that I used to love. I didn’t want to feel, of all things, wistful and melancholic: I had a case against these people, who had packed up my soul along with their blankets and books, and had kept it without caring for it all these years. A case against these three Black Monks who had prophesied for me—all but promised—a future which had not begun to come to pass; and who, with their promises in hand, had abandoned me as if it were a mere lark—I had a case—
But who could have a case against that laugh? Or against Skandar’s long-lost smile, as if he’d been dropped by parachute into his own living room and didn’t quite know where he was … He, too, seemed genuinely pleased to see me—how long had it been?—and after we embraced, he held me by the wrist for a moment, almost unthinkingly—as if, I thought, Sirena were not in the room and as if, oddly, I were a child. Then Reza came out of his room, somewhere in the back of the apartment: in this big-footed and gawky manlet, his features oddly proportioned in the way of boys almost pubescent—a pimple, yes, perhaps even two, upon his chin—I strained to see my perfect child. His eyebrows were now frankly heavy, his voice croaking; but his eyelashes, and his eyes: yes, there he was entirely recognizable. Not in manner, though: you’d think he’d never known me, or else that it was he who’d kissed my bare breasts among the aspirin flowers—he was that bashful, that awkward, glancing up like a coy maiden, shuffling and rustling his enormous hands and feet, adult puppet pieces on his boy’s body. His curls were longish, in fashion: I noticed this. I knew he’d be the boy the girls dreamed of. I’d known that from the moment I first saw him. He showed such palpable relief when his mother told him to go do his homework, that we’d catch up at dinner, that I had to let him go happily. As his door shut, Sirena rolled her eyes—in that moment, more typically motherly than I’d ever seen her. She said, “Homework? What do you think, it’s a nonsense. At this age, it’s all Facebook, all the time. From video games to Facebook—for boys, this is the socialization process.” She snickered. “I’m thinking of how to make an artwork really to say something about this. But it’s difficult … Nora, my friend, a cocktail? A wine? What would you like?”
And she was off—we were off—and it was familiar, but it was also different. Just as Reza had trained her into motherhood, day after day, over years, so, too, she’d been trained, since last we’d spent time together, to think of herself as an artist of importance in the world; and it was obvious, somewhat wearingly, even when she was supposedly being lighthearted about her work.
A scientist acquaintance once explained to me that to attain nuclear fusion—which would apparently solve the global energy crisis—you have to replicate exactly the conditions of the birth of a star. This is obviously very hard, and very rare, and very fleeting. And I realized, in the Shahids’ living room, that I’d fallen in love not only with a particular configuration of people, but with that particular configuration in a particular moment in their lives and in mine. It wouldn’t have mattered if I were myself Peter Pan, ever unaltered: the minute Wendy starts to change, the idyll is over. Each of them was different, even though they were much the same. Their configuration was different. You couldn’t replicate what had been.
That didn’t make it worthless. We were friends. I still envied them their family; and I felt my blood swell with tenderness at certain gestures, certain expressions, tics that carried me back. But I left—with the promise that Sirena and I would have lunch, or at least breakfast, on Thursday (I was returning to Boston on Friday)—thinking I’d been wrong to imagine there’d been a breach of trust, flushed with the warmth of their charm and at least a bottle of wine, touched by the supper Sirena had prepared—
(“Oh,” I said, “you remembered! How sweet!”
“Remembered?”
“The