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  Avi’s amusement evaporated, and he gave Tom a look—stern and disapproving—that she recognized and dreaded. Despite his disapproval, she couldn’t help exclaiming over the news. “What will you do there?”

  “Teach, observe, write. After two years, I should have enough material for a book. If I don’t, well, I could have done worse things with my life.”

  Avi shook his head. “Better to get it out of your system now, before you start a family.”

  Tom laughed. Elaine said, “You talk like it’s a disease. It sounds exciting.”

  “Romantic notions are a disease,” Avi said.

  Elaine looked at Tom pleadingly.

  “Don’t you know who you’re marrying?” Tom said. “This is classic Avi.” It seemed funny to her in the moment, and she and Tom laughed.

  At the entrance to the club, Avi held the door open for them. The place was full and Elaine had to squeeze between two tables to take her seat on the banquette. An older man sat very near to her. Tom had to pull the table out so he could squeeze beside her.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Avi, but you’ll have her the rest of your life, right?”

  “Right,” Avi said.

  Two bourbon-and-Cokes arrived for Elaine, who was already drunk. “What’s this?”

  “It’s called a double,” Tom said. “Cheers.”

  Avi watched the band. Elaine drank her first cocktail quickly, to get rid of it. She was sipping her second when she started to feel unwell. As she made her way to the bathroom, the floor buckled in jagged hunks, rising and falling beneath her feet. The bathroom wobbled and heaved. She stood at the sink gripping its cool sides, hoping to vomit. Her eyes watered, and her belches echoed off the tiles. Feeling no better, she lurched back to the table, keeping her eyes on the violently shifting floor. Tom wouldn’t let her sit. He tried to dance with her, but she bounced off his chest like a doll. By the time he led her back to their seats, most of her vision had blackened, save for small portholes of wavering amber. When she squeezed between the two tables, her legs became liquid rushing to the floor, and she collapsed into the lap of the elderly man next to them, bracing herself on his crotch. Startled, he jumped, and Elaine slid between his legs to the floor beneath the table.

  For a moment, she rested her cheek against the cool pedestal of the table. If she could just rest and breathe some cool air. Tom flipped the tablecloth up and beckoned. “Come. This way.” She crawled out, and once Tom had lifted her to her feet, she marched stiff-legged to the door. Avi was already hailing a cab. She had hit her head and scraped her arm, and now she clutched herself in a shamed embrace on the sidewalk. “Ow, ow, ow,” she said.

  Tom came out with their coats over his arm. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”

  “I scraped my arm. I feel sick.”

  She threw up twice out the window of the cab on the way to Aunt Carol’s. Tom spoke loudly and continuously to the driver, to cover the sound of her retching. When they arrived at the brownstone, Avi held her elbow and led her upstairs. Sick and humiliated, she pulled away and wobbled ahead of him. In the bedroom, half-undressed, she turned to look at her arm where Avi had held her. No trace of him.

  She awoke in the morning with what felt like a mortal head wound. She heard, as if from a great depth, Aunt Carol say, “She’s still sleeping.” Later, she woke to pounding on the door. The pounding wouldn’t stop. Aunt Carol, apparently, was out. Elaine wove through the rooms toward the sound, bumping into doorframes and occasional tables, upsetting photographs and rattling candy dishes. She answered the door wearing only her slip. It was Tom, and he held her purse.

  “You left it at the club. I’m not sure if anything’s missing. I didn’t want to look.”

  Heat rose to her cheeks. She took her purse and waved him in. He stepped into the small warm kitchen, his hands shoved into his pockets. She smelled alcohol and hoped the smell wasn’t coming from her.

  “Avi noticed, so we went back. The old guy you fell on must have turned it in to the bartender.”

  Elaine looked inside. Everything was there, but her wallet had been emptied of cash.

  “Where’s Avi?” She imagined him waiting in the car outside. Would he be blank-faced or disapproving? Her mouth felt suddenly juicy.

  Tom looked pained. “He went back to Jersey. He asked me to put you on a train. He said to call when you get to the station.”

  Now her eyes stung, and she looked down into her purse again. Tom would have to give her money for the train and for the phone, too. Why couldn’t Avi have waited—or at least left her money for the train? She clicked her purse shut. “I’m not going.”

