Marooned

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I know that Substack isn’t exactly perfectly suited to very long short stories, but I did want to share this, a pandemic-based short story. At the partner site Inner Life , Kimia Dargahi writes “My Body Is The Least Interesting Thing About Me.”

Best,

Sam

MAROONED

She had always had difficulty with dating — not that she was bad at it, as she sometimes jokingly claimed to be, just that there was an unwillingness there. She found herself playing elaborate games with time and scheduling, tricking herself into thinking that she could watch one more episode of a Netflix show, that she could stay a little later at the office to finish up some assignment, before she started the process of showering and making herself up and dressing and getting the subway or a cab to meet some stranger. She always showed up late to meet someone, with her outfit sort of halfway assembled, and the monologue in her head was always strangely bitter, these guys were always so unfailingly polite, so interested in whatever she was telling them about her life, as if the sale of hospital equipment could really be that fascinating, always tried to kiss just before putting her in a cab or else with this wistful expression, eyebrows arched, shoulders hunched, asked if it might be possible to see her again, and it really bothered her, bothered her to the point of laughing in their faces, this insistence they had in treating her as a prize when she knew perfectly well what she was, knew that her legs were shaved only up to the hem of her dress, that she had drunk a bowl of miso soup straight out of the kettle in her haste to eat something and still be more or less on time for the date.

But she was persistent, didn’t necessarily blame the guys for her difficulties dating. When she had found exercise to be beyond her, and also sort of ridiculous, she had diligently signed up for months of non-refundable classes, on the gamble that her cheapness would outweigh her laziness, and it actually had worked, the class packs, the trainers, she had stuck with it as she stuck with everything, had made exercise a routine, an extension of herself, and she came at dating with the same idea, she gossiped with her family, with her ‘girl gang,’ she asked them to give her a push. And so, together, on family vacations, at liquid brunches, they scrolled past profile after profile. The exact situation varied, the idea was always the same, her cousin cradling a baby with one arm while with the other she swiped flamboyantly right on a gorgeous gym rat, her friends batting at each other’s wrists, grabbing at her phone, the tables and mimosas tipping dangerously, while they competed for who could send the dirtiest possible message to some creepo she had jokingly liked.

They were all boy-crazy, that was Jamie’s takeaway from this exercise. They reminded her of pawn shop owners, of junk salesmen — that was Jamie’s line — the way they eyed some shirtless selfie, some weird emo closeup, said appraisingly, “Well, maybe if you got him to work out a little” or “Just lose the bangs and everything else falls into place.” And Jamie, fake-sputtering, recovering her phone from the table, said, “You treat everything like it’s a fixer-upper, and I don’t get why I’m supposed to give all these second-raters the benefit of the doubt, why it’s like I’m shopping at a used car lot, and I don’t have anything else to do with my time except tinker and fine-tune, why I can’t just buy new — someone who’s grown-up and put-together and doesn’t need a gazillion touchups.” And her friends or cousins would laugh hysterically, out of proportion to the funniness of what she was saying, the way people do when they’ve just been found out in something.

It was surprising, almost any way you looked at it, that out of this whole haul she would center on Brad, that he would be in the needle in the haystack. They hadn’t had any formal relationship talks, they weren’t anything to each other in any contractual sense, no ‘I love you,’ no towels or coffee mugs stationed at the other one’s apartment, but they had at least moved beyond the etiquette of early dating, sent each other text messages just randomly, about their commute or the daily outrage from the White House, called one another in the middle of the week to see if the other was free that night. There were no more wine bars, no more hasty leg-shaving, she found unfamiliar t-shirts tucked under her bed and thought about it and decided they must be Brad’s, same went for smells around her apartment. Quietly, she’d put a pause on her dating profiles, and what a relief that was, not necessarily because Brad had so far outpaced the rest of the field, but because it added so much time back to her schedule, gave her the chance to play Words With Friends again and even to start Italian courses on Duolingo instead of spending her phone time studying some dude’s profile and puzzling out whether his listing Maroon 5 as one of his favorite bands was an automatic dealbreaker or was just the kind of endearing detail that they would laugh about together one day with their grandchildren.

