What did she see in him? He said that the sky was “bucolic”; she asked him what “bucolic” meant. He said he liked Steely Dan and the color black. Well, so did she. What did that make her? He drank coffee black, or sometimes with a little cream. What did that mean? She felt like she was on a scavenger hunt, searching for clues as to who he was and what he wanted from her. She had no idea whether, if she found out, she would give it to him or not.

Was Jesse a good man? she asked herself. He probably was, because he bored her to death sometimes. “You think that if it isn’t dramatic, nothing is happening,” Norma had told her. “The idea is to get old with them, not because of them. Pretend it’s an acting assignment. Act like someone who enjoys the quiet that can be found in a mature relationship. Act normal, and see if some feelings of normalcy don’t eventually follow.”

“Normal. People don’t get much more normal than us,” she thought. “We’re prototypes for the new normal line of people who were designed to pave the way for the nineties.” She realized that she and Jesse were getting serious. Serious. She hated the sound of it. “I joked myself into a serious situation,” she’d told Lucy.

“You’ve backed into normalcy via Cambodia,” Lucy said, “so you can appreciate it more. It’s like you applied for a weird life and got a regular one by accident.”

Lucy liked Jesse. She thought he was good for Suzanne, that people would take her more seriously if they knew she was going with “an author.” For a while she even considered finding herself an author, but one who was, as she put it to Suzanne, “maybe just a little famous, like John Irving or Philip Roth.”

Then Lucy met Lowell Stephenson. When No Survivors came out, she received a lot of attention, so when she went to Seattle over Christmas to make up with her father for the things she’d said about him on the talk show, Lowell—the head of New Age Studios—recognized her on the plane and struck up a conversation. She was seeing him fairly regularly now.

Sometimes the four of them would go out together. Lowell even cooked for them once. “This is exactly how I like it,” Lucy had whispered to Suzanne while Lowell was perfecting the salad dressing. “Breadmaker and breadwinner all in one.”

“How did we ever end up as parts of couples?” Suzanne asked, as they watched Lowell show Jesse how to sauté shrimp.

“Think of it as an experiment,” Lucy suggested.

“Does one of us have cancer?” Suzanne had asked Jesse on their fourth date, after they’d sat in her house talking for eight hours straight.

“Pardon me?” he said.