AUD HAS TO WORK so Benji goes alone, in a huff, to drink mimosas and eat smoked salmon at his old flatmates’ house in Watertown, where he lived through the end of his studies into this first year as visiting assistant professor without a whiff of tenure, where he lived until she came to him across the growing Atlantic. On his return from brunch to Calvin Street, she’s sitting at the drop-leaf kitchen table, earbuds in, staring out of a cobwebbed window.

Something lugubrious and ardent. He’s feeling awfully hard done by and sorry for himself

It’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it, he replies.

I know and respect that it’s your body.

She sighs. This has been going on since she flew in three months ago and they moved into the new place. He begged her to come. I can’t live without you, he said. On her arrival, he met her at Logan International with flowers, his hair shoulder-length in a ponytail, yet another fad at 35. She said nothing about the hair, which he kept taking down and tying up in a rubber band till she lent him a snag-free bobble.

He’s a pond into which things drop, vanish. He hates when she calls him the absentminded professor, sensing a prick in it. Do all Ivy League academics possess reverent, pragmatic spouses who manage the boring earthly acts of clothing and cleaning and child-rearing and pleasing that they might occupy themselves in probing knowledge? Bright souls can’t wash a dish! His oblivion is self-serving, chosen, though bred into him as well. As a teenager, he was thought too rare and gifted to waste time on a Saturday job. What is it to only ever have been a pupil and a teacher, never to have served or had a boss? How on earth did she miss how delicate he was? He hid it well. He seeks, she thinks without awareness, to make an angel of her, an angel like his mother. I’m not your fucking angel, she wants to say. Don’t you see that it has taken more to get me here than it took for you to get where you are? She cannot fit the emotion into words, doesn’t yet know how. She loves him. He’s the closest she has found. Is this the cost? Ah, she thinks too much. She must strive for softness. Other women, her friends, seem happier, more forgiving — perhaps one because the other. He behaves like this when she’s pigheaded. He’s tender otherwise.

At home, he ascends to the spare room. There he will spend the night alone. In the morning, he’ll let her curl her body around him.

So dumb. Let’s pretend it never happened. Deal?

Today will be back to normal.

When he moves within her, they’re nearly whole and innocent again. Yet at times, she glimpses a frantic tinge of yearning in his face that wasn’t there before — or else she didn’t apprehend it. Then he has the panicked eyes of a man who’s clutching at something that’s slipping from him, the loss inevitable. This struggle’s his, she thinks. The abyss is beneath or in him.

No time to change or to titivate much. She feels plain, narrow, slips up to put on lipstick.