He was sweet, considerate, forgetful and short-sighted in all the ways that were supposed to be charming in men. He was a couple of inches shorter than her, forgot to shave often, and when he did always managed to leave a few patches, had a habit of singing Country Western songs in the shower, really did have a very particular, peculiar smell that trailed behind him no matter how many deodorants and colognes he lacquered on himself. “Mahogany,” he said, “like a proud old tree.” “That is not how mahogany smells,” Jamie insisted, “that is not how anything smells.” Maybe they weren’t the sort of endearing details that are grandchildren-worthy, but they were something, they were familiarity, if not affection, she no longer asked him, as she had the first few times she invited him to her apartment, if he was sure he wasn’t a psycho killer, she made him coffee in the morning and knew to heap sugar into his cup, he knew just how she liked to sleep, on her side, spooned tightly, until she groaned and shook him off in the middle of the night and lay placidly on her back until morning.

When the virus spread from China to, of all places, Italy, and then made its inroads into the United States, first through commercial travelers and then through the villainous suburbanites whom the Times hounded from their offices back to their lairs in New Rochelle, Brad was at her apartment as often as not. “Well,” he said grimly when they were watching New York One and the last of the non-essential workers were ordered home, “your place or mine?”

That had been a breakfast ritual of theirs, the daily update on the cellphone, propped against a stack of books, the endless cups of coffee. She was washing out grinds when he said that and it was possible to pretend she hadn’t heard. “I guess what my place is lacking in maintenance and amenities….and privacy and just general furnishing,” he said — he had a way of carrying on long conversations with himself, like elaborate inside jokes — “it does more than make up for in location.”

“I don’t think there is such a thing as location anymore,” she said.

“Well,” he said, considering, “there is a coziness factor, there is a definite coziness factor at play here.”

“Having a woman to make you coffee and make the bed?”

“Do you make the bed?” he asked. He’d learned somewhere to be very deadpan, it was probably from these stoner comics he was always watching, but the result was that she could never tell when he was joking and when he wasn’t.

“If location no longer exists,” he said hollowly, as if he were sounding out the words to test for their meaning, “and there is a coziness factor at play here, there is a lot to be said for here, a very strong argument for here, as the place to ride out the storm.”

He gave her a sudden look, like he was playing poker and had just checked and was very eager to see what everybody else at the table was going to do, and Jamie had the strong sensation, like a voice buzzing in the back of her skull, that she could no longer pretend to be so absorbed with the dishes.

“I’ve never lived with anybody,” she said squarely.

“That makes two of us,” he said.

“I think it’s a big deal living together, living with someone, it’s something that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort to make happen.”

“That sounds tedious,” he said.

“And I like you, I like you a lot,” she said heavily, and they seemed to watch together as the words settled in the space between them, and together to examine their value, “but this isn’t the kind of thing that I would want to rush into — with anyone — and if I did, if someone were to ‘ride out the storm’ with me, I would want to know them a lot better.”

He spun the coffee mug in his hands. He reminded her of a television inspector puzzling out a case. “What would you want to know that you don’t know already?” he said blandly.

“I don’t know. Anything. Everything. Start from the beginning. Like what your middle name is.”

“Devin,” he said. This was his kind of banter, his kind of conversation, he always seemed to be pushing into the realm of absurdity.

“And, like, who are you, what is your deal, strange man in my house, man who keeps materializing in my bed?”