  Tom nodded, as if that were the only thing to do—the thing he could have predicted and in fact wanted her to do. He waited while she showered and dressed, brought her a glass of ginger ale after a fit of vomiting. When they said good-bye, he kissed her cheek. “Good luck in Africa,” she said, “and with your book.” Her engagement to Avi already felt like a mostly forgotten dream.

  With the money she had been saving for the wedding, she sublet Tom’s studio in the Village, on West 11th. At first her mother was pleased about her change of plans. She thought Avi too old-fashioned, too conservative, too Jewish. When she finally understood Elaine’s plans—that they didn’t include college—she became disturbed once again. Elaine found it easy to ignore her mother’s misgivings.

  II

  Nine years after she had moved to the Village, she was robbed on a Saturday in early June. That morning she sipped coffee on the balcony, easing into the day. Her legs were bare, and she wore nothing but a large white button-down and panties. A beer truck pulled up to the liquor store across the street, and a man unloaded cases onto a hand truck. This was her Saturday routine: a date with the beer man. She liked to air-dry her hair, it was too hot for much clothing, and the skirts girls wore were shorter than her shirt. The beer man didn’t seem to mind.

  She’d been blond now for five years. She’d grown her hair out and bleached it, her eyebrows too. Sometimes she tanned.

  “Blondie,” the man called. “You got a sandwich for me?”

  “I’ll give you a sandwich.”

  “I’ll get in trouble with my wife.”

  “Just for a sandwich?”

  “See you next week.” He got in his truck and drove away.

  After putting on a pair of jeans, she got her basket and detergent and set out for the laundry room. She thought about keys, but her jeans were too tight and she was afraid she’d lose them, so she left the door unlocked. When she came back to her apartment, she sat at the table and called her mother. Mrs. Shapiro was dating someone new, and Elaine enjoyed calling weekend mornings to talk to Ernie while he made breakfast for her mother.

  “Ma, put Ernie on.”

  Her mother sighed. “Ernie, it’s your girlfriend.”

  Ernie said, “Alice, I tell her it’s over. She keeps calling. I don’t know why.”

  “Listen, Ernie, I need a favor,” Elaine said.

  Ernie wheezed into the phone. “Anything, doll.”

  Elaine liked asking her mother’s boyfriends for favors. She had never been resentful of her mother’s dating; in fact, she had always considered her mother’s beaus potential resources for all sorts of things. The trick was figuring out what they were good for. Most were grateful for the interest, and, Elaine discovered, they liked helping and being appreciated. She never thought much about what she brought to the table, other than gratitude. She hit Ernie up for a workshop on networking for the young professionals of the JCC. He was flattered and agreed.

  Her mother got on the phone. Elaine worried vaguely about her laundry. A peach silk camisole had disappeared recently when she’d forgotten her clothes overnight. “Hi, Mommy. What’s up?”

  “Are you nervous about your big night?”

  Elaine answered firmly. “It’ll run itself. And Daniel will be there for moral support.”

  She could almost hear her mother’s tight-lipped frown. “Ther
e’s someone I want you to meet—a dermatologist, just your age and so handsome! He knows about art, too—he’s not just some, you know, stethoscope.”

  Elaine closed her eyes. “Daniel will be there, Mom.”

  “What—you can’t meet someone? Is Daniel that insecure? Sometimes young men are, you know.”

  The eggs and butter in her mother’s kitchen sizzled over the line.

  “Mommy, I love you, but I have to check my laundry.”

  She raced down to the basement to move her clothes to the dryer, again leaving the door unlocked. When she returned she called Daniel, who worked at the JCC with her. They talked for sixty minutes, flirting and making plans to meet that night before the fundraiser. Daniel had been waging an elaborate campaign to persuade Elaine to spend six months in the Catskills at his uncle’s cabin. He had received a grant to pursue a new photography project.

  “Remind me,” Elaine said, “what I would be doing at your uncle’s cabin for six months.”

  On the other end of the line, Daniel inhaled sharply. There was a long pause before he spoke. “Nature,” he said. “You’d be part of nature.” He exhaled.

  “We went camping once, with some neighbors. Nightmare! Burrs in my socks, ticks in every crevice.”

  Daniel moaned drowsily. “I will personally—” He inhaled again.

  “Yes?”

