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We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain. We don’t want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one’s hands—like some dancer, in a trance, just…

“Mark!” Arielle called after him. “Choose wisely!”

“Hey.” Toby cut in again.

“No, I need to say this,” Arielle insisted. “I’ve known guys like you, Mark. You think girls need to be saved. But we don’t. We’re OK. Save yourself!”

He kissed her. She kissed him back. They kept their lips closed—Gwyn was a nice girl, from Minnesota, and Mark was almost ten years older than she—but she kissed him with such an intensity of kissing, such an abandon to it, that he began to think that maybe he could just do it all over again. Gwyn …

Mark laughed. He was not Mick Jagger either. Celeste was twenty-nine years old. In general, this was a pretty good age to be, a pretty happy age. But in Brooklyn in 2006, with every other weekend a wedding save-the-date from a college friend in her mailbox, it was less so. Celeste concentrated mome…

But he had to break up with Celeste; he began catechizing himself again the next day as he rode down Classon on his bike. Break up with Celeste, he said. You are both unhappy. You are not, it turns out, such a great couple. Misanthropes should not marry. At least not each other. And your failure to…