But in late February of that fresh year with all the zeroes, they ran into each other in the line outside Film Forum, and apologies were whispered, and more tears were shed, and her hand slid under his jacket and his flannel shirt to touch his bare, warm skin, and soon enough they were back together again, inhaling each other in the old way, because was there anybody else who could love as big as she could, who was as spirited and as honest, and was there anyone as wickedly funny as he was, as avid, as verbose? Was there anyone else who would go see all those Pasolinis and Fellinis with him, or anyone else who would read to her from Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim over the phone, the cordless one cradled hot against her ear, on those nights when he was downtown and she was uptown and couldn’t sleep? That yes, factually, in New York City at the very start of the millennium there were still people who would have done these things, who were doing these things, was irrelevant to their love, just as it was irrelevant, lying anew in each other’s arms, that they’d met one spring afternoon in 1999 purely by chance, and that had they not, each would have eventually fallen for another, which meant that each was replaceable, that each could be replaced. From then on they were solidly together—their coupledom was fixed, became a fixture that the rest of us drank at, envied, aspired to.

So much the same, but with the emphasis in a different place: that was the simple, clockwork beauty of their union, as they saw it. Once, early on, lying naked on the mattress in his East Village apartment, she assessed aloud their compatibility, and he listened and agreed and then put it this way: While she looked for all to see like a nice, good girl who did everything right, in truth she liked transgression and had a dirty mouth and her dark side liked it darker, while he presented as dark, troubled, and filthy, but actually was warm and pretty nice. Beyond that, they’d come down from more or less the same number of Holocaust survivors, had more or less the same number of relatives in Israel, each had a mother born in Europe and a father just barely born in America who’d been Republican up to Reagan; each had been raised with the same death-penalty prohibition against marrying a goy, or failing in any way, which is to say that each was a product of the same proud, closed-minded, hotheaded, anxious, comforting, all-consuming tribalism, but while Sophie’s mother, resenting the confines of her postwar North London Orthodox childhood, had sent her daughter to public school in Roslyn, he, Ezra, had been sent to, and eventually kicked out of, yeshiva.