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[...] I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it; when one of you pretends to not really understand what the…

That summer, I treated poor Adam like a roommate. I came home late. I ordered Chinese food for dinner again and again. He mentioned once that I was ordering Chinese a lot and so I ordered Thai. I dared him in the mornings to ask me questions so that I could tell him about how I didn’t know how to l…

Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all e…

I watched a couple go by, burrowing into each other so that they were nearly facing each other but still walking forward, like on the cover of that Bob Dylan album. I pitied them. I saw the girl in the couple, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, and I knew now that in a few years, that gi…

“SO WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked Toby on the phone. I’d loved the Nahid story—this prisoner trying to gain freedom for herself through the random secret fucking of men in her apartment. It was like a dirty fairy tale.

“She just wasn’t who I thought she was,” he said.

“What was she?”

“She was ju…