He pursed his lips, like it really was a very good question and he was a bit stumped by it. “I thought we covered this on the first couple of dates,” he said in his extra-mild tone, which he’d picked up from Hicks or Hedberg or one of them. “I’m Brad Devin Pauley. I grew up in a not-very-interesting town in Michigan, I went to a not-very-interesting college, I work a not-very-interesting job as a glorified IT.” He knitted his eyebrows, nodded towards the table-top like he was wondering if he’d left anything out. She couldn’t tell if he was doing some sort of a bit or not. “Maybe it’s not so glorified,” he said thoughtfully. “I like to eat — three times a day, sometimes I sneak a fourth, I like sleep, drink, sex, I spend about six hours a day on screens, according to my annoying app, I read a good book every now and then, maybe less than I made it seem on my dating profile, fresh air once in a while.” He seemed aware that he was getting too sleepy, too deadpan, he rallied a bit. “I also like beaches, travel, camping,” he said, “did I mention beaches and walking on them? I like to laugh,” he said, “I like to laugh and make other people laugh, I especially like it when people don’t laugh right away, when something I say explodes on them about two hours later, like a time-bomb, I like music, all kinds of music, a lot of people say their taste is ‘eclectic,’ but mine genuinely is, all kinds of weird Vietnamese and Chinese music, things that aren’t even on any fucking scale at all, I think I’m smart in a way that sneaks up on you, that snuck up even on my parents, and I’m good in a way that’s really surprising, that even I didn’t see coming, and I like women, I really like women, I’ve spent more time than I would have wanted to being single and being lonely, and I’m making up for lost time now.” He got quiet again, he seemed really to be scanning himself for qualities and shrugged when he couldn’t think of any he’d left out. “And I think we get each other,” he said. “I know you didn’t ask that, but I guess that’s a relevant point. You say something and it makes me laugh like an hour or two later. And I think you have a pretty good bullshit detector and I do too actually, and we’re both looking for somebody who’s real and doesn’t go into too many head games.”

As far as his sense of the absurd went, this definitely was towards the peak of it, this declaration of self at the breakfast table, with New York One on in the background. And as far as something to tell her grandchildren, she could do worse than this, this deadpan speech just as the plague was breaking out.

She pushed her hair back behind her ear. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot like that,” she said. He shrugged, as if to say that he was ready and able to be put the spot at any time. “I just don’t like feeling pushed into things,” she said, “I think we were doing really well, we were at a good pace, and I don’t want, just because of some stupid virus, to suddenly do something before I’m ready, to be living together, or to have you sponging off me, I think that throws everything off, and that can create a whole bunch of problems that we just won’t have if we let everything happen in the time it’s supposed to happen.”

He raised his eyebrows, shrugged himself out of his seat. “Just to be clear, this isn’t a breakup?” he said.

“It’s not a breakup.”

“Alright,” he said, “furloughed, not laidoff, I get it. I would like to see you soon — ”

“Yes,” she said. “Seeing you soon is great. Wine bar is great — or, whatever people do now, walks by the river. Coming over here for the night is great — ”  

“Just not every night,” he intoned.

She smiled at him, stood over him, he wrapped his arms around her, patted her hair like he was stroking a very soft cat. They kissed on the lips, and he assembled his various bags and garments that were scattered around the apartment. When he left and the door clicked behind him, she felt an incredible, soul-surging relief, she felt it like a rocket shooting out of her, it wasn’t so easy to stop herself from laughing or shouting. She waited for a decent interval, after he must have padded to the elevator and the elevator, which could be slow, must have brought him out of earshot, and she put on music, the music from her ‘favorites’ playlist, which she reserved for special occasions, and she put it on full volume, blasting it over the governor and the health experts and the commentators bleating about PPE and ventilators and the looming disaster.

She had always been an independent, self-sufficient person, difficult to explain in a family as large and close-knit as hers, although of course any therapist would probably say that that was exactly the reason for it, her need to create islands for herself in the midst of all her family’s chaos, and now, truly, the apartment was hers, an island, an oasis, it was that incredibly delectable feeling, like when you’re a kid and the adults leave you home alone or when a friend stands you up for a meeting and suddenly you have whole hours alone to yourself. She wasn’t naïve, she had always been considered a mature, responsible person, ‘with a good head on her shoulders,’ but as far as adulting went, there was a lot to be desired, she wasn’t the sort of gnarled peasant woman who could easily weather a pandemic, her cooking was wok-focused, she was heavily dependent on food delivery and fluff-and-fold laundromats and Amazon fulfillment services, and it wasn’t clear which of those, if not all, would be disrupted by the shutdown.

Work was fine. She was in a sleepy, reliable industry, so sleepy and reliable that even a massive health crisis, calling for the massive transport of medical equipment in all sorts of unprecedented ways, couldn’t affect the fundamental torpor at the heart of it. There was a period of transition to Zoom and then it was hard to remember that it had ever been done any other way, that these figments of conference calls and status updates were once flesh-and-blood co-workers with whom she had exchanged sly notes across cubicles and, on occasion, even passed spare tampons under the partitions of bathroom stalls.

