The Breeze

By Joshua Ferris

he was in the brig when her husband came home. Below her, neighbors reclined on their stoops, laughing and relieved, shaking off winter with loud cries and sudden starts. Someone unseen scraped a broom over a little courtyard, the rhythmic sound of brownstones in spring.

“In the brig!” Sarah called out and, with her wineglass at a tilt, looked down on the neighborhood. They called their six feet of concrete balcony overlooking the street the brig.

The children’s voices carried in the blue air. Then the breeze came. It cut through the branches of the trees, turning up the silver undersides of the young leaves, and brought goosebumps as it went around her. The breeze, God, the breeze! she thought. You get how many like it? Maybe a dozen in a lifetime . . . and already gone, down the block and picking up speed, or dying out. Either way, dead to her, and leaving in its wake a sense of excitement and mild dread. What if she failed to make the most of what remained of this perfect spring day?

She finished her wine and went inside. Jay was thumbing listlessly through the mail.

“Hey,” he said.

“What do you want to do tonight?” she asked him.

“Oh,” he said, and paused over what looked like a credit-card offer. “I don’t care. What do you want to do?”

“There’s nothing you want to do?”

“I want to do whatever you want to do,” he said.

“So it’s up to me to come up with something?”

He looked at her at last. “You asked me to come home so we could do something.”

“Because I want to do something.”

“I want to do something, too,” he said.

“O.K.,” she said, “so let’s do it.”

“Let’s do it,” he said. Then he said, “What is it you want to do?”

She wanted to have a picnic in Central Park. They bought sandwiches from a place in the neighborhood and took the train into Manhattan. He unfurled a checkered blanket in the breeze and spread it under a tree whose canopy would have spanned the length of their apartment. In the mild wind, the leaves ticked gently back and forth, like second hands on stuck clocks. She wore a shimmery green sundress, with a thin white belt, slipped on quickly in the few minutes she gave them to get ready. His knees looked as pale as moons in last year’s shorts. They ate their sandwiches and drank a little wine, and then they stood and tossed a Frisbee until it was just a white underbelly floating in the darkness. Before leaving, they walked into a little wooded area and with barely a sound brought each other off in two minutes with an urgency that had hibernated all winter, an urgency they both thought might have died in its hole. It was all right now; they could go home. But it was early, and he suggested going to a beer garden where they’d spent last summer drinking with friends. There was a flurry of texts and phone calls, and before too long their friends showed up—Wes and Rachel, Molly with her dog. They drank and talked until closing time. Sarah skipped ahead down the street on their way to the subway and then skipped back to him, leaping into his arms. It stayed warm through the night.

On their way into Manhattan, he told her that they had tickets to a movie that night. It was the 3-D follow-up to the sequel of a superhero blockbuster. He had gone online the day before only to learn that theIMAXshowings were already sold out. He couldn’t believe it. How far in advance did this city make movie tickets available for pre-purchase, and how much cunning did it take to get your hands on them? He hadn’t even been able to get tickets to the early show at the regular theatre, which would have been preferable—it had been a long week and he was tired, and, for God’s sake, who thinks they need to plan more than a day in advance to see a movie? It was just a movie, it wasn’t—

She put a hand out to stop him. “Jay,” she said. “I’m sorry, sweets. I can’t see a movie tonight.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too predictable,” she said. “Aren’t you tired of movies? All we’ve done all winter long is go to movies.”

“But I bought the tickets. They’re bought and paid for.”

“We’ll get a refund,” she said. “I can’t see a movie.”

“You’re always telling me you like it when I plan things.”

“It’s a movie,” she said, “not a weekend in Paris. I can’t sit in a movie theatre tonight, Jay. I’ll go bonkers.”

“It doesn’t start until eleven. The night’s practically over by then.”

“Whose night is over?” she said. “Whose particular night?”

He didn’t understand. “What are you getting so excited about?”

Her focus shifted, and she didn’t answer. The train had slowed to a crawl and was now stopped altogether. Why had it stopped? They were sitting dead still in the bowels of the subway while the last hour or two—not even, not two—the last hour and change of daylight and breeze died out on the shoulders of those who had known better than to lock themselves inside the subway at such a delicate moment. Here was the underworld of the city’s infinite offering: snags, delays, bottlenecks, the growing anxiety of never arriving at what was always just out of reach. It was enough to make you stand and scream and kick at the doors. Their ambitions should have been more modest. They could have walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped midway to watch the sun go down.

She stood.

“Sarah?” he said.

