The night Anelise announced she was leaving New York, Jennifer was met with the smell of meat and onions. She did most of the cooking, not because Hugh couldn’t do it, but because she was good at it and enjoyed it.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“I got this craving for cheese steaks.”

“Don’t overcook the steak,” she said, feeling itchy with this chore taken out of her hands.

“Go watch something. I’ll bring it out. We can eat TV-dinner-style.”

She eyed him warily as she backed out of the room. This had happened before, where he was in a deep black hole, and then one day he woke up and it was like he’d recharged and his lights shined brighter. But it had been nearly three years since the last time, and she had acclimated herself to his baseline misery.

Later that night he peppered her with questions. “What’s your friend Anelise doing for New Year’s?”

Jennifer said she didn’t know, but she was sure it involved a late night and lots of drinking and minor drug usage.

“Remember when I got high that time and thought I was a giant teddy bear? I wanted everyone to pet me and hug me?”

How could she forget? He brought it up whenever he was in the slightest good mood.

He stroked her arm and gave her the look. When they first met, when she was cheating on her college boyfriend with him, they could be sitting in a diner and he’d just have to give her that look and they were out the door and running down the street to get back to her tiny bedroom.

She shook his hand off her arm more violently than she should have. It wasn’t his fault that she was heartbroken, but she wasn’t in the mood for his undivided attention.

“I’m sorry. I’m really tired,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said, to her receding back.

The next morning she expected him to be his old morose self but he was already out of bed and making pancakes. She choked down the smallest one to be nice.

Even though she wanted to wear a sweatsuit and stay in bed all day, she put on a short black skirt, fishnet stockings over sheer black hose, and her red Doc Marten boots.

“You look hot,” Hugh said.

She forced herself not to flinch when he kissed her on the forehead, and let him slip her a little tongue when he kissed her on the mouth, but then she ran out the door saying she was going to be late.

 *

When Jennifer arrived at work, she saw, lying on her desk, the snowflake cutout Anelise had given her. Anelise was a library trainee, but the day before had announced that instead of transitioning into the open position in youth services at their branch, she was moving back home to apply to MFA programs in writing.

“I had a story accepted. It’s just some journal no one reads, but I figure I should go for it. My parents think it’s a good idea.”

Jennifer had been too afraid to ask to read her work—what if it was bad? Or, even worse, what if it was good?

“Why can’t you do that here?”

“Do you know how much rent is? It’s not like when you and Hugh rented your place—what was it? Fifteen years ago?”

Jennifer flinched both at the mention of Hugh, and at how long she’d been living in what she considered a total shithole of an apartment.

“Why did you even go to library school, then?”

“So my parents can’t say I don’t have a backup plan. They have orange and avocado trees. I could be sitting looking at that, instead of the fucking BQE. Why wouldn’t I take advantage of that?”

 *

When Anelise had asked if Jennifer had roommates, she’d said she lived with her partner, but she left his gender vague. Anelise volunteered that she had recently moved in with a bunch of people in Sunset Park after she broke up with her girlfriend.

“Breakups are hard,” Jennifer said, hoping to exude worldliness, but in truth she had only had two. The first one was her high school girlfriend; the second was Mitch, the college boyfriend she cheated on to be with Hugh.

“It’s ok,” Anelise said. “Now I get to fuck around and have fun.”

She was as impish as the smiling emoji she favored in her text messages, and if Jennifer wasn’t instantly smitten, she would have hated her on the spot.

Anelise’s favorite writer was Mary Gaitskill and she only dated older women.

“I have mommy AND daddy issues because I’m Asian AND white,” Anelise said.

Jennifer didn’t register that this was just a coquettish joke Anelise made when she flirted with white people. She believed Anelise was entrusting her with a painful intimacy, so she nodded knowingly even though she privately wondered which side was responsible for mommy issues and which the daddy issues. Jennifer envied being young enough to have mommy and daddy issues. She envied having parents at all.

Jennifer had seen photographs of the ama—Japanese female oyster divers—and been entranced by their sleek topless forms diving with just a rope and blunt tool. In Jennifer’s daydreams Anelise became one of those women: a fearless, industrious siren, slippery to the touch.

