[...] That evening, when Marie’s wife asked her how her day had been, Marie had simply not mentioned her lunch with Helena. She didn’t tell her about how Helena had launched immediately into the most intimate conversation Marie had ever had with anyone she didn’t actually, technically, know—Helena had been thinking about the nature of desire and power and men and women and how the reasons she had gotten married just ten years ago now already seemed so retro and regrettable, almost unmentionable, but she did believe in sticking it out, in sticking around even when it seemed doomed, when it seemed like she may never again feel real sexual pleasure with another human body, but then again, What had even been the purpose of sexual pleasure in the first place? she asked, undercutting the urgency with which she had just uttered the phrase “real sexual pleasure with another human body,” and Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles, but still, lately she spent a lot of time thinking about how being in a couple seemed entirely at odds with being in a family and how it might be better if all the women just took all the children away from the men and raised them collectively, without the men, men who seemed only to get in the way, men who seemed so often to be no different than children, just larger. Oh, but I don’t really mean it, I do love my husband, what am I even saying, he’s a good father, a great father, she took a sip of wine, I mean what am I even saying? And Marie had tried to reassure her that this all seemed to be normal in a long marriage, the irritation at the edges of it, though Marie did not, at least not consciously, feel any of that irritation in her own long marriage. It does seem like a lot to manage, she said to Helena, an observation that seemed to calm Helena, a little, but Marie also noticed the tragic little tick in Helena’s voice when she asked and rapidly answered two questions she’d pushed together into a single line: But you’re married right to a woman right? Marie paused as if she needed to remember whether she was married (right?) to a woman (right?), then she said, as if reading the phrase, Yes, I am. The lunch went on, both of them increasingly tense, overly aware of their own breath and each other’s every gesture, and at times Marie thought she was doing something wrong just by being there (though she couldn’t identify what, exactly, was wrong with it), and at other times she thought she was being presumptuous to assume anything indecent about this lunch of salade niçoise and chenin blanc with Helena, whose intentions, personal history, desires, middle name, fantasies, and current mental health status were all still to be, soon, discovered.

She had not really liked either boy, but instead felt confused about her position, in each of their lives, as a desired object. She stayed up late at night trying to pray, trying to address, in the divine gaze of God, her fear that human-on-human love was really the root of all suffering, all malaise, all bad music, all good music, all addiction, all psychological problems, all joy, all art, all laughter, all sorrow, all ecstasy, most pregnancies and therefore most human beings from the best to the worst, and therefore all global warming, all disaster, all war, all science, all art, all waste, all of us and all of it, and wasn’t it true that the only way out, the only way to soberly and respectably pass your life, wasn’t the only honest option to devote yourself entirely to God and nothing else, to never align yourself with something so base as another person, to avoid the distraction of heartbreak and longing and mixed feelings, to avoid romantic entanglements altogether? Or was refusing God’s (perfect, but twisted, but perfect) creation a kind of sacrilege on its own?

When I asked if he was upset, The Reason said he’d mourned the end of our relationship slowly, in private, for months and months. He’d gone through his own piecemeal mourning right in front of me, without a word, smuggled out like a house removed brick by brick. If I had really been paying attention to him, he explained, if I had really loved him, then I would have known what he was feeling. I would have known how dire the situation was. How had I not read his mind?

Apparently Seneca believed widows should be permitted to mourn their husbands for ten months maximum, a precept meant to counteract the stubbornness of female grief, but what had any ancient man ever really known about any female anything? How could any of them have been so sure that it wasn’t all an act, that she wasn’t a bit pleased, that it wasn’t just relief that led a widow to dwell in her black? What says leave me alone better than a veil?

Still, sure, I could see how there might be value in putting time limits—though not prohibitions—on mourning:

For to be afflicted with endless sorrow at the loss of someone very dear is foolish self-indulgence, and to feel none is inhuman callousness. The best compromise between love and good sense is both to feel longing and to conquer it.

Edie tries to remember for a minute, then all at once she does—I asked him why suffering existed, and he told me he had chosen to suffer.

But that didn’t answer your question, Marie interrupts, but Edie keeps on.

And I asked him why he had chosen to suffer, and he said that all life required it, and he had chosen to be alive, therefore he had chosen this pain. And I asked him if everyone chose to be alive, and he said no, that some people and some animals are here against their wishes, but that eventually they either come around or get out.

Edie had often joked when they were together that she was getting a PhD in Him—that he’d told her what to think, what to read, what and whom to give her attention, the qualities that made art worthwhile, the qualities that made life worthwhile. And she had, she knew, benefited from his education. She had been improved. Yet he’d also built up in her an indestructible confidence similar to his own, had taught her to respect herself and her ideas so much so that she, years later and slowly, began to see, through a lens he’d given her, his total disrespect of her, despite his love, the way he saw her as a project of his, a savage mind he was civilizing.

Weeks after latkes with the witch, an acquaintance, Molly, emailed to ask me what I thought of optimism. She had also reached the end of a long relationship, and was moving states away in our new country of uncertainty. I typed a reply in total confusion, unsure of what I thought until I read what I’d written. Maybe pessimism is the assumption that you know something you don’t know in order to avoid disappointment, but if an optimist remains an optimist when the worst happens, then what is the cost of optimism?

I really don’t know, I admitted to Molly in the end, but it seems optimism is free and pessimism costs you something.

Giancarlo’s death had felt, for so many, totally unbelievable. I’d learned about it from Martina, my Italian editor and beloved friend in Rome, who emailed the word in all caps (DIED) as if to force herself to see it (I can’t stop crying); and because so many writers loved Gian, the internet filled up with sentimental remembrances from otherwise aloof people, and I made it my job to read every word that everyone had to say about him, as if that was going to be some kind of tunnel back to his apartment in Rome, a meal he and his husband served me after a long journey, fragrant with olive oil, and Gian talking, nodding, smoking, and ready, always ready, for some long and unforeseen night to arrive. That day he was still a little dazed from a night out dancing with Martina and others, so he was going to take it easy, stay in, calm down, but again he saw the dawn.

Pessimism might be an insurance policy against disappointment, and optimism a total buying into a different fantasy, but maybe a love of fate could be both and neither, I thought; then the agent at the airport confessed that the problem with my ticket was that it had been recategorized as first class for no understandable reason, and she couldn’t find a way to change it back to the economy ticket I had purchased, hard as she tried.

The flight was long and international, and I felt quite chewed up by the last two months, and perhaps I never needed more than I needed then the ability to fully recline for a few hours. Certainly many people would have liked to have met that first-class fate, and now the idea of getting an amor fati tattoo seemed quite silly, me of all people. What did I know about the difficulty of fate? Nothing.

It was all so odd. In a coffee shop in the terminal a child knocked her plastic cup of yogurt off the table, and looking at it splattered across the floor she was quiet for a moment, then laughed.

I tried to watch the flight attendant explain what to do in case of an emergency, but I had seen it too many times to see her. The oxygen masks, the exit rows, the seat cushion that can float. We know this. We all know this by now.

The pandemic was still drizzling on, so there were not many on that flight, just the people who really needed (or wanted or were being forced) to go somewhere, to leave somewhere, to flee. None of us were listening.

We know more about how to attempt to survive an aerial disaster than we know about meeting the end of love, the former being highly unlikely while the latter is close to certain.

Over lunch on a quiet street a married friend told me that her husband had asked her for a postnuptial agreement. It seemed humane, perhaps, but too late, as they were already getting separated, trying to read the informational brochure in the seat-back pocket as the plane was hurdling down in flames.

But she was not alone in being willing to prepare for imaginary disasters while refusing to imagine the commonplace ones.