What was difficult was the process of setting up a routine. She had been looking forward to all the hours in the day that were accruing back to her, tabulated them with a giddy excitement, the time she wouldn’t have to spend commuting to work and from work, wouldn’t have to spend making herself up in the morning, or even cleaning herself really, wouldn’t have to wander out for lunch breaks, wouldn’t have to meet friends for drinks in the evening. It was becoming possible to imagine a completely other way of being — not busy, not stressed, not constantly with her head under water. She set her alarm early, actually earlier than she had when she commuted to work, kind of crawled out from sleep while it was still dark, turned on the video of the yoga class she’d signed up for and did her poses on the floor next to her bed. After, she went for a jog, fastidiously wearing her mask, and when she returned made oatmeal or cereal for herself. It was incredible that the workday still hadn’t started. She learned Italian through the app on her phone — although travel wasn’t a thing anymore, even Italian restaurants weren’t a thing, it seemed even less likely than it had before the pandemic that she would use her Italian phrases with anyone. She read a novel as she waited for the minutes to tick by until the morning status meeting. Mostly, she scrolled through news, which seemed not to exist anymore either, there was no politics in the normal sense, no sports, just this snow day feeling, the report of hospitalizations and the death tally and the injunction to stay inside and then the feel-good stories and in the evening the applause for the health care workers, which by some stretch of the imagination could apply to her too, since she was in that sector. The governor had said, “Do not underestimate the mental health toll from this,” and she had puzzled over what he was saying and the stern, fatherly way he was putting it, since this sort of endless staycation didn’t strike her as any kind of mental health crisis, but by about 6pm it was an issue, it was a bit difficult to strategize the remaining hours until her early bedtime, she ordered a couple of Ottolenghi cookbooks and made up her mind to finally learn cooking, she took out a subscription for the Criterion Collection with the intention of working her way through the New Wave, although curiously, given the expanse of time in the evening, she seemed to make no progress with either of those projects. The New Wave made her sleepy, she kept defaulting to Succession and Tiger King, she somehow had no more energy to cook in the evening now than when she had had the excuse of a commute, and delivery and the food service industry in general had proved more robust than expected in the first few days of the pandemic when the zombie apocalypse had been generally anticipated. “When this is over,” she had said to the Thai deliveryman she saw most often, “there should be a statue set up to all the delivery workers.” He hadn’t smiled, and it wasn’t clear if he understood, and she had instantly regretted trying to joke like that, and didn’t order from that restaurant for several days, her humor usually wasn’t off-kilter like that, she attributed it to not seeing anyone for a prolonged period of time, that was the kind of strange, subversive, slightly unsettling behavior that she associated with Brad.

Speaking of Brad, they had stayed very much in contact. He was right, they did have a lot in common, he sent her Onion articles and comedy videos from YouTube and he really did get her funny bone, there was one in particular, an Onion piece about Chris Cuomo interviewing all the other Cuomos that made her laugh hysterically, out loud, for whole minutes — clearly, she thought, she’d already been cooped up for too long, in her Stockholm-y relationship with the governor of the state of New York, but it really was nice to laugh by herself, without inhibition, without anybody around to find it weird. She forwarded the article around to pretty much her whole family, and girl gang, none of whom seemed to find it remotely as funny as she did. Brad was very understanding of her decision to send him packing back to the East Village. “I could feel that I was pushing it,” he texted. “I’m sorry. I guess I really had gotten comfortable with you. I wasn’t looking forward to spending all this time being lonely.”

