It was an extraordinary room. Under an enormous hexagonal skylight through which you could see the night sky, the walls of Max’s office were painted with seventeenth-century florals—peonies and chrysanthemums, their petals shining and lush, giving one the overall impression of having tumbled into a Dutch still-life—and an egg-shaped chandelier hung in the corner, illuminating the room with a tender flush of golden light. The furniture was custom: a ruby-grapefruit velvet daybed, a bleached-cedar desk, two huge armchairs, a brass bookcase, and a small coffee table that was 90 percent ashtray. I perched on the edge of one of the chairs. She lit two cigarettes and offered me one; I took it. I don’t smoke, but with Max, I always smoked and drank and snorted whatever she did. I couldn’t help it. Nobody could.

“I’m so glad you live here now,” she said, lying dramatically on the sofa. “I would die of loneliness if you didn’t live here.”

Max could have died of loneliness anywhere, though I didn’t say that.

“What are you doing, Max?” I asked instead.

“Oh, well, I rented out the top of the brownstone because we decided to stay here for the whole summer. I kept the garden apartment open but I haven’t been going back at all.”

“With your time, I mean.”

“I’m doing a book,” she said excitedly. “I’m editing all of my photos from the last twenty years, starting with high school and writing about what happened in each one. They’re calling it Just Kids meets The Year of Magical Thinking, but, you know, for our generation.”

“That’s a good idea.” I took a drag of the unfiltered cigarette and picked tobacco out of my teeth.

“I have a brilliant writer. She does a ton of collabs. Fleur? Madrigal? Anyway, she’s razor-sharp. She’s around here somewhere. You should talk to her.”

“What’s it called?”

“The Art of Losing.”

It took me a minute to realize what she was referring to. “…isn’t hard to master,” I said, recalling the line of an Elizabeth Bishop poem we’d loved as teenage girls.

“Exactly. Of course you would know that right away. Christ, we are so old. Look at us.” She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray. “I mean, you don’t look a day over twenty-five. But I feel old as dirt. All I do is get lasers pointed at my skin and needles injected into my arms. Thirty-five and they told me they were going to inflate my biceps ‘like a tire’ to get rid of the batwings. Can you believe that? And it worked.”

Self-consciously I remembered the purple lipstick I’d put on earlier but never reapplied and reached up to wipe it away; I wondered if there was a purple ring around my lips, if I looked stupid and thoughtless.