Anelise wasn’t easy but she was as bracing as a freshly shucked oyster and Jennifer wanted to eat her all up until she was sated, but she knew she never would be.

They had only fucked four times over the last four months—but each time had been cataclysmic, and Anelise’s absences left Jennifer tetchy and forlorn, even more than usual. On those days she listened to Anelise’s playlists, which were loaded with songs from Jennifer’s 1990s and early 2000s heyday. What a gift it was to partake of a beloved’s youth without having to learn a new language!

They sang and cried together singing “Maps” over wings and beer in a karaoke booth in Koreatown with a group of Anelise’s friends. She eased Jennifer’s self-consciousness over their fifteen-year age difference by keeping Jennifer by her side at the center of the room, and pressing her lips to Jennifer’s ear to ask what songs they should do next.

When Jennifer left for home, Hugh, and a warm shower to relieve the tension of being so close to her, Anelise insisted on walking Jennifer to the train, and kissed her at the entrance to the subway. It was like switching on lights in a dark room—everything that was wrong in her life was spotlit. Jennifer would have followed her anywhere that night. Anelise, four inches shorter than Jennifer, got on her toes to whisper in Jennifer’s ear, “We’re just getting started.”

But Jennifer never felt like they ever quite got started. With the roommate situation, and Anelise’s library school classes, and the hours she spent writing, they saw each other only infrequently outside of work, and their relationship was mostly buoyed by the copious text messages they exchanged, so many more than Jennifer thought was possible to exchange with another person. 

On their last assignation two weeks prior, they’d rented their own karaoke booth, and in between nosy inquiries from staff, Anelise had gotten Jennifer off using a discreet sex toy she controlled with her phone.

Even more erotic than orgasming in public was taking the slick vibrator out of her panties and slipping it against Anelise’s clit, and watching from across the room as Anelise tried to sing, while as Jennifer increased the intensity of the vibration with Anelise’s phone.

 *

“Grad school doesn’t make you a real writer, you know,” Jennifer said after the MFA bombshell.

Anelise curled her lip, and pointed around them at the cluttered information desk, the sickly fluorescent lights, the wholesome signage advertising craft sessions, and the downtrodden patrons who nodded off in the well-worn furniture until security reminded them that sleeping was not allowed in the library.

“Don’t you want more than this?”

 *

Before moving in with Hugh, Jennifer had been an intern at a small independent record label. She hoped that she would distinguish herself and be offered a job, but no one ever learned her name except for Geoff Dunn, a co-founder of the label, which she thought would give her an in.

She and Hugh had already been together for a year, but she still lived with roommates in the East Village. One night she was backstage at a disastrous show where one of the label’s stars had broken down in tears and been unable to perform. She was coaxed back on stage by the audience’s gentle reassurances that they loved her. The singer strummed a guitar and warbled her way through three songs before croaking out, “Thank you for your kindness,” and exiting the stage for good.

Geoff Dunn came up to Jennifer, his brow furrowed. “Can you help me get Caitlin home?”

After Jennifer followed the singer into a cab, Geoff Dunn peered inside. He told Jennifer to scoot over and put his hand on her thigh to steady himself as he squeezed in with them. On the ride to Caitlin’s apartment on the Lower East Side, Jennifer was sure that Geoff Dunn was going to go home with Caitlin, but he surprised her by saying, “She’s in 5C. Just put her to bed, if she’ll let you. I’ll wait down here.”

She’d expected a struggle , but once they reached her door Caitlin turned and said, “I’m fine. I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Geoff thinks you should get sleep.” Jennifer had never said his name out loud before.

“That’s easy for him to say. He sleeps like a baby.”

“You sure you’re ok?”

“I’m fine,” she said, blowing away her bangs so she could look Jennifer in the eye.

If Caitlin had pulled her in for a kiss the way Jennifer wanted, she would have happily submitted to her cigarette breath, but instead Caitlin gestured for her guitar, and, taking it, walked inside and closed the door.

It had started raining.

“Where are you? Brooklyn?” Geoff Dunn said in the cab.