They made plans to meet. “When is good for you?” he texted. “Well um I don’t have a lot of plans,” she wrote. But there was the transportation question. The subway had become inaccessible, pestilent, only health care workers and the homeless still rode it. Cabs involved close proximity to the driver — and “is Uber still a thing?” she wrote. Brad texted back that he wasn’t sure. It was out of bike range and they put together a complicated plan for how Brad could after all bike there, take a CitiBike, thoroughly sanitize it, swap it for another CitiBike midway through the route when he passed the 40 minute limit — “like a stagecoach journey,” he said, “like changing out one tired old horse for another.” That plan foundered on his roommate, who was a smoker and partyer and also asthmatic and had just about every kind of underlying condition and risk factor they could think of, and Brad had spent every minute of every day in the same space as him, and she had been so careful to keep her exposure to the absolute possible minimum, just the grocery store and deliverymen. “Look,” he said finally, when they were going around in circles. “He doesn’t have it, I don’t have it, we’re both healthy, we would know, but if it makes you feel better I can take a test.” “Yes,” she replied, “that’s great, a test would be great.” And he looked it up and then had to write back an hour or so later that, as far as he could tell, no Covid tests were available anywhere in New York. And she spent some time staring at the screen, composing her message carefully, wrote, “I’m sorry Brad, maybe this would have worked out if I hadn’t been a Nazi about personal space and kicked you out when you were already at my place, but right now, the way it’s happened, we’re just not on the same quaranteam and it’s just too much of a risk given everything that’s going on for you to go back and forth. I’m really sorry. Let’s pick up when all this is over.”

It was difficult to explain what bothered her about Brad. He really was a very good guy, at least he had given her every indication that he was — no matter how many times she had asked him if he was sure he wasn’t a psycho killer, he had never once, upon entry to her apartment, attempted to torture or murder her. He had a whole world inside himself that was unique, hard-to-place, really, come to think of it, different from anyone else she had ever met. And he was into her, doggedly, stubbornly, for reasons she couldn’t quite piece together — she did know, from bitter intimations of her girl gang, that men could fake interest for much longer than they felt it, and that must have been all the more true during a pandemic, but that somehow didn’t seem to be the case with Brad, he’d find some stupid Instagram meme and forward it over to her, sensing rightly that it would make her laugh, and it seemed reflexive with him, offhand, like he had fully vetted her as a kindred spirit. And she was 32, she was very aware that she was behind-the-curve as far as dating and intimacy and commitment went, most of her cousins had had babies long ago, although, admittedly, they all lived in places where that was the norm. She did want children and, for that matter, grandchildren. When she thought about this at all, she thought about it very much in abstract terms, but, however she triangulated it, she didn’t want the wilderness of an old age alone, shuddered to imagine it, whatever people did in that situation, crocheted, volunteered, attended church, hoped that some niece or something, a god-child, would usher them into a nursing home when the time came and pay an occasional visit. She made herself pause and imagine someone in her girl-gang doing that for her, agreed that it was best not to give up on dating prematurely. As she went about her daily routine, the long jogs to the river, the uncomfortable pause as Netflix refreshed itself to move on to the next episode of some show, unaided by her, the way Seamless seemed always to be opened on her browser, with her order primed, she could feel the arguments for Brad stacking themselves up, tried to will in her imagination, like in some freaky thought-experiment, the image of Brad standing at the end of the aisle expectant while she trundled towards him, the image of Brad deciding that their eight-year-old or ten-year-old, or whatever it was, was finally ready for George Carlin. They didn’t seem so bad these summoned-up images, but they had the sort of artificial quality of a movie flashback or reconstruction, they had less weight, she noticed, than the rocketing relief she had felt when she once again informed Brad that he wasn’t on her quaranteam.

