“Want some?” he croak-talks without exhaling, angling the bong in my direction.

“No thanks.” Gary smokes entirely too much pot these days, even though it’s the medically prescribed kind, formulated especially for his kind of debilitating anxiety, with all the THC removed—something I’d even managed to work into a few of my top-read Well/er posts. (“Is the ‘new pot’ for you?” “Why cannabis beats Klonopin for anxiety.” “If just seeing the word cannabis makes you anxious, keep reading.” “Yes, pot sommelier is a thing, and you need one.”) But, as usual, I don’t say anything. Why open myself up to the conversation that would certainly follow—the one that would surely include my role in the fact that our marriage is essentially over even if we can’t afford to live separately like normal people? Why would I want to go there when I can just pretend to ignore the fact that he is smoking himself into oblivion? Isn’t that what marriage is all about? Avoiding terrible arguments and self-examination that could expose your own complicity in the breakdown of your union?

But there has always been Teddy to consider, his happiness, the preservation and protection of what’s left of his childhood, and so we came up with a practical affordable solution that seems to be working for us: an in-house separation masquerading as separate sleeping arrangements due to intense snoring. Separated but still living together. And every six months or so we assuage our guilt for failing each other by going through the motions of seeing a new couples therapist on the off chance that we can change or, at the very least, improve on our imperfect solution. It’s also fun. We get to tweak an unsuspecting therapist who has no idea that we know we’re beyond help. It is performance art, cheaper and more fun than a dinner-and-movie date night.

I watch the smoke pour out of his mouth—so much smoke that I quickly close the sling over the dog’s head so she won’t get a contact high. “Every time you ask me I say no. So why do you keep asking?”

“Because maybe one day you’ll say yes.” Gary closes his eyes, throws his head back. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops—at all.”

I sit down in the guest chair. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson is in the middle of the train table, an elastic band around it. I pick it up and run my fingers over the title. “You gave this to me after our first date. Remember?”

“Of course I remember,” he says, with a slow shake of his head. “God, how pretentious.”

“It wasn’t pretentious. It was sweet.” I touch the elastic band until it makes a sad twang. “We’d left that bookstore reading early. Of course.”

“Because it was so insufferable.”

“And because we love leaving early.” Especially when we feel justified in leaving early. That night: an independent bookstore on the Upper West Side when we still lived in New York, a few months after we’d started dating. A pompous windbag-author was reading from a biography of Henry James, my favorite writer in college—I’d loved how seemingly tiny moments were often his character’s biggest turning points—droning from a makeshift podium amid folding chairs full of tweedy types with corduroy pants and public television tote bags.