“Then I saw your car parked at the motel. And I knew. This thing was on.”

“On?”

“Or did I read you all wrong?”

If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling.

“Why did you come back?” he said. “Why are you here?” He waited, his sharp, dark eyes on mine. “You came back for me. You’re here for me.”

“Why would I do that? That’s crazy. That would be crazy.”

He smiled a little, sympathetically. “Yep. But that’s what people do.”

We sat in silence. I wondered if I was misunderstanding. He reached across the table and touched the back of his hand to the back of mine, ever so gently. There weren’t very many ways to take that. Just one, really. [...]

But our moral codes were entirely different. He keeled over, like he was having an ulcer right then and there. And he actually might have been. He had never done anything like this, never even been tempted.

“It’s only because it’s you. Anyone else I’d be able to resist.”

This was meant as a great compliment, but it felt impersonal to me, like he’d been caught in the snare of my work. Whereas my feelings for him were totally pure, I’d simply been drawn to him.

“To my pretty face,” he said glumly. We each worried that the other one adored something that wasn’t really us. [...]

The next day he was busy when I arrived so I had to sit beside a customer in the row of connected chairs while he rented a car to a woman my age. I tried to figure out from her back if she was flirting with him. It made me crazy, other people around him; he gave himself so freely to these customers. In some alternate dimension I engaged with other people, too. And I had stature! Sometimes people wanted my autograph! But I couldn’t even hold that idea in my mind for one second before it was overwhelmed by a new and much more profound thought: Who cares. None of that had any impact on what was going on in this Hertz on the Arcadia/Monrovia border. I looked at the ceiling, took smooth breaths, and pulled my shoulders back. The gray-haired woman sitting next to me chuckled a little and said something under her breath that weirdly sounded like “You’re admiring him” but obviously wasn’t that.

“Do you want to be with him instead of Harris?”

“No.” That was still easy and true. “He’s not a rock like that. I love him as my lover. I just want to dance with him, I don’t want to raise a child together.”

“So maybe it’s okay.”

“And fuck him. And kiss him. And lie in bed in his arms all day.”

“If you were a French man this would all be perfectly acceptable,” Jordi said.

She was a really good friend.

I lay with my head on his chest. He said he couldn’t believe this, that he was lying with his dream girl in his arms. I saw us lying like this for the rest of our lives, profoundly married to other people but always knowing we could return to our shared world. This was what I had always wanted; he was real enough to love and love me back but not so real that I couldn’t desire him. No matter how miserable I was, there would always be this to look forward to. I smiled, thinking of Parkers and Drivers. Now I could live a full and complete life as a Parker, rather than becoming a Driver, like Harris. And I would probably be a better wife and mother now that I had a lover. An almost lover.

“It’s just being cleaned right now, if you can wait a few minutes.” Skip had handed me the receipt already and now gave me a look like, Is there anything else I can help you with. The couple also now looked at me. I opened my mouth to say something about the suite, about it really being mine—but it wasn’t. If you wanted to own property you went about it in a completely different way. Escrow, things like that. I wheeled my bags out to my car, tears openly running down my face. Helen was carrying clean, folded towels to room 321, but she paused to watch me load up.

“I don’t regret what I did,” she suddenly called out. I was startled; my weeping paused. “If I could go back, I wouldn’t do anything differently. I would do it all exactly the same.”

It seemed like she had committed a terrible crime and somehow thought I was the right person to hear she was unrepentant. I nodded as if I understood and, now somewhat self-consciously, got in my car and began backing out.

Her affair. She didn’t regret cheating on Claire’s uncle. I looked back at her in the rearview mirror. With the towels clutched to her chest, she watched me drive away.

“Mama?” Sam ran around the house; the scooter rolled on the kitchen floor above my head. My heart shattered at the sound of their little voice. Whatever I had been doing to minimize this pain abruptly ended—I was desperate to see my child. But I couldn’t move. I was immobile, stricken. The transition was simply not possible for me. Someone got a glass of water from the faucet. The toilet was flushed, loud in the pipes. Harris called out my name. Sam shouted, Where’s my big spoon? They knew I was home, but where was I? How much longer could I stay down here without it being hard to explain? Not much longer. I was crouched between my suitcases and a mini trampoline on its side. I wasn’t dead, but I was too much a soul. I had weighted things too heavily in the direction of music and poetry, and my spirit, thusly animated, had come to think of itself as a full person. It did not understand how misshapen it was. Now they were looking in the backyard for me. Other people knew how to merge things; I was forever running back and forth between opposites, never in any one place.

“These people always think they really know you,” Harris said, ripping off a piece of Friday’s waffle and putting it in his mouth. “They can’t separate the actual person from the work.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to slap him, hard. The real me is in my work. Any fan of my work knows me better than you do. But whose fault was that? I hunched over my crossed arms.

“Now, what makes you think about him less?”

There were really only degrees of more, but I tried to think of what was the opposite of looking him up.

“Maybe your work?” Jordi suggested.

“What work?”

Our eyes met; she looked quietly terrified for me. Obviously a person like me, like us, could only find salvation in her work.

“Cleaning. Maybe when I clean I think about him a tiny bit less.”

“Perfect,” said Jordi, “and think how nice your house will look!"

“Are you crying?”

I hadn’t even realized.

“Their plight is very moving to me,” I said, quickly pulling myself together. “A business . . . struggling to keep up with the technology . . . online booking.”

Harris, no idiot, didn’t say anything to that. I let out a sigh and shut my eyes.

“I’m just wiped out from my drive. Exhausted.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to come back,” he said slowly. “Really hard.”

Did he know? On some level? Maybe he did. Maybe he was about to confess something and then I would confess and this would be the start of us finally breaking through. Unfortunate timing, since I wasn’t in the mood to break through right now. But I might feel differently in the moment, the way people who suddenly accept Jesus Christ into their heart were like, Jesus who? just seconds before being born again. I sat up, bracing myself. He was finding the words.

“When I get home from Olympic”—Olympic was a recording studio in London—“it always takes me a couple days to readjust.”

“Yeah,” I said, waiting for the confession.

“To get back into the swing of things.”

“Right.”

“But then I do.”

Oh. No confession. He was saying there were limits to how long one could mope around and apparently he did it the right amount.