I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.

We fell silent and I didn’t want to be the one to break the silence—it seemed like he, as an FBI agent, would know when it had been enough. But it just went on and on until I began smiling to myself, slightly grimacing from the awkwardness, and still it continued so the nervousness passed and now I thought of the silence as something we were doing together, like a jam session, and then that feeling ended and I grew inexplicably, overwhelmingly sad. My eyes welled up and when the silence finally broke it was because I made a sniffing sound and he said Yeah again, with resignation. Then, as if nothing had happened (and in fact nothing had), he went back to talking about the guy with the telephoto lens.

Saturday. I got out of bed and looked at the calendar on my computer. (This is the kind of thing you can do easily if you don’t share a bed with your husband. He snores, I’m a light sleeper.) On Saturday at three o’clock Harris had driven Sam to a playdate, so at four I had been alone. That’s right—I had dutifully called my parents, but they weren’t home so I began texting friends in New York about my upcoming visit; I had just turned forty-five and this trip was my gift to myself. I was going to see plays and art and stay in a nice hotel instead of with friends, which normally would feel like a waste of money, but I’d gotten a surprise check—a whiskey company had licensed a sentence I’d written years ago for a new global print campaign. It was a sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey. Twenty grand.

What do you mean? we all said. Harris just shrugged, took a sip of his drink. He doesn’t talk much at parties. He hangs back, not needing anything from anyone, which of course draws people toward him. I’ve watched him move from room to room, running in slow motion from a crowd that is unconsciously chasing him.

Now he touched two fingers to his forehead and I did the same, relieved. We’d done this saluting thing the first time we ever laid eyes on each other and across many crowded rooms ever since. There you are. He didn’t look away. Dancers kept moving between us, but he held on for a moment longer, we both did. I smiled a little but this wasn’t really about happiness; it hit below fleeting feelings. At this slight remove all our formality falls away, revealing a mutual and steadfast devotion so tender I could have cried right there on the dance floor. Sure, he’s good-looking, unflappable, insightful, but none of that would mean anything without this strange, almost pious, loyalty between us. Now we both knew to turn away. Other couples might have crossed the room toward each other and kissed, but we understood the feeling would disappear if we got too close. It’s some kind of Greek tragedy, us, but not all told.

We were sipping milkshakes; mine strawberry, hers chocolate. Once a week we meet in her studio and eat junk together. Usually desserts we’d eaten as kids but almost never again since we’d discovered the healing power of whole grains and fermented foods and how sugar was basically heroin. This was part of a larger agreement to never become rigid, to maintain fluidity in diet and all things. At home I baked high-protein, date-sweetened treats. No one knew about our medicinal junk food, are you kidding? Harris and Sam would both be jealous, each in their own way. Similarly, I never told Harris what I jerked off to.

“Call us from Utah tonight,” he said, hugging me. I gave him a look that said: If I survive, if I come back to you, let us finally give up this farce and be as one. He gave me a look that said: We could be as one right now, if you really wanted that. To which my eyes said nothing.

I sat in the car while he filled the tank and a young man cleaned my windshield, which was unnecessary but I guessed part of the service. The guy with the squeegee had a Huckleberry Finn/Gilbert Blythe look that I used to flip out over as a teenager but with more closely cropped hair and a downy little mustache that kind of ruined the effect. He was sliding the rubber edge across the glass with long, sure, steady strokes. It was hypnotic, like being bathed. I fell into a sort of lazy trance and for this reason I was slow to realize we had made eye contact. How embarrassing. But to look away would make it seem as if I cared what this person thought—he should look away. He didn’t, so we remained locked together like this as he made his way down the window. In moments he seemed to be smiling faintly at our predicament and at other times he grew deeply serious, as if this thing between us was no joke. And I could feel my own face mirroring his, sunny and then somber, grave. I felt a little disoriented. What had I gotten myself into? Would this never end? And at the same time I had a growing anxiety about the end. I feared it would be too abrupt or that I would somehow be unprepared. It took a long time for me to notice the earbuds in his ears. He was listening to something, that’s why the serious then smiling face. Probably a podcast. Could he even really see me through the glass? No, the way the light hit it made that impossible; I was just a dark shape. No matter. I’d already forgotten him by the time I pulled back onto the freeway.

I drove to Fontana’s listening to Portishead at a very loud volume. This had been my main album in the midnineties when my ex-girlfriend and ex–best friend were living together in the apartment next door to me and loudly consummating their new love. The lovemaking involved some kind of hitting followed by a hoarse uh. It was a kind of arousal that I hadn’t experienced—I’d never been hit, I’d never gone uh. When they had sex like this I’d put on my Walkman and listen to Portishead and try to imagine a time when this would all just be a funny story. Now was that time. My young agony was the funny part; it made me smile as I drove. Twenty years ago I’d been in my twenties; twenty years from now I’d be in my sixties. I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot. I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to. I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season.

Fontana’s wasn’t exactly what I would call healthy. I ordered the Shrimp Diablo. The young waitress was barely civil, but I treated her warmly nonetheless; I always go out of my way to not be like my mom in these situations. She often felt she was being mocked—so she mocked back. She’d get nervous and mock a waitress, a cab driver, a neighbor. Sometimes they didn’t notice, but often they did and a fight would break out, ending with her in tears. Now I’m more detached, but when she mocked me as a teenager I had to restrain myself from scratching her face or biting her. All in all, though, my mom was the cozier parent, no contest. I loved it when we cuddled; the warmth and smell of her body in a baby blue nylon nightie. Her big, soft breasts falling this way and that. Once, at around fifteen, I did briefly try to strangle her during one of those mocking episodes. That’s when I discovered there’s no satisfaction in violence; it actually works in reverse, making you the bad one.