“East Village. Not far from here,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “NYU?’

“Hunter,” she said.

“Huh. Imagine that.”

Then he said, “I don’t live far. You up for some fun?”

His open expression gave her the impression that he could take or leave her answer, that there wasn’t anything more or less to his invitation.

His loft was spacious, but rickety. He had a king sized bed shoved in a corner, and most of the walls were lined with records. Across from the bed was a stereo with speakers almost as tall as Jennifer.

They fucked. She knew that’s what they were there for and she liked it.

Six months later, when she inquired about a job, and was told that there wasn’t an opening, she refused to believe that night had any bearing on the situation. Later, when she was in library school and working at the Barnes and Noble at Astor Place, she saw Geoff Dunn canoodling in a corner by the periodicals with a woman the same age she had been seven years earlier. Jennifer didn’t think the woman was an intern—she was carrying a clear portfolio full of headshots—but something in his manner, maybe how he wore a sharp suit and an ironic cravat, even though his musicians slept on floors as they crisscrossed the country on tour, made her feel that the real exploitation had been the internship itself. There had never been a job, but they needed interns to keep the place running. The only way someone would get hired was if one of the old time employees burned out and had to go to rehab, or went to law school and quit. It wasn’t the sex she resented—it was having her time wasted.

After this one-time infidelity was when she should have broken up with Hugh. By that time he had dropped out of his PhD program to work in the mailroom at a law firm in midtown. He liked to joke that reading Moby Dick five times in a row had made him lose his mind.

Now Hugh barely read, except for musty pulp fiction he ordered in bulk, and he rarely left the house except to go to work or to Mets games with his brother Bobby. When Jennifer first met Hugh’s mother, Janice, she had doted on Hugh because he’d graduated college and gotten an MA, while Hugh’s brother only did two years at John Jay and become a cop. Now, the few times a year she saw her, Janice talked all about Bobby and his daughters. She had less kind things to say about Bobby’s wife, but it had been ten years since Janice had asked Jennifer when she and Hugh were getting married, so Jennifer assumed she rated even less highly in Janice’s esteem than poor Luisa did.

If Jennifer had broken up with Hugh when they were young, it would have been forgivable. Now it was unthinkable. The four months she’d been dallying with Anelise, he had been as close to bedridden as he had ever been, but never once did Jennifer believe herself to be the cause. How could she be, if she had never once been the cause of his rejoicing?

The closest she’d come to ending things had been a strange weekend when her friend Chip invited her out for Chinese food. They were both inexpertly eating noodles with chopsticks when he pointed his at her and said, “I have a proposition for you.”

She motioned at him with her chopsticks to explain.

“So, you know Ellery has been struggling with depression for a while, right.”

Ellery was his girlfriend. She had been vaguely aware, but completely unconcerned. Who wasn’t struggling with depression? She nodded in sympathy.

“Ok, so this might sound weird, but we agreed to open things up since she’s not interested in sex and all of that.”

Jennifer nodded again.

“I don’t know what things are like with Hugh, but we’ve known each other a long time and I think we can trust each other not to catch feelings, as the kids say. What do you think?”

Chip had always joked about hitting on Jennifer’s younger sister, Katie, but she never took it to mean he might be attracted to her, not because she thought herself unattractive, but because she found him so grossly unattractive she didn’t think he would dare try. 

She dropped her chopsticks and laughed and laughed and laughed.

At first he smiled, but then it faltered, and the more she laughed, the angrier he looked.

“Wait. I’m sorry, you want me to ask my boyfriend if it’s ok to have sex with you? Because your girlfriend is too depressed to have sex?”

She was shouting; she couldn’t help it—this was the funniest thing that had happened to her in years. But then she saw Chip’s expression and deflated.

He drove her home and even though he said he’d see her soon, he never called her again.

When she recounted the scene to Hugh, she’d expected him to be outraged on his own behalf, but he’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It sorta kinda makes sense to me.”

“You wouldn’t mind?” she asked, incredulous because she would mind if put in the same position.

“I’d mind, but I’d understand. People have needs,” he said.