***

She was settling into her routine and improving upon it. She had kept to the daily run, and now she didn’t just stop at the river and kind of bob up-and-down in triumph before returning home, she continued on, hugging the water, exploring further each day, finding herself in more and more unexpected neighborhoods, was really taken aback at the spot where the Puerto Rican fishermen suddenly gave away and everybody at the waterfront was wearing payot and black robes. Her gym was still closed so she ordered a box full of weights, had to ask a neighbor to help her carry it all the way to the elevator. “A bad start to my workout regime,” she said. With a kind of throb of irony, she took up crocheting, and it really did help keep her mind focused in the evening, enabled her to watch a serious two-hour movie without getting hopelessly bored. She cooked, found that the problem she’d had with it wasn’t lack of skill, as she’d always assumed, but impatience. It really did take a lot for her to stand there, watching a pot boil or stirring onions in a pan, she relied on a complex array of podcasts and low-attention TV shows, and in normal circumstances, if there was any excuse to do anything else, she would have taken that, but now there were no friends having birthday bashes, no office happy hours, mercifully, there were no Tinder dates, and there was nothing for it really except to listen to the story of the Clinton impeachment or RFK’s assassination and wait for onions to brown or mushrooms to water, and there actually was a joy in it, as her stodgiest, dullest aunts had always assured her, it was a form of meditation, there was some tremendous satisfaction in watching a disparate assortment of vegetables alchemize into something that looked more or less like the source photo in Ottolenghi and in hauling it to bed for her evening of Netflix and crochet. And she was on the phone with her family. It turned out that, in the ways that mattered, the pandemic had made her more social, not less, she knew who her people were, the brunchy, boozy girl gang had faded out, sending each other emoji-laden encouragement from time to time, and she talked to her mother, her sisters, the most simpatico of her cousins. These were long and free-flowing conversations, they seemed to be untethered to anything happening out in the world, were a maze of jokes and memories and personality traits, they gave her the feeling that she was vast, that there were all kinds of spaces to be explored within her, which could only be tapped into by somebody who knew her really well, knew her when she was a kid, for instance, had seen her grow, these were the only conversations that really mattered, long and winding, the kinds of conversations you could have while waiting for a pot of water to boil or with a cell phone on a pillow kind of watching yourself get tired enough to fall asleep, conversations that you could have with a mother or a sister, not even with somebody from the girl gang, definitely not with some stranger. It always gave her a thrill when she reached the heart of one of these conversations, was able to say something like, “That’s it, that’s totally it, the way I shut myself down in second grade, there’s still this moment I have when I’m in meetings, when it’s my turn to speak, and I’m sure I’m right, and I still bottle myself up, and it’s so interesting the way that, essentially, nothing ever really changes,” and for the person on the other end of the line to know exactly what she was talking about. So it was a real surprise for her, in one of the winding conversations, as she was inching towards sleep, when her mother said, “Oh Jamie, I just wish you didn’t have to go through all this all alone,” and Jamie was genuinely shocked, sprang up in bed, pivoted her head around the room. “I don’t know why you’d say that,” she said, suddenly, unexpectedly angry. “I don’t feel alone at all.”  

The pandemic played out in distinct stages, none of which, as far as Jamie could tell, had anything to do with the raw numbers of deaths and hospitalizations, the movement of the virus, which was a reality all its own. Everybody, from their separate warrens, seemed to reach the same emotional conclusions pretty much at the same times. In the beginning was the raw panic, the hoarding of toilet paper and the shaming of the toilet paper stockpilers, then there was the sort of Hollywood version of the pandemic, in which everybody banded together, cheered for the emergency workers, posted inspiring Instagram messages, lived out their best selves, then there was the period of polarization and dysfunction, when it seemed to sink in that, as Governor Cuomo had put it back when Jamie was hanging on his every word, “the all-clear is not going to sound,” and suddenly things like masks became hot-button issues, and it reminded Jamie of the whiplash she had had back when she was 12 years old and there had been this inspiring unity after 9/11 and then, with no real warning, that had turned into these bitter arguments everybody was having about invading Iraq. Ironically, this was the stage of the pandemic when Jamie excelled the most, and she attributed that to how self-sufficient she had truly become. She wore her mask, even when she was on a long run, and didn’t care whether people in Nebraska wore theirs or not. Her discipline had become second-nature to her. On a rare ‘day off,’ she ordered Thai from her old favorite place, and when the same deliveryman appeared, she crowed to him, “Miss me? You wouldn’t believe how good I’ve gotten at cooking since I last saw you.” And he grinned broadly, although it was unclear, as ever, if he understood her at all. He had a very angelic face, he’d taken an outsize influence over Jamie’s thoughts, once the phrase had come to her that he was her ‘guardian angel,’ which was not the way Jamie tended to think at all, was the sort of oddball thing Brad might have said.

