Not taking into account the many waitressing jobs she had in Los Angeles while she was staying at her aunt and uncle’s when her parents were fighting too much, she worked as an intern at a casting agency (still in Los Angeles), then spent a year at a kibbutz in Israel, came back to study political science at Columbia, went back to the kibbutz, came back to Columbia for j-school. After graduating she started traveling around using her father’s money, stringing and writing wire stories she’d try to sell to the agencies. She started taking pictures while working for the wires and has now stopped writing. She has been through war, and so whenever he is with her, what Berengo thinks to himself is: “The fact that Vera is going out with me means that what she does is worthless. You can’t stare death in the eyes and then fuck me. I am the Untruth. I am Unimportance. And I’m not even your husband, in which case at least I’d understand that you needed stability to compensate for your adventurous lifestyle.” Maybe, I said to him, what she sees in you is a sense of death that’s similar to what she feels when she’s actually in the war zone. “That’s a very flattering reading,” Berengo said. “But my actual issue is: I think these photographers are posers. Their entire life is a pose. They have these conversations where they call each other bro. They look after each other. They host these beautiful dinners. There’s the one who’s great in the kitchen and the one who’s really, really terrible, and that’s just more reason to love him. You eat by candlelight. The people there always look like they just got back from a Vanity Fair party that they didn’t really care about going to or from a charity block party in Harlem. Or from Lebanon. They have the same attitude whether they’re coming back from Lebanon or the Vanity Fair party: it’s hell out there. Their conversations are uninteresting because they all say the right things. They’re intense. They pick up nice tans while they’re out taking pictures of torn-up bodies and piles of rubble. They dress well. Their coats, their shirts. They get along. Their walnut bread is delicious and homemade. And then when you’re busy hating on them, a friend suddenly calls, and you overhear the following exchange: ‘Hey, buddy, you dickless cunt,’ Vera says. She’s calling someone a faggot, then hands the phone over to another photographer who says: ‘Hey shithead, two months in the hospital doing nothing, you should be ashamed of yourself!’ All those around the table look at each other, sort of uncomfortably. Vera’s eyes well up, and she has this angry look on her face. Someone gets up to take the cheese board into the kitchen, all of this in candlelight, by the way, and someone says into the phone: ‘No, no, I’ll come over myself and stick it up your butt!’ When they hang up I find out it was a friend of theirs who lost a leg. I’m not sure where, some war zone. He’s gone through surgery over thirty times, and they even removed a flap of skin from his asshole to patch up another hole in his stomach or leg—again, I’m not sure, I didn’t totally follow. Talking to each other like that is their code, the way they show their brotherhood: they grieve, and they’re brave. And then Vera fucks me, which means her bravery is a pose. She should despise me. I mean, these people make you think that God has to be a hipster, because he allows people like that to see the truth. The affectionate gatherings, the perfect dinners, the perfectly formed sentences about how hard it is, actually, to be there on the front line, but oh the memories. The only possible escape from this is to think that if you fuck me, then maybe you’re a fraud. I mean, I’m sorry to go on about this. It’s just that they’re real people.”