In the grocery store, wiping my face, which I’d forgotten to wash. Composing lines of poetry on my cell phone: about additives, cold-water detergent, sinks. A man kneeling beside a car. Two old women commenting on a panhandler behind his back. Mornings with no work—as an editor I’d cut these details from a novel, but they were moments of love.

A boy hiding at the back of an aisle, playing a prank on the friend he’s talking to on the phone. Laughing like crazy because he alone knows they’re both in the grocery store at the same time.

While I recorded this image in the notes on my phone, the yellow screen disappeared and a call from Barbara came in. She was stressed, locked in a bathroom with a stomachache. A regional administrator was causing trouble when it came to modifying the public notice to add the event at the medieval garden. The women she was working with had made a proposal to a councilor to modify the events calendar to allocate around thirty thousand euros for this evening on violence against women. The problem was, if it wasn’t announced in time, one of two things would happen: there’d be no texts from invited authors, so the festival couldn’t go on, or they’d have to let the grant winners know secretly before the official date so the festival could go on, and doing that would be illegal. The public notice wasn’t ready yet because the administrator was questioning the phrasing in the document.

“They’re driving me crazy. We’ll never finish it in time to get people to participate.”

“Are you crying, honey?”

“No. A little. What are you doing now?”

“I’m at the store.”

“I’m sick of this—I want to stop working, too.”

I stepped into the checkout line. An old alcoholic kept telling the cashier to give her twenty plastic bags for free.

“I’m sick of this,” she said again. “I’m quitting, too.”

“Poor little bubble.”

That evening she came home early, no cocktails with colleagues, no theater. She didn’t greet me right away: she glanced up from her cell phone, then looked down again; transfixed, she slipped on her moccasins; with every message she let out a “Oh, Christ, what now” or a “Oh, Christ, not this, too.”

She started looking around for something. She must have found it: “Must this keyboard always be on the couch?”

She picked up the cordless keyboard I used with my laptop and carried it into the bedroom, and I followed behind her. She hadn’t looked at me yet. I followed her into the bathroom, too, where she pulled down her wool boot-cut slacks; they dropped lightly to her feet and she was left standing in her underwear.

“You want a gin and tonic, a martini?” I asked.

“Do we have beer?”