Now, here was Hal, a decade later, standing behind the cash register at the bookstore on Sunset. They exchanged a few words and arranged to meet the following day. That night, she got a call from a recent ex-boyfriend, Carlos, who was in L.A. working as an electrician on a TV show. She spent the afternoon at her fashion shoot photographing extremely tall, surreally beautiful women, and by the end of the day she felt like a garden gnome. She answered Carlos’s call enthusiastically and they had sex in her apartment without memories in the trendy hotel, only now there was a memory in it, which was of having sex with Carlos standing up in the kitchen. She and Carlos had been together for two years and broken up really because she’d been unfaithful to him with a charismatic older friend named Larry, who had bad diabetes and was missing several toes. Larry was a real physical mess and Justine got naked with him more out of a sense of friendliness than anything—and maybe curiosity—but either way she should not have mentioned this to Carlos, obviously. But to be fair Carlos already knew she had a problem with fidelity; their affair started when she was working as a set photographer on a low-budget picture he was on the crew of. She was going out with another photographer at the time, Ben, who was so upset when he realized she was sleeping with Carlos that he moved to Pittsburgh. Anyway, when Carlos left the hotel, she called Elliot, with whom if you remember she was still living in their three-month-lease apartment on Lafayette Street. Elliot said something like, “Getting back together with you is easier than I expected.” By which he meant she was easy to get along with in her absence. Justine laughed at this, not pausing to think about what her life was becoming.