The train started to move—not enough to jolt her, but enough to get her sitting again. She didn’t answer or look at him.

She left the table and started toward the ladies’ room of the beer garden. She walked under a sagging banner of car-lot flags weathered to white, past a bin of broken tiki torches. A thick coat of dust darkened a stack of plastic chairs growing more cockeyed as they ascended a stucco wall. Open only a week or two after the long winter and already the place looked defiled by a summer of rough use.

In the brig a few hours earlier, she had come to believe that, in all the years she had lived in the city, this was the most temperate and gentle day it had ever conferred. Distant church bells had rung out. The blue of the sky had affected her deeply. A single cloud had drifted by like a glacier in a calm sea. Looking down, she had paid close attention to the tree nearest the brig, picking out a discrete branch. It ended in a cluster of dark nubs, ancient knuckles sheltering life. Now, breaking through, surfacing blindly to the heat and light, pale buds had begun to flower. Even here, in rusted grates, down blocks of asphalt, spring had returned. Then the breeze touched her flesh. A tingling ran down her spine to her soul, and her eyes welled with tears. Did she have a soul? In moments like this, absolutely. The breeze! She spent the day at her desk, all the light of day spent while she kept her head down, and the snack pack convinced her it was O.K.—the snack pack and the energy drink, the time stolen to buy shoes online. Then this reminder, this windfall. As thrilling and irretrievable as a first kiss. This was her one and only life! It would require something of her to be equal to this day, she had thought at that moment in the brig, and now, looking at herself in the mirror of the ladies’ room, scrutinizing her eyes, her veined and clouded eyes, she was afraid that she had made a series of poor choices and failed.

She left the bathroom. Jay was quietly drinking, surrounded by livelier tables. Their friends had not been able to come on such short notice.

“Can we go?” she asked.

He stood. She was dozing in the cab before they reached the bridge.

When they came up the subway stairs, she took one look at the light and said that it was too late. By the time they found food for the picnic and bought the wine, walked the rest of the way to the Park, and laid everything out, they would be eating in darkness.

“What are you after?” Jay asked.

“Let’s cross,” she said.

“What am I supposed to do with this stupid blanket if we’re not going to the Park?”

They left the curb late and found themselves marooned on an island of concrete between two-way traffic. Cars zipped by in a steady stream. They didn’t give them an inch to maneuver.

“What do you want to do?” she asked him.

“No, no,” he said. “You just killed the picnic. You’re in charge.”

“I came up with the picnic,” she said.

She needed an alternative, something to salvage this vital hour. But what? And this fucking traffic! A hundred million lights and every one of them stuck on green.

“What about that hotel?” she asked.

“What hotel?”

The drinks would be overpriced, and there would be no breeze, but the hotel lounge had a fine view of Central Park. It’d be better than waiting in a badly lit bodega for sandwiches to be made. They could eat later.

It was a short walk. They took the elevator up. The lobby, like the lounge, was on the thirty-fifth floor. Receptionists were checking guests in with hushed efficiency, as if, behind them, the first act of a play were just getting under way. Through the window in the distance, the Park was divided in two: the westernmost trees, hunkered beneath the tall buildings, were sunk below a line of shadow, while the rest, looking fuller, rose up in the light. Their leaves shivered in the breeze with more silver than green.

They had to sit at the bar first. Then the hostess came and got them. Once seated in the tiered lounge, they faced outward, as in a Paris café, and watched as the remaining trees were claimed by the shadow. They drank crisp white wine. Night settled grandly.

It still felt like winter down in the subway. There were hot gusts, weird little eddies of cold, the steel burn of brakes poisoning the platform—but never a breeze. Nothing so limpid and delicate as spring could penetrate here. Even inside the car, they were breathing last century’s air. Salt tracks stained the floors. Soon winter would give way to hell: the subway’s two seasons.

The train pulled into the station. Passengers rose from their seats and stood before the silver doors. They waited and waited. At last the doors opened and off they went, given early release; she still had time to serve. People from the front cars walked by, and then the platform was empty, and yet the doors didn’t close. The purgatorial train seemed to be breathing, taking in air and letting it out, pointlessly. The automated voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are being held momentarily by the train dispatcher.” A ludicrous little god at play with switches. One station after another it was like that, and, between each station, a maddening stop-and-go.

The warning dingof the closing doors sounded, but nothing happened, and the train failed to move. She was out on the edge of the bench. She turned, offering him only her profile.

Slowly she said, “I would literally rather kill myself than go to a movie tonight.”

