Beyond even that, both wanted to be what their families, who had seen so much, had not yet seen: a person who considers it their vocation to make not a living, not money, not measurable success—but art.

Pasolini! I repeated, when Sophie told me this detail. She was lying on her pallet under the dirty, tattered blue blanket, watching the rain dribble into a rusted, overflowing metal drum. I’d forgotten that name, and by then I’d forgotten the images of most of the movies I’d once seen. But Sophie could remember them all. She could describe whole scenes, the light, the camera angles, she could even remember the lines, and when she unspooled these films, her gray-violet eyes softened, as if she were watching them again, projected on the tarpaulin of makeshift tents, the rubbled walls, the filthy sky crosshatched with wires. Whoever was nearby, or waiting with us on the line for the food kits, vaccines, or juice boxes that might or might not come, would quiet down and listen too, and without any evidence to back it up, I want to say that the movies she blew into our minds with her magic-lantern words achieved their higher form, their highest, with everything else stripped away from them.

In the early aughts I saw Sophie, and so Ezra, a fair bit, at dinners, or parties of friends, or the parties thrown by the establishments that those friends now worked for. Then, about two years after 9/11, I moved to London for a job and lost touch with Sophie. She and Ezra were still together, and I remember hearing at some point that they’d gotten engaged, that there would eventually be a wedding at her family’s house on Long Island. By then I’d stopped fantasizing about her, I suppose. By then it had seemed good and right: that those two, whose match was so fated and well built and symmetrical, should lead the way into the farther fields, into the seemingly still faraway fields of adulthood, where eventually we would be put out to the pasture of parenthood. But time passed, and no wedding invitation came, and then other people we knew went ahead and got married, and then babies started to be born, some even to the last people we ever expected to go nuclear-family, and then one year, back in New York for the holidays, catching up with the friends I still stayed in touch with there, I finally heard that Sophie and Ezra had broken up.