“Some intelligent people think that if they sit there taking apart their problems all day long, they’ll eventually see how to solve them. But they’re wrong. When you surround yourself with your own thoughts, when you walk around thinking and talking every tiny aspect of life to death, all you’re doing is taking all those little pieces of yourself and building a wall around yourself that you’ll never come out of,” Jake’s mother declared, almost with anger. “Thinking too much is selfish.”

It took Jake until his first year of college, five years after she died, to see what his mother had meant. In high school, people primped and preened and squealed and shouted whenever they reeled in the boy or girl of the moment. But in college, with the agony of sharing rooms and staying up all night for stupid reasons, love became something burdensome, a heavy and tedious affair. People in college and thereafter didn’t talk about love. They talked about “relationships.”

“Relationships” were something entirely different from love affairs. Unlike love, which was something light and deep, unquestioned and unconditional, “relationships” involved “work,” “struggle,” “compromise,” “problems,” and “issues.” Jake’s friends, both male and female, loved nothing more than to sit around and talk for hours about the “issues” they needed to “work on” in their “relationships.” Relationships weren’t fun. They were serious, a full-time job. And Jake watched his friends building little walls around themselves with each new relationship, so that no one could reach them anymore. They became like cities under siege, bricked in by their issues and struggles and compromises and by their need to be loved without ever needing to love.

Jake had wasted years of his life on someone like that. Rebecca was the reason he had been to Forty-seventh Street before. Not that she came with him, of course. Not that she even knew he was thinking about it, though if she had known she probably would have left much sooner. They had been “relating” for almost five years when she told him she needed “space,” time to “think,” time to “work things out,” and accepted a fellowship to spend a year in Heidelberg. He cared too much to risk begging her to stay. In December he came to New York to visit his father and went to Forty-seventh Street to look at diamond rings. Just window-shopping, that’s all. Just to look. When he stepped into the subway car on his way back to his father’s apartment, he saw Rebecca and another man wrapped around a subway pole together, working things out. From then on, he only took the bus.