In the summer the pandemic shifted into a different phase. On her runs along the river, Jamie noticed packs of young people sitting in the park, drinking wine, chatting, not a mask in sight. It was so jarring to her that at first she wondered if they were all in some sort of communal living arrangement, if each of them was a separate quaranteam wandering out to the park together. But of course that wasn’t what was happening, it was like everybody had collectively decided that they were bored of coronavirus, had run out of memes and self-improvement projects, were no longer interested in ‘inward journeys’ or ‘letting the planet heal itself,’ which had been the initial spin that Brooklyn, at least, had given the virus. Jamie couldn’t help it, she felt cheated by all these happy and apparently healthy young people. The numbers seemed to have stayed flat no matter how many wine parties there were in city parks, and life, by hook or crook, had moved forward. She was really shocked when she passed by a neighborhood place that had set up a plywood bar outside its windows, watched a row of people drinking, shouting conversations to one another, when she passed by a television and saw an actual live baseball game. She was online, scrolling through facebook, saw Brad’s status change to ‘in a relationship.’ He had added that to a post as well. ‘In a relationship!!’ he wrote, and it was always hard to work out these things with him but the exclamation marks seemed to be genuine enthusiasm as opposed to some complicated irony. Jamie generally had a good discipline about these things, but in this case she unabashedly google-stalked his new girlfriend, who was pictured wrapped in a tight headlock type of embrace on a walk along the East River. She was a bit mousy, looked shy and somehow sardonic, it was easy to imagine her reading a poem at an open mic. Jamie had no trouble concluding that she was much prettier than this girl.

That night she was watching an Almodóvar film — she had gotten past her hangup with the Criteron Collection — and a character, an old woman hosting a talk show, said to her guest, a younger man, apparently successful, “Don’t be lonely. Living alone — that’s a terrible thing. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.” It was an awful moment for Jamie, she was lying in her dark room with the screen flickering, she had a bowl of kichadi she’d made on her bedside table, and she didn’t even have her crocheting to keep her company — for some reason, that had started to bore her — and she felt it acutely, a speech of a soft-spoken woman in an old film.

She wasn’t completely without options. There were, of course, the apps, idle but undeleted on her phone, and then there were the messages that trickled in from old — she wouldn’t have said ‘flames,’ that was putting it too strongly, from acquaintances, random men from school, from previous jobs, who had suddenly gotten very concerned about how she was coping with the pandemic. One of them was Tim. He was stout, had a barrel-like build that had always reminded her somehow of the trains from Thomas The Tank Engine, which was of course the kind of thing she would never say out loud to him but also wasn’t the worst thing in the world. They had met at a summer job back home, had drinks a couple of times when they discovered that they had both moved to New York. In the lockdown phase of the pandemic, he sent her an e-mail without anything written in the body, just a subject line saying “Thinking of you….hope you’re ok in the insane time.” He followed that up with a couple of long expository text messages describing what he’d been up to the last few years and how he was spending his time now and she’d let time go by and eventually responded to them. Now, wearily, she leaned over to the side of her bed, retrieved her cell phone from where it was plugged in to the wall outlet, wrote to him, “Sorry for the delay. You’ve been keeping up alright?”

It took him an undignified amount of time to start typing back. He gave her a slew of information about different projects he was working on, some highly ethical thing about incentivizing energy companies to invest in renewables, and as she got tired she took turns closing eyes and read and responded with the open eye. She had the fantasy, maybe this was because she’d binged The Americans recently, that she was like some kind of government official who was being approached by a spy, but knew the person was a spy, and for some state security reason couldn’t say anything, and so she played along with the patter and small talk, told him about her job and how her family was doing, asked him perceptive questions about the energy market, and she successfully resisted the urge to laugh when she heard the clutch in his voice just before he asked, very casually, “So, have you been seeing anyone?” and she fought back the same impulse when he suggested that they meet ‘for a walk or, you know, whatever people do these days.’

She felt incredibly dirty as she returned the phone to its wall charge. These conversations had always unnerved her, all the way back to when she was 11 or 12 and these random boys had looked her phone number up in the school directory and ambushed her at home when she was minding her own business, wanting her to see movies or go to dances or whatever the excuse was. She was mystified by their attention, she barely knew who some of them were, and definitely hadn’t led any of them on, although she probably was nicer than some of the ice queens in the popular crowd. She was pretty, she supposed, blond, with bright, well-assembled features, like a healthy farmgirl’s, and a certain kind of guy, always a bit awkward, offbeat, seemed to have a remarkable talent for ascribing all kinds of qualities to her, described at length over the phone or in out-of-the-blue e-mails, that she was fairly certain she didn’t possess.

