She put her head in her palms. She wanted to buy a ticket to Mexico but she had almost no money. Her show had not sold very well, though it had been well-received, and the prop-styling work she did on the side wasn’t coming through lately. The whole city was waiting for jobs, and all her friends were calling each other daily, trying to remain hopeful.

She stared at her kitchen table and took a slow index of its scattered contents: a pile of old bills, an ashtray full of thumbtacks, a ballpoint pen without its cap. The newspaper made a crazy quilt of pictures and type, and the cloudy light from the window caught in its grain. She could see tiny furrows and crosshatching in the paper, and the liquid blackness of the print embedded in its soft tissue. The walls of her breakfast nook were so pale that they almost seemed to have no color at all.

Jen had been in Portland for a long time. Ever since she was a little girl. And her energy for it was waning, as it always did around this time of year. She needed to move somewhere, she told herself. She needed to go where she could get something going, as an artist or anything else. Maybe it was New York City, maybe Los Angeles. It didn’t matter that much. She had friends in both cities; she could land on her feet. She just needed to open her eyes and see some new buildings and trees.

As Jen sat at her table, plotting her escape, listening to the rain on the shingles, she slowly came to realize that her plans did not include David. She hoped he had guarded himself somehow, though she sensed he hadn’t.

A few days later Jen took David to an art opening at a new gallery downtown. The white walls were high and immaculate and hosted a single row of small, brightly colored canvasses at eye level. The crowd milling around was full of familiar faces, and it took a long time to actually get around to seeing the work.

David was drawn to one piece in particular, a blank canvas with the word “YO” written in italics. He claimed it induced some dyslexic effect in him, and kept flipping between “YO” and “OY.” To him it became a dense semiotic commentary on racial identity, hip-hop’s “yo” mirroring the Yiddish “oy.” Jen, as usual, couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

“I think you’re reaching,” she said. “It’s not that great.”

“Not on purpose, anyway,” he said. His excitement stalled and he went off to get a drink.