“You didn’t ruin it for me.”

“Sometimes I wish I’d married someone else, too. And the weird thing is, I’m not even that unhappy, Judy. Even though we don’t fuck anymore, and even though we sleep in separate rooms and have this weird arrangement that’s kind of a fake marriage and kind of a very real marriage, I still love you. And I probably always will, no matter how things eventually end up.”

I turn my head and rest my forehead on the cold glass of my window.

“You’ve got Teddy, and the dog, and me. You may wish you had more than that, but that’s not bad.”

I don’t want more than that. I’ve never wanted more than that. I’ve just wanted things to be easier. Is that so wrong?

“No one cares how weird your life is, Judy. Or all the ways you think it’s failed you,” Gary says. “Your mother’s gone. No one sees the bird on your head except you.”

Part Three

Bracing for Change

Michael Wasserman

Trying to distract myself from the emotional hangover of our disastrous trip to Vermont, I’m at Costco a few days later, fondling a twenty-count bag of small avocados, while Teddy is off in the video game aisle. I’m hoping to find even one avocado that is soft enough to eat tonight, or tomorrow night, or maybe this month, which I know probably isn’t going to happen, since finding an avocado that’s ripe when you want to eat it is nearly impossible. Everything in life is about timing, about patience, about having faith in the future, but I’ve never believed in any of that. All the cigarettes I smoked before meeting Gary because I was convinced I’d never meet anyone and thus would never have anything to live for; all the times I’ve tried to get back to my work—the writing and the drawing—and failed. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe I’m still not ready. Maybe instead of blaming myself for what happened at Sari Epstein’s I should accept the fact that I’m pushing myself to do something I don’t actually want to do anymore. Maybe I should just move on.

Moving on (“Is ‘moving on’ like ‘giving up’ but with a better publicist?” “When accepting failure is a Good Thing”) is what I’m thinking about when I think I see Michael Wasserman from Hebrew school looking at a jumbo pack of tomatoes. Michael Wasserman, who I’d had a secret crush on all those years ago because of his slim chinos and thick brown hair and perfect teeth and always-white Jack Purcell sneakers, but who had never liked me back. At least I didn’t think he did. Was it possible he’d liked me, too? Probably not, especially since he’d started dating Janie Levy, who also had perfect teeth, during our bar/bat mitzvah year, and to my knowledge, they had never broken up. But now that I’m technically separated, I force myself to question all my default negative thoughts—especially that he could never have liked me because of what I did to him all those years ago by accident.