He raised his brows, as if, at his desk on some Wednesday afternoon, the peal of a fire alarm had brought him to sudden life. It was an exaggeration, but her level voice was soft and frighteningly sincere.

“O.K.,” he said. “We won’t go to the movies.”

Traffic eased. They stepped off the median and hurried across the street. But they didn’t know where they were going or what they were doing, so they idled under the shade of a building. Passersby ignored them in a push toward known destinations, fixed plans, the city’s eight million souls seeming to conspire against her joining in something mysterious and urgent.

“Sarah,” he said. “What is it you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But don’t put it like that.”

“Like what?”

“What shouldwe do, Jay?” she said pointedly. “What shouldwe do?”

“Don’t they come to the same thing?”

“They don’t.”

She spent ten minutes searching for something on her phone. He retreated a few feet, squatting near a scrawny tree planted in a little cell. When she gestured, he rose to his feet and followed her, keeping a step behind. At the next corner, they waited as taxis bounced by on their shocks. They caught every red light thereafter. They reached the building she wanted, the one with the lounge with a floor-to-ceiling view. She kept hitting the button as the elevator made its way down to them.

They were the last ones out when the doors opened. The window just past the reception area showed the buildings down Fifty-ninth Street checkerboarded with lights in the dimming hour. Bankers in their brigs, she thought. A canopy of shadow was slowly rolling across the silver treetops, settling the leaves into their darkest green.

All the tables were occupied or reserved. The hostess took Jay’s name.

“Should we be here?” Sarah asked him.

“Isn’t this where you wanted to be?”

The hostess watched them. “You’re welcome to sit at the bar,” she told them.

“Thank you.”

“How long until a table is free?” Sarah asked.

The hostess didn’t know. She couldn’t guarantee one at all. They went to the bar, where they drank in silence.

She had wanted a picnic, then the subway had defeated her. Then they’d been stranded on the median bickering over nothing, the all-consuming nothing of what to do. Was it she, she alone, who made that question so inscrutable and accusing some nights, like a stranger levelling a finger at her from across a room? Or was it the haltings and blinders of an entwined life: the fact of Jay, the disequilibrium of having to take what he wanted into consideration, whatever thatmight be? Because he kept it to himself, or it remained alien to him, and so how could she hope to name it? Or maybe there was no mystery at all. Maybe he just wanted to see a movie.

The last of the daylight disappeared as they waited, and all the possibility that had arrived with the breeze was reduced to yet another series of drinks at a bar. By the time a table opened up, she felt drunk and unfocussed. They had a final drink and left.

They tried having dinner at a cheap Italian joint downtown, but they got into a fight and left before he would even enter the restaurant. When they got home, they were no longer speaking. They lay in the dark for a long time before he broke the silence. “I could have gone to the fucking movie,” he said.

She grabbed him when they reached the bottom of the stairs, turned, and, with his hand in hers, raced back the way they’d come, up the stairs into the mellow night. She breathed the spring air in deeply, shedding the subway stuff, the still blue sky confirming her good judgment. But he was confused.

“What are we doing?”

“Let’s not get on the subway,” she said. “I can’t stand it down there, not right now. Let’s just walk.”

“Walk where?”

She led him west toward the Brooklyn Bridge. On the pedestrian walkway, she skipped ahead, then waited for him, then skipped ahead, then swung around and smiled. They came to a stop midway between Manhattan and Brooklyn just as the sun was setting. The wavelets in the bay turned over in little strokes, scaling the water silver before it darkened to stone. She looked straight up. Just to see the towering spires of the bridge climbing to a single point in the sky was to affirm that nothing more could be asked of this hour, nothing better apprehended in this life. She took hold of a steel cable in each hand and gazed out again at the setting sun. The burn-off against the buildings grew milder, its colors deeper; for a minute, the certainty that it would die out was in doubt. The sun dropped away, and a blue shadow settled over everything—the bridge, the water. It mirrored the cool ferric touch of the suspension cables. She let go, and the blood came back to her hands in heavy pulses. Her eyes filled with tears for the second time that night.

When the last of the sunlight was gone, she turned to him and said, “What did you think of that?”

He looked at her with perfect innocence. “Of what?” he said.

It was before midnight when she found herself sitting on the edge of the tub, fully dressed, doubting the future of her marriage.

They waited a long time for their drinks to arrive. The bar was situated—stupidly, to her mind—far from the view, and they were facing the wrong way. They had nothing to look at but liquor bottles and wineglasses, while outside the sun was disappearing and shadow was unfurling swiftly across the trees.