“Sex is overrated,” she said, and then left the room to wash the dishes, because she couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him. She ran the water hot so her glasses fogged up and she clanked the dishes into place. She couldn’t believe he couldn’t even get it up enough to defend his claim over her. What was all this for, anyway? But when she looked at him in the middle of the night and thought about leaving him, knowing that she should, she just cried, not because she was going to do it, and it would hurt, but because she knew she couldn’t. She was stuck right where she was in the same sagging bed they’d had since they first moved in together, because it was cheaper to live together than it was to live apart, and she hated other people more than he annoyed her.

 *

After answering emails she went to the youth section of the library looking for Anelise, but Anelise had called in sick. She’d dressed up for nothing.

“Actually, Anelise isn’t coming in anymore,” Angela said. “A little notice would have been nice,” Angela added, with a roll of her eyes.

Back at her desk, Jennifer picked up the snowflake again and started to make a fist to crumple it, but she dropped it on her desk and smoothed it out and returned it to its pride of place.

 *

That night Jennifer was getting her keys out of her pocket when someone entered the vestibule with her. Jennifer glanced at the security mirror above and saw it was an older homeless woman who was a regular at the library and bore an uncanny resemblance to her old childhood neighbor, Mrs. Downy, which made Jennifer avoid her.

The library was in Manhattan and Jennifer lived in Queens, so that normally gave her a little buffer zone from patrons. But a year ago Jennifer had been coming home from the subway after a long day and walked past a neighborhood church and was surprised to see this woman standing outside. Did she live nearby? The thought had alarmed Jennifer. The woman didn’t shout, but she spoke in the loud confident voice of the fervent believer, and told people that if they were in need, they had a home with Jesus. Jennifer stopped and gawked a bit. Had this woman always been a Jesus freak, or was it gradual? The woman mistook Jennifer’s hesitation for interest and thrust a box of macaroni and cheese into Jennifer’s chest.

“Take it. Don’t be shy. He does not judge.”

If Jennifer had not clutched at the box, it would have fallen. She wanted to give it back and insist she did not need it, but she was afraid to get caught up any further and hurried away down the street.

At home she put the box in the back of the cabinet and forgot about it until one night she came home to see Hugh eating the orange glop straight from the pot. She knew it was unreasonable to think the food was tainted, but she went straight to the bedroom and said she wasn’t hungry. Hours later, when Hugh joined her in bed, she smelled macaroni and cheese on his breath and she elbowed him and said, “Go brush your teeth for god’s sake.”

 *

Now, Jennifer rushed her key into the lock, entered the door, and quickly shut it behind her before the woman could enter. She ran up the stairs, her vegan leather messenger bag bouncing against her back.

By the time she entered the apartment a loud buzz was issuing from their intercom and seemingly every intercom in the building.

Jennifer ignored it, but Hugh answered, and a loud plaintive voice pleaded, “Let me in, please. Just let me in.”

Hugh asked her if she knew who that was and Jennifer shook her head. “Must have come in after I was already on my way up.”

“I’m going to see what she wants,” Hugh said, not bothering to put on his shoes before running out the door.

When he returned, he looked pleased with himself.

“She just wanted somewhere warm to sleep for the night.”

Jennifer froze in horror. He hadn’t brought her upstairs, had he?

“What’s wrong with you?” he said.

“Nothing. It’s just sad,” she said.

“She’s camping out under the stairwell. At least she’ll be warm tonight.”

Hugh’s depression made him generous, but he never followed through on his initial efforts—he’d forget all about the woman under the stairs within the hour, whereas Jennifer held herself at a distance lest she find herself trapped in service to another. Once, she’d had to change her route from the subway to work after a man, accustomed to the daily dollar she gave him one week, became aggressive when she tried to ignore him the next. At least that’s how she spun it in her head.

Hugh seemed to have forgotten the woman. He took Jennifer’s small hand into his large soft one (even now she affectionately called them his bear paws) and pulled her arm around him and pinned her to him with his other arm, forcing her to embrace him and look up at him.

“Guess what?”

“What,” she said, her hand growing damp against his palm.

“I’m going to do it this year.”