  “—attend to—”

  “Uh-huh—”

  “—every inch,” he exhaled, “of Elaine Shapiro. No terrain unexplored. Meticulous mapping. Don’t. You. Worry.”

  Elaine giggled madly. “I’ll visit weekends. You’ll have to do all the mapmaking then.”

  “You’ll try to leave,” Daniel said, “but you will stay, stay, stay.”

  After their good-byes, feeling sultry, Elaine rescued her overheated laundry from the dryer.

  That evening, she shimmied into a bronze satin slip dress and matching sandals. She opened her vanity to find her pearl earrings missing. The gold bracelet Avi had given her long ago was also gone. After rummaging through all the drawers, she straightened up and looked around the room. The little box of change and stamps on the shelf had been opened—the lid was off, the change gone. The box of photographs and old cards that she kept on the coffee table had also been opened. Nothing seemed missing aside from the change and her jewelry. She realized someone must have come into the apartment while she had been in the basement. The lobby door could only be opened with a key, and she wondered which of her neighbors could have trespassed. She imagined Mrs. Otseke in her flowery kimono opening the fridge to examine the leftovers, Mr. Safransky mashing the white bathmat in his street shoes. Maybe the guest of another tenant had robbed her—the stringy-haired saxophone player hosted a stream of gigging musicians, and the librarian was putting up his teenaged sister whom Elaine thought of as “Cornfield,” because she was from Ohio, even though she had been introduced to the girl at least twice. She imagined the raven-haired girl, watchful, waiting for her moment, slipping in and rustling through Elaine’s things. Elaine stepped into the hallway and peered down both ends, gazing at each green door as if she could note a sign of guilt or spy her missing items with the X-ray vision of the righteous. She didn’t bother calling the police.

  Daniel arrived, as always, with a camera.

  “This is a Brownie,” he told Elaine, holding up the small box. He snapped her picture after she’d turned away from locking the door—which she made a show of doing, noisily rattling her keys and throwing all the bolts. She felt stupid about the loss of her jewelry—it was her fault for leaving the door unlocked—and she didn’t feel like mentioning it. She was afraid she might cry if he showed sympathy, and she felt bereft enough as it was. She wore her everyday earrings—gold filigree studs her mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday.

  “You have enough pictures of me. Let me take yours.”

  Daniel handed over the odd box of a camera.

  “Turn sideways.”

  She looked through the viewfinder and marveled at his unlined skin, his fine nose and hazel eyes. She, Elaine Shapiro, was dating a god—a god who lusted for her. She snapped the picture. They kissed long and hard, Elaine pressing Daniel into Mrs. Otseke’s door.

  On the way to the train, she held onto Daniel’s forearm, kneading it. “Tell me more about the Catskills,” she said, tossing her hair.

  Daniel glanced at her. “Wait—you’re actually considering?”

  “Were you not serious about the invitation?”

  He stopped in front of her, held both of her hands. “I’m completely serious. Take a leave of absence—that’s what I’m doing.” He paused. “This could be a trial run for us.”

  Elaine’s heart lurched, and she felt her eyes widen. “Or not,” Daniel said.

  “Ha,” she said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

  They started walking again. “Why can it only be two ways?” he said.

  “Because,” Elaine said, “I only went to high school. They only teach two ways.”

  “My God, my parents would probably pay you to go back to school, they love you so much.”

  “They love the idea of me,” Elaine said. “Your father does, anyway. Well, maybe your mother.”

  She thought of playing cards with Daniel’s mother, how they’d gotten drunk and Mrs. Eisenman had shown her the gowns she’d worn to yesterday’s formals, insisting that Elaine model them. She had beamed—warm nostalgia!—and Elaine had cooked up a fundraiser on the spot: for the ladies of the JCC to pay to see their idealized pasts floating down the runway toward them. Now she entertained the possibility once again of being taken care of; she liked the idea of being rich in resources—Mr. and Mrs. Eisenman, Daniel’s uncle, people who enjoyed the idea of a young couple’s potential. She imagined waking up to Daniel gathering his cameras and preparing for the day. She could keep working part-time, cook meals for them, make a home, find clever ways to throw dinner parties on a budget, something she was already good at, on a much larger scale—with other people’s money. They would have whimsical low-budget vacations in the off-season, at other people’s cottages. Or maybe she would become someone entirely new, a person she could not now imagine. College. The Catskills, spring and summer. Why say no?