It had been a terrible idea to come up here, thinking they’d fall miraculously into a table. She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as they always accommodated her. It didn’t work like that. What a stupid place to live—stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance. And, as if choosing the wrong place weren’t bad enough, there were all those alternatives, abstractions taking shape only now: a walk across the bridge, drinks with Molly at the beer garden. Lights, crowds, parties. Even staying put in the brig, watching the neighborhood descend into darkness. The alternatives exerted more power over her than the actual things before her eyes. What had she been thinking, penning them in a bar on a night like this?

Knees fixed between the stool and the bar, she turned to him as best she could. “I’m sorry, Jay,” she said.

“For what?”

“For rushing us out of the apartment, and for how I acted on the subway. And it was a mistake to come up here. Let’s do something,” she said.

“O.K.,” he said. “Like what?”

The second he asked, the desire came over her to be in the Park, obscured by trees and bent over with her fingertips dug into the earth, and to feel him push her panties down to her ankles. As she worked it out in her mind, they would not be perfectly secluded, so that he would feel rushed, and as a result would be a little rough with her, dispense with the considerate sheets-and-pillows concerns of their weekend sex life and just fuck her, fuck her hard and fast. Then let the passersby ignore them, ignore the flash of white skin inside a clot of trees in the near-dark. She’d feel no sense of exclusion then. The minute she felt him coming, she would come, too. Then she would right herself as he was buckling, straighten the sundress, smile at him, and, just like that, all the stale tenement air of married life would disperse.

“Sounds like you have something in mind, Sarah,” he said, taking her hand under the bar. “Tell me what it is.”

She dared herself to lean in and whisper it.

“I’m up for anything,” he said.

But she lost the nerve.

“I don’t really know,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

He suggested they buy sandwiches before getting on the train, from the neighborhood place. But the neighborhood place! She was so sick of it. They had lived off that menu for as long as she could remember. Then she climbed out of the subway and knew they’d made a mistake. Finding food for a picnic would take time, time they didn’t have. But if she called off the picnic because there was no time to find food, then what did they have if not time? Time to squander and squander until the night was over. One night after another until her life was over. A night in spring could make her go a little crazy, start thinking her options were either a picnic or death. Jay was charging forward, blanket under his arm, toward the picnic he believed was still on, when she stopped. It took him a minute to notice. He turned, then walked slowly back to her.

It wasn’t in him to see what made this day different from other days. He didn’t pick up on breezes and breaks in weather, or they came upon him as the natural course of events too common to celebrate. If he had had his druthers, even today he would have worked into the night, feeding at his desk from some Styrofoam trough, then hurrying to meet her for the late-night showing of the follow-up to the sequel. Once home, he would have collapsed on the bed as if all the adventurous excursions of the day had depleted him of everything but the delicious aftertaste of exhaustion. She wanted to be a different person, a better person, but he was perfectly happy being his limited self.

She had made a series of bad decisions, and now she traced them back to their source. It was not forgoing the sandwiches, or stepping onto the subway, or heading into Manhattan at the wrong hour. It was not leaving the brig where she had fallen into a fragile harmony with the day, or foolishly breaking that harmony to seek out something better. It was asking him to come home early. That was the mistake that had set everything else in motion.

“What is it?” he asked.

She was about to tell him. She had overcome her fear and was about to tell him everything when she said, “Thanks for carrying the blanket.”

He looked at the blanket in his hands. “Sure,” he said.

By the time they found food and made it into the Park, the shadow had overtaken the spaces between the trees. She could see vaguely that it was him as they laid the food out on the blanket, but, when the time came to pack up, it was so dark that he could have been anyone.

Molly looked up from the general laughter just as Sarah hurried past the tables in the distance. Sarah disappeared through a rusted steel trellis festooned with lights that served the beer garden as entrance and exit. “Uh, Jay?” Molly said.

She was a block away by the time he caught up with her.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey!”

“It’s over!” she cried. “It’s over!”

“What’s over?” he said, trying to take hold of her. “Stop. Stop!”

She stopped resisting and pressed her head against him and sobbed. Tears came through his shirt. Passersby, intrigued by the sight of another life on fire, skirted around them, turning back to stare.

“Spring,” she said.

“Over?” He lifted her off his chest and looked at her. “Sarah,” he said, “spring just started.”

