OKAY, Lorraine Kominski had typed back, four minutes after Marianne’s email, like she was waiting for exactly such an invitation. She’d detailed her modest salary requirements and the airport and flight times she most preferred. I LIKE TO FLY DELTA FOR THE DELTA MILES. NICE TO HEAR FROM YOU. HOPE YOUR WRITING IS GOING BETTER.

A few days later, Eric had warmed up to the idea of Lorraine as poetry teacher, or at least accepted it, and Marianne, for her part, felt more and more relieved to be in an administrative role, to avoid the actual teaching.

Can’t wait to get to FL with you, he texted her. This is really going to work out.

Excited to see you too, she wrote back, laboring over the buttons on her flip phone, which Eric said looked like something an old lady might use to call an ambulance. I hope so.

She wasn’t sure what they were talking about—the school, or living in proximity again—and guessed that Eric wasn’t either, but it was better, easier, than clarifying.

He was still in love with Marianne. She knew this and had encouraged it in small, mean ways: wearing certain dresses (low-cut, shoulder-baring) when he visited her in New York, brushing against him in the narrow aisles of the Strand, reaching across restaurant tables to take food from his plate like a girlfriend. And sometimes she was in love with parts of him too—the sound of his voice on the telephone on Sunday nights, the funny emails he sent her from work about his students, memories of lying in bed with him in his tiny Astoria walk-up, her head on his chest, his fingers in her hair.

Marianne was good at the early stages of a relationship—dressing up for dates, flirting, doing thoughtful things that required only a small, un-intimidating, spontaneous kind of effort. She was not good at the things required by a long-term relationship (visiting other people’s families, planning trips or holidays or extravagant surprises), but this was something that was difficult to make someone else understand; they had to see for themselves, over time. Early on, when she told Eric that she had never lived with a man and never intended to, he wasn’t dissuaded. “A Woody/Mia thing then,” he’d said gamely.

“Sure,” she said. “That turned out great.”