Just a month ago, Marianne had her own place in Brooklyn, a miraculously cheap railroad apartment on the top floor of a four-story walk-up in the treeless and newly trendy neighborhood of Greenpoint. Not that she cared about trends (and she would have preferred some trees), just the cost of things, which needed to be bargain-basement low. Marianne wasn’t cheap; she was just a poet. Really? she thought each year at tax time, totaling the measly grant or teaching payments she’d collected. She felt like someone on a calorie-restricted diet, looking over a list of what she’d eaten in a week: shock and a little pride that she was even still alive.

It was, in its way, the life she’d imagined for herself, growing up in rural Virginia: the sparsely furnished apartment, the neighborhood buzzing with unfamiliar languages (Polish, mostly, but also Russian and Spanish), the clacking of grocery and laundry carts along the street. A job she didn’t have to go to every day. Time, hers alone, for writing.

Her mother, an art teacher at the local high school, had fed Marianne this vision when she was very young, with books like This Is New York and Eloise and later with stories of her own time at the New School, studying painting. “Every artist requires a New York experience,” Theresa used to say, her soft coastal Virginia accent mixing with a slight Yankee nasality. For Marianne’s fifth birthday, she’d given her a heavy glass snow globe with a pewter cityscape, and had pointed out the crowded-together landmarks: the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, Central Park. Though Marianne couldn’t draw or paint or act or sing, she had loved books and words even before she could read, and was relieved to learn that writing, too, was an art that could provide you some entrance to that fabled city, some reasons for being there.

But those reasons, in her thirty-fourth year, were beginning to dry up like the slowly evaporating water in her snow globe. Her mother died before Marianne made it to the city, and she was no longer so sure she was honoring her memory by living there. Yes, she’d been the recipient of various grants, had published a chapbook, and was working on a full-length manuscript of poems, but her career had not exactly taken off. She took her turns reading to dispiritingly small crowds at coffee shops; at the post–high school level, she could only get hired to teach remedial composition at vocational schools. Unlike her mother, who met Marianne’s father, in town for an academic conference, in a seedy East Village bar, she had not found love. Or else—and maybe this was worse—she’d found it and had thrown it away.