He was wrong. Spring was a fleeting moment, and it blew past like the breeze on the brig. Then summer rushed in, hot and oppressive as car exhaust, and she couldn’t take another summer in the city. It was followed by another single moment, the instant the leaves changed color, and then it was winter again, the interminable winter, one after another endured and misspent until they came to an end with a final hour that she would never be prepared for.

“Tell me you get it,” she said. “Please tell me you get it, Jay.” She shook her head into his chest. “I’m scared to death,” she said.

“What just happened?” he asked. “What went wrong?”

“What are we doing? Why did we come here?”

“Where?”

“What else could we have done?”

“We did a lot,” he said. “We had a picnic, now we’re with friends. Why are you so upset?”

“Should I not do the thing I do?” she asked. “Or should I do the thing I don’t do?”

“What thing are you talking about?” he asked.

She didn’t want to go back to the beer garden. She made him go. He said goodbye to their friends and reassured them that everything was O.K. Then he returned to the corner where he’d left her. She was already in a cab on her way back to Brooklyn. She gathered some things from the apartment—her pills, her toiletries—and an hour later she was in Molly’s apartment falling apart again.

The hostess came for them at the bar and led the way to a table in the lounge. The buildings down Fifty-ninth Street brought midtown to an abrupt end; the trees filling the Park had tumbled over the sheer blue cliffs of their mirrored surfaces.

Now night was rapidly resolving the green from the trees. A minute later, it seemed, the dark knit them together, and they were all one. Yellow taxis lost their color and became lights floating on air. The mysterious figures they were picking up and dropping off at the curb, those shadows: what were they seizing hold of at this hour, that would escape her grasp? She had to do something.

“Jay,” she said. “Do you know what I’ve always wanted to do in the Park?”

He was idly picking at the label on his bottle of beer. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Lean in,” she said. “I have to whisper it.”

The hostess never rescued them from their tight squeeze at the bar. They had a final drink and left. Out on the street, in the shadow of the Park, he asked, “Are you in the mood for dinner?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Yes or no?”

“I said sure.”

“Should we stay here, or go downtown?”

“Either way.”

They took a cab downtown. This was the best they could imagine: another dinner downtown. She opened the cab door and stepped onto the curb just as a loud pack of strangers came through a foyer and out to the street. They were aimed half drunk at the center of the night. She wanted to abandon Jay and his blanket and dinner plans and follow them into another life.

Jay shut the door, and the cabbie drove off. “Do you have a taste for anything in particular?” he asked.

“No.”

They stopped at a place to look at the menu. “Looks good to me,” he said.

“It’s fine.”

“You’re not crazy about it.”

“Do I have to be crazy about it? It’s dinner, who cares. It’s fine.”

“It should be more than fine if we’re going to drop a hundred bucks in there,” he said. “It should be a place you want to go.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, and opened the door and walked inside.

It was an Italian place with checkered tablecloths, not likely to be anything special. And air-conditioned! There was no breeze here, only a recycled stream of arctic air. She would have walked out if Jay had been beside her. It was an affront to time. The first day of spring, and this place had it in a choke hold, waiting for its legs to stop kicking.

She requested a table for two, then turned and gestured Jay inside. He didn’t move. She followed the hostess to the table and sat down. He glared at her through the window. Unbelievable. She picked up the menu and began to study it. So this was how the night had settled: in a squalid little showdown at a cheap Italian restaurant that was as far from a picnic in the Park as—

She didn’t see him open the door. He raised his voice above the din.

“I’m not fucking eating in there!” he yelled.

Startled, she watched his head disappear and the door swing slowly shut. In that second, she was more determined to stay than ever, but people turned to stare at her, and she felt embarrassed, and so at sea compared with them, in their perfect little parties of friends and lovers, unburdened by the possibility of different companions, competing appetites, alternative pursuits of a finer life, as their dishes arrived at the appointed hour like destiny.

They left the bar excited. This was unexpected. Thiswas being equal to the night. Not just watching the Park from afar, admiring its trees. Heading straight for them, into a different life. She hardly recognized him in the elevator. He kept looking over with a smile she’d never seen before. It was nearly enough to release them from the sentence of a long winter and its dull bedroom strain.

Outside, the last of the sunlight was gone from the sky. They were led into the Park by the silver light of old-fashioned street lamps. Her heart pounded with uncertainty: Where would they do it? Would they be seen? How was it even done? Like a rush job, or something more deliberate, slowed down to expand the risk, intensify the thrill, feel anew the audacity of what two people can do?

They went deeper and deeper into the Park, until they were lost in it. They stopped and looked in both directions. Then she took his hand and rushed him into a dark knot of trees.