  She matched Daniel’s long stride, her heart pounding. “What do you see in the forest?”

  “Trees, mostly,” he said. He stopped again and faced her. “You can do whatever you want. Come and go as you please. OK?”

  She nodded and they walked again, Elaine pressing to keep up with him. She was beginning to feel harried by the pace, so she tried to focus on the people passing by, tried to see inside them for some clue: Whimsical or serious? Depressed or fulfilled? Grateful or bitter? Steadfast or uncertain? Finally, she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “You’re running me off my feet here.”

  Daniel whirled around to retrieve her. “Hiking boots,” he said.

  A woman passing by smiled at them. Elaine wondered what she saw.

  At the dinner dance, Daniel moved among the crowd snapping pictures for future brochures and fundraising campaigns. Elaine liked this arrangement; she could mingle without having to worry about entertaining him, but he was there and he was hers. As she talked to the partygoers, she found herself distracted by the women’s jewelry. She felt a pang every time she saw a pair of earrings like her stolen pair, or even unlike them. The bracelet she had felt guilty about keeping, but her mother had assured her that returning it to Avi would seem strange and spiteful. If this were some kind of karmic payback, well then, time to move on, but every woman outfitted in pearls or diamonds or weighted down with gold had a man nearby, and each one held onto the arm of her man like an anchor. Elaine, in her slip of a dress and her minuscule earrings, felt in danger of floating away.

  She shook away the feeling and turned to find Daniel. She scanned the room and saw again the many women in dark gowns glimmering in the low light. Faint panic fluttered against her ribs as she slowly turned. Scannin
g the room again she saw him behind the serving table, squatting amid the black-clad legs of the caterers, photographing the milk crates filled with dirty plates, cups, and utensils.

  At this moment, her mother swept into the room, leading a tuxedo-clad Ernie by the hand. At fifty-five, Mrs. Shapiro had what Elaine liked to consider substance. It wasn’t entirely looks; it had something to do with her mother’s presence and the way she carried herself. Elaine could never pull off the things her mother wore. The cappuccino-colored gown this evening, for instance, with the matching stole. On her mother the gown was regal; Elaine would have looked like a girl playing dress-up. Mrs. Shapiro spotted her and glided over with Ernie. They kissed each other in greeting, and her mother frowned.

  “You look flushed. What’s wrong?”

  Ernie went to get drinks, and Mrs. Shapiro dabbed at Elaine’s forehead with a tissue. Maybe her mother would decide not to introduce her to the doctor if she were sweating too much. She considered telling her mother about the robbery, in fact, wanted to, but she knew her mother would worry about her safety and might even insist that Elaine come live with her in Chatham. Elaine feared she might agree.

  “I’m fine.” She took her mother’s hand and squeezed. “Now, where’s this art-loving doctor?”

  Mrs. Shapiro led Elaine across the dance floor to meet Paul, the dermatologist. Ernie sailed toward them with their drinks on a tray commandeered from one of the staff. After the introductions and preliminary chitchat, he and Mrs. Shapiro excused themselves. Elaine liked Paul’s dark looks and his cool light fingers in her hand when they were introduced. They talked about their jobs, and while they talked, Elaine imagined his enormous loft apartment, how dim and expensive it would be. She saw herself sitting on a butter-soft leather sofa, tastefully dressed and flipping through a magazine. She wanted to say, “I’m sure you’re very nice,” but she didn’t know how to finish the thought.

  “You’re really very lovely,” he said. Elaine gave him a sharp look. She agreed to meet him for drinks the following Tuesday. On the one hand, what was the harm? On the other, what was the point? After they parted company, she eyed the people around her. As she had predicted, the party ran itself. People showed up, the caterers served food, and the guests ate, drank, talked, and laughed. Daniel had switched cameras and used the telephoto lens to snap pictures of the guests. His blue sharkskin suit glimmered. Two women in black cocktail dresses watched him from the edge of the room. The women exchanged glances, then burst out laughing. Elaine wanted to throw her soda water in their faces, though she knew that their laughter could have been innocent. She made her rounds, checking that the food stations were stocked and the tables reasonably cleared. Along the way, she chatted with guests and discussed plans for renovation of the community center and the new art classes being offered in the fall.