chapter one
My boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, Rosemary, has the same thickness to her eyebrows as I do. The same wavy auburn hair and pear-shaped hips.
I’m standing across the street from her office in a chunky maroon sweater and sunglasses, watching her leave. I want to know if she’s the type who heads out at five for a gym class or a happy hour, or the type to send emails until eight, adrift in a sea of empty desks.
Watching her exit the building at 6:35 p.m., I’ve now discovered she’s neither.
I note the New Yorker tote bag she carries, which to me suggests unoriginality, conformity. She crosses the four-lane street with only two seconds left on the crosswalk’s countdown. Cars honk, she pops a breath mint.
I know it’s a mint because I stand close to her on the Fulton subway platform and breathe it in. I resist the urge to touch her. To see if she dissolves.
Up close, Rosemary looks different from her Instagram photos. She must use a variety of filters, excessive shadow and saturation. She has a flatter stomach than I do, but much smaller breasts. Smooth and glowing skin, but a square and masculine jaw. In the pictures I’ve seen, