But that wasn’t how it went. “Marianne!” Eric called across the next MFA gathering, his southern lilt splitting her name into the more familiar Mary-Anne. Her name in his mouth was urgent and delighted. Like she was special, remarkable, someone to scan the room for.

They went home together again, to Eric’s apartment, where instead of falling into bed (to Marianne’s slight disappointment), they talked: about workshop, their hometowns, living in New York as southerners. It started to get dark, and Eric began making dinner, referring disconcertingly often to a recipe in a cookbook. “The way people won’t even wait for a less-crowded train!” Marianne insisted. “They’ll just cram themselves in. Elevators too—the hurry to do everything, shoveling snow as soon as it falls!” Eric agreed with her; at least, he didn’t argue, just looked at her slyly, slightly adoringly, waiting for the next pronouncement. “Not that I’d want to go back,” she clarified.

“Not eventually?”

No, she insisted: she loved New York, and feared living the life her mother lived, putting her art second, or third—really last of all the things she had to do in a day, in a week, in a year.

“But if she hadn’t moved to Virginia,” Eric said. “If she hadn’t met your father.”

“I know,” Marianne said. “You can appreciate something without wanting it for yourself. Don’t you ever go home and feel—at the grocery store, or wherever—proud of living here?”

“Sure,” he said, plating the pasta.

“You would give that up? And go back to being—what?”

“Myself?” And there was something about the way he said that, the essential simplicity and honesty on his face—why would he want to be anything else?—along with the pasta, which was surprisingly good in its lemony cream sauce. It was comforting. Unchallenging. It was, at the moment, exactly what she’d wanted without knowing.

All spring and all the next year they did New York things: went to concerts, readings, museums, out to dinner. They got bronchitis and nursed each other with Gatorade and deli-bought soup. They took long subway rides to Coney Island and the botanical garden in the Bronx; they rented a car and got sunburns and a parking citation at Rockaway Beach. Eric read and marked up (with checks and exclamation points) Marianne’s thesis, mostly poems about people in her hometown; she read his novel, about a family of moonshiners, and did not complain that not a single character resembled her. As graduation loomed, they never talked about leaving, about what they would do next. What was wrong with life as it was? Why did there have to be a next?