Tim sent her a well-thought-out list of pandemic-friendly activities that they could do together, a walk, an ice cream place, even a drive-in movie theater somewhere in Queens, and she just didn’t quite have the patience for any of it, suggested that he come over to her place, so long as he brought wine and cheese.

To give Tim credit, he brought over a really terrific assortment of hors d’oeuvres. There were green and black olives, babaganoush, some nice crackers to go with it, feta cheese, and a fancyish bottle of chianti. He kept admiring her apartment, walking around and pausing in front of all the different furniture pieces as if he were a museumgoer. “Kitchen cabinets — actually nailed into the wall,” he said. “A real crockpot. Living plants — watered plants.”

“And at the end of the tour I’ll sell you a picture,” she said.

He shrugged, declining to be embarrassed. “I just feel like you’re the Swiss Family Robinson or something, like you’re the only one keeping it together.”

She was in charge of the music, she put on the mix that she’d developed over the past months. It was genuinely eclectic, as Brad would have said, a lot of soundtracks from all the movies she’d been watching and then gems from the various rabbitholes that her Spotify algorithm had led her into. It was a bit all-over-the-place, a bit hard to understand, but Tim listened to it enthusiastically, actually closed his eyes and nodded along to a couple of her songs. “This is nice,” he said when the music reached the end of the Magnolia theme song, “I could stay here for awhile.” He reached out towards her, like he were a traffic cop beckoning a vehicle towards him, and she obeyed, slid over from her cushion on the floor. She allowed him to bend her back, to take the nape of her neck in his hands. He was nice-looking, he had a fresh boyish face that paired oddly with his stout body, she thought of a bear cub as well as the trains in Thomas The Tank Engine.

Later on, when he was on top of her, inside of her, pressing down on her, her mind went to a curiously vacant place. That actually was exactly how her thoughts ran. It struck her as funny that all the terms for sex seemed to be taken from an exercise in the prepositional case in a foreign language reader, and she tried to come up with as many of those terms as she could: ‘the man entered the woman,’ ‘the man inserted himself into the woman,’ the man mounted the woman’ — ‘l’uomo è entrato nella donna,’ as her Duolingo would have it, ‘l’uomo era sopra la donna’ — and, as was happening more and more often, she nearly made herself laugh out loud but of course kept a grip, Tim didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would share in the joke.

He kissed her sweetly when he left. She couldn’t sleep at all, and she went through a really vicious purge of her things. Tim had been wrong to think that the apartment was well-organized, her mess was all just sort of crammed away, but now she made up for it, she reached deep into the back of her closets and she created piles of things on the floor and, pitilessly, she threw them into large white trash bags and hauled them out to the chute. She was hard at it the next day when Tim’s sweet text messages started to pour in, thanking her for a really nice night, seeing if she wanted to do it again anytime soon. She didn’t bother to reply. It was a long weekend and by the time it was over she had managed to overhaul the apartment, cleared out pretty much all her old dresses, all the gunk, all the sentimental knick-knacks that she thought she might someday treasure. She could feel that her taste had changed by the end of the weekend. She had become harder, tougher. Later that week she saw somebody wearing sandals, one of which said, ‘Do No Harm,’ while the other said, ‘But Take No Shit,’ and she thought they were absolutely brilliant and bought a pair on Amazon. They were great, they became kind of her signature the rest of the summer. She went out much more than she had before, she was a regular at the coffee shop, the farmer’s market, went occasionally to a neighborhood bar that was timidly reopening, she was actually very social. Wherever she went, guys hit on her, sex seemed to be back in the cards after the spring’s hiatus, and she had a nice way about her, smiled at strangers, was quick to think of a joke in the most unexpected situations, but she took no notice of any of them. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but, with the pandemic, she had definitively crossed over: she had become one of these people who lived their lives alone.