Eric wondered what he meant—was he better off not getting married, or better off without Marianne? At that moment, only hours after celebrating, then ending, their engagement, Eric could not imagine life without her. Beautiful, crazy, capricious Marianne. Every annoying habit was suddenly endearing and precious—the way she underdressed for the weather, in filmy dresses and ridiculous shoes, her terribly decorated apartment, her foul mouth and open atheism. Eric rooted through his CDs and found The Essential Leonard Cohen and played “So Long, Marianne” on repeat until Mark showed up after work.

“I’m no English major, but listen to the song, dumbass,” Mark said, turning it up. “The fucker was glad to be rid of her.”

What other choices did she have? Did she really want to wind up alone, in some crummy fourth-floor walk-up? What were her goals, her prospects? She did not seem to want any of the things he wanted so desperately, not publication or marriage or a permanent address, or at least did not expect them. Perhaps she knew something that he did not—he was too good for her, maybe that was it. Eric began to catalog Marianne’s faults obsessively. Aside from part-time teaching, she hardly even worked, while Eric had taught, temped for a medical supply company, answered phones for an escort service, and worked in social media consulting. Marianne never had any decent furniture and spent her discretionary funds on psychoanalysis and vitamins instead of health insurance. She was a connoisseur of the pointlessly difficult—long readings held at inconvenient hours, meals so spicy you could only bear to take two bites, exhibits of ephemeral art—and everything she wanted to do was far away, so that what you remembered, instead of the actual experience, was how hard it had been to get there. She canceled plans, she was self-absorbed and argumentative and petulant. She was pretty in a way that he told himself would not last—her hair would grow frizzy and coarse; her pale, freckled skin would wrinkle early.

For almost two months, they hardly talked. At the end of the summer, he moved to Charlotte, and soon they were dating other people. They began their Sunday-night phone call ritual, and Eric thought, so this is how we’re meant to be. Then Eric was married—he had pictured Marianne at the country club wedding, tearfully but powerfully reading a poem composed just for him and his bride, but she didn’t show.

Now, of course, he understood that it had all been a mistake—proposing to Denise and Julie and Marianne, marrying Christine. He worried that the rest of his life would be lived in the wake of these mistakes, that they would influence his future chances at happiness, the same way his poor novel sales would influence the sale and marketing of a new book. He did not want to look back on another Copper Creek, another failed marriage. He was done with serial proposing.