Back in the city the season was more appropriate to what I expected and hated: airless, choking heat, sunlight that seemed to burn without warmth. Steam lifted off the sidewalk. The hours were slow and gone before I could count them. The feeling of August was as uncomfortable as the weather. Enough time had passed to know what this summer would be, but there was enough time to convince myself I might still be wrong. It was only four months before my husband would pack the suitcase and move out. In those nights, humid memories of the day kept me awake behind my closed eyes. I read the letters that writers I loved wrote to the people they loved, and circled the ones that felt important even if I couldn’t say why. One I kept with me for a long time, waiting to understand how I knew what it meant—on August 12, 1971, Elizabeth Hardwick had written to Robert Lowell:

I have had a really fine summer, strange in many ways, in others exactly the same. In the afternoons the light drops suddenly, the day waits, and you feel a melancholy repetition, as though you were living moments before, maybe long ago by someone else.

In September she wrote to say that she had started divorce proceedings.