He unbuckled in a hurry as they kissed. She had to slip her panties down herself. Then she turned, planting her hands on the ground, and waited.

She waited and waited.

“Do you need help?” she whispered.

“Sh-h-h,” he said suddenly. “Do you hear that?”

“What?”

He was quiet.

“Jay?”

“I need some help,” he said.

She turned. A few minutes later, she brought her hands back to the ground. She waited.

“I lost it again,” he said.

She stood and dusted herself free of earth.

“That’s O.K.,” she said. He was quickly buckling up. She reached out and touched him on the head.

There was an essential difference between them—what he might have called her restlessness, what she might have called his complacency—which had not surfaced before they were married, or, if it had, only as a possibility, hidden again as soon as it revealed itself. When they pointed out their shortcomings to each other, often in an argument, they both treated them as implausible accusations. But, if there was some intractable self in her that could be identified and accused, she thought, it was one in search of more life, more adventure, of the right thing to do at the given hour. It was not a homebody. It was not a moviegoer.

But suddenly she stopped. What made her any less predictable, she wondered, than she accused him of being? Night after night she was anxious not to miss out on . . . what? She didn’t know. Something she couldn’t define, forever residing just on the other side of things. It must be so tiresome for him, she thought. He must be convinced by now that she would never find it, that indeed there was nothing to find.

She was no longer beside him. It took him a minute to notice. He turned, then walked slowly back to her.

She reached out and took his hand. “Jay,” she said. “What do you want to do tonight?”

“I thought we were having a picnic.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Sure,” he said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“Am I too predictable, Jay?”

“Because you like picnics?” he asked.

He put his arm around her, and they walked the rest of the way to the Park. After they ate, they lay on the blanket in the dark and talked again about having kids.

He was gloomy on the ride downtown, and gloomy when they stepped out of the cab. He was gloomy going from restaurant to restaurant while she studied the menus posted outside.

“Do you have a taste for anything in particular?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you just want to go home?”

“Whatever,” he said. “Up to you.”

“Well, I don’t want to go home,” she said.

She chose a harmless Italian place. She wanted to turn to him to express her outrage that they were blasting the air-conditioning on the first day of spring, but she knew that he wasn’t in the mood. The place was louder than she had anticipated, a fact that became clear only after they’d been seated. They looked at the menu, keeping whatever impressions it made on them to themselves. Finally, he set his down on the checkered tablecloth, on top of the checkered blanket he’d brought for the picnic.

“Do you know what you’re getting?”

He shrugged.

“Jay,” she said, “it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t.”

“Maybe not to you,” he said.

“I’m sorry that I even suggested it,” she said.

“Why did you touch my head?” he asked.

“What?”

“Did you have to pat me on the head?”

She returned to studying the menu. Had she patted him? She hadn’t meant to. She was just trying to make him feel better. When she looked up, sometime later, she found Jay staring intently across the room. She tracked his gaze to a table and to the man there, who was, she thought, his opposite in every way: charismatic at a glance, holding the table rapt with some expansive conversation. He was the handsomest man in New York. He would know what to do with her in the Park. Jay’s fixation on him, she thought, while sullen and violent with envy, was also, possibly, at root, pure curiosity, a reflection, a desire. He wanted to be the man, or at least someone like him: someone poised, commanding, rapacious. He would never change, but, in his way, he wanted to, as she had always wanted most to be someone else.

They waited for their meal in silence, in muted unhappiness, the odd ones out in that lively place. They ate quickly, but it took forever. He went to bed when they got home. She went back out on the brig. What breeze came had no effect on her, and she understood that the night had been over several hours earlier, when everything she was seeking in the world had been brought out from inside her. If it had not lasted long, was it not enough? It had been an error to go in search of something more. If she had just told Jay about the breeze, shared that stupid fleeting moment with him—why hadn’t she? He might have understood. Everything that came after was a gift that she had squandered.

They walked out of the Park and hailed a cab. The driver let them out with plenty of time to kill. They had dinner, then found a bar where they nursed their drinks. They didn’t say much.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked her.

“I told you.”

“I know, but why? You were so adamant on the subway.”

“It’s what you want to do,” she said.

It was time to leave. She stood up from the bar.

“O.K.,” he said. “But it was never that big a deal to me.”

“I know,” she said.

“And what you wanted to do,” he said, “we couldn’t do.”

“I told you it doesn’t matter,” she said.

They left the bar and walked to the theatre. They watched the follow-up to the sequel, and then they went home. ?