“What?” She hated when he talked this way, like he was continuing a conversation they had never even started. She broke free and turned toward the kitchen.

“Polar bear swim. Come watch. I want someone to take my picture after.”

He hated having his photo taken.

“I guess,” she said, retreating another step.

“It’ll be fun. I’ll buy you hot chocolate.”

“Great,” she said, then went to the kitchen to make dinner and wait for a text from Anelise.

 *

The next day she braced for the woman’s presence under the stairwell, but she was gone. The only thing left behind was a matted wool scarf. Jennifer winced, knowing the woman’s neck would miss the scarf in the cold, since the library was closed that day, but she was relieved. She didn’t want to feel responsible for her. Mrs. Downy had always asked to see her report card and said she was the pride of the neighborhood.

They rode the subway out to Coney Island. A group of men sat hunched over, nursing hangovers, but they got off the train and headed to the beach just as she and Hugh did.

Hugh had stuffed a library tote bag with two towels, an extra pair of socks, and a thermos of coffee.

He surveyed the scene nervously, and his hair whipped this way and that, but when he turned to look at her he was smiling. He looked so happy she could cry.

He stripped to his boxers, but lots of people wore costumes. There was already a unicorn frolicking in the water.

“It’s cold,” he said.

“You don’t have to do it,” she said. “We can just watch and take pictures.”

“No,” he said, handing her the camera. “I need to do this.”

Hugh marched down to the water. She was proud that he didn’t have the jiggling beer belly another man had, whose cigar trailed smoke behind him as he walked.

At the ocean’s edge, Hugh turned around to face her and splashed himself with water, as if administering a sloppy baptism. Even from a distance she registered the joy on his face.

She resented that joy in the face of her heartache, and pitied herself because she would never in a million years do something like walk into the freezing Atlantic on New Year’s Day. But then her heart soared. She could finally leave him! At the very least, she had to tell him about Anelise. He’d have to break up with her, but it was okay, because he was strong enough now. He was happy.

When he ran back she almost forgot to take his photo, but she raised the camera just in time and got him exiting the water, and his big triumphant face as he reached their tote bag.

He gave her a deep salty kiss and then stripped off his boxers. He didn’t care who saw his junk.

When he had his jeans and socks back on she said, “Hey. We should talk.”

He licked his lips and said, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m so sorry.”

Was she crying? Why?

“I met someone. Anelise.”

She expected him to say something but he remained silent. His face looked concerned but not angry.

“I thought you should know,” she added.

“I figured,” he said.

“You knew?”

“You smelled like sex,” he said, with just the slightest edge. “And you never mentioned anyone else.”

She was mortified, but she could take it as long as he followed through and put them both out of their misery.

“I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner.”

“Do you love her?”

“No,” Jennifer said. She lied not to spare his feelings, but to spare her own.

“Okay,” he said, nodding to himself. “Okay.”

Jennifer bit her lip, tensing.

“Is it over?” he asked warily.

She considered lying again, but didn’t see the point.

“She’s moving back to California,” she said in a rush.

“Okay,” he said, nodding decisively. “That means we can work it out.”

“Really?”

As much as her heart had soared just minutes ago, it crashed through her stomach. She was lightheaded. Hugh’s passivity was a burden rather than the gift he thought it was. She dropped the camera to the sand and walked down the beach to the water’s edge. She was going to do it. She had nothing to lose.

The water sloshed over her sneakers and up her ankles but that’s as far as she got. She couldn’t make herself walk any further. She was crying again and maybe she was yelling. She sank to her knees and pounded them over and over.

Hugh pulled her to her feet but she wrenched out of his grasp and sloshed a few more steps into the surf. The water bit into her thighs and she turned around and stumbled into Hugh’s open arms and wept into his chest.

He helped her back to the towel. He made her sit down and he pulled off her wet sneakers and socks and rubbed her feet. He pulled the extra socks off his own feet, and pulled them over hers.

As they walked back to the train, her in Hugh’s socks, her sneakers abandoned on the beach, she said querulously, “I don’t deserve you. Why do you put up with me?”

He shushed her, and kissed the side of her head, and she hated him for it.