She rolled her head from side to side, breaking loose the tension that was cocooned in the base of her neck.

“Well, you know what I’ve always said,” Diego replied. “Leave.”

“Sure … and do what? What else is there? Corporate communications? Teaching? Advertising? P.R.? I’d hate that too. They’re all the same. Long hours and people who suck your energy and drown your imagination. Come on, what would I do if I left?”

He reached toward the nightstand for a glass of water, considering what to say and how to say it. There is only one thing to do, he thought, taking a preemptive aspirin.

“You could finish your novel and sell it. Forget what I had to say about it. If you left Umbra you could really spend time with it … and finesse it … and really make it work.”

She asked for an aspirin, sat on the edge of the bed, and lowered her head between her knees to stretch her spine, where tension was crawling like a worm along the stem of a leaf.

Absently, she took the pill without water, and was forced to endure its scrawl along her throat, a chalky bitterness as galling as graffiti. Wincing, she drained the glass, then leaned against Diego’s belly and stared up at the teepee, whose silken folds faded as her gaze burned through to the past.

“There is one side of me, Diego, that loves to write … I mean … you know that. But I’ve given up on getting that novel published. I don’t even call my agent anymore. I haven’t spoken to her in months. The rejection letters just became too much …”

The words trailed off into a hum, which was her way of fighting tears. Hums were better than sighs. One could always pretend they were songs.

They lay together quietly for a while, listening to each other breathe as music and laughter dripped through the ceiling, balming them like sea spray.

I wish I could just lie here, she thought … and fall asleep.

But she was animated by a new thought: “The politeness is the part that’s damaging, y’know. They never tell you the truth. They never say, ‘Give it up because your work is shit,’ or ‘Join the right clique and you’ll be okay.’ So instead of packing it in, you keep hanging on, waiting for your luck to turn, like those guys with their eyes glazed over at the OTB. But it never comes, man. Not for most people at least. And I don’t have time anymore. I’ll soon be thirty-five, Diego, and I have to get on with my life.”

She sat up again and looked around this space that Diego owned, saw all the things he had—the chairs from Java, the Turkish rugs—and thinking of their similar backgrounds asked herself, How is it that we’re so different? Why can’t I be like him? Why can’t I just be?

She was thinking now of the day he quit college to work as a gofer at a production house. There she was on the steps of Low Library, begging him to stay. There he was, striding across the quadrangle … driven to madness … drawn to his calling, he said, after seeing Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict.