“Okay, anyway, that was a lot about me,” Nadine said, referencing some earlier thread in the conversation. “How’s work?”

Violet sighed theatrically. “Good. Bad. The same. I’m, like, having the same fight with my manager I was having in December, but I think there’s a limit to how far it can go this time.”

“Where do you work?” I said.

She named an art gallery in Lower Manhattan that I had heard of, and I told her that I had heard of it, and she nodded politely.

“It’s, you know, prestige, but it’s mostly normal office work,” she said. “I complain about it a lot, but it’s, like, fine. It beats serving coffee.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

I looked over at Nadine, who was looking up above the awning at the pair of pigeons nesting in the eaves of the building.

“What do you do?” Violet said.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

She nodded thoughtfully.

I was literally twitching in my seat at that point, so I abruptly and awkwardly made some dumb excuse to leave. Nadine stood to hug me, and Violet waved from her seat.

“Nice to meet you, Leonora,” she said, looking me in the face.

On my way back down the block I could hear Violet talking in that loud, nasal voice about the office politics at that stupid art gallery. I heard her call another woman a “dumb bitch,” some coworker or interlocutor, and I heard Nadine laugh, and then I turned the corner.

♒

“I feel like that cat would be happier on the street,” Nadine said. “Like, I feel like in our apartment she’s always just stressed out and constrained. That’s probably why she destroys things. She’s trying to tell us — please, I don’t belong here.”

It was a couple days later and we were walking somewhere together. She was texting rapidly while walking.

“Violet wanted to invite you to a party she’s hosting next week, by the way,” Nadine said. “Her roommate and her new girlfriend are doing a housewarming, even though they’ve been in that apartment for six months.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I think Violet is outgrowing the lesbian poets,” Nadine said. “She wants to make new friends.”

I turned over the phrase outgrowing the lesbian poets in my head. Each word seemed to imply a different facet of Violet’s life that further indicated how different she was from me.

“I’ll go, yeah,” I said.

“She’s a good one, Violet,” Nadine said. “Sort of the one who got away.”

She never said much about her inner life — what she desired or feared or regretted. I imagined that she had a mind that never stopped moving, that she didn’t want to interrupt herself by trying to put her feelings into words.

“You two still have chemistry,” I offered.

“Something like that,” she said, and changed the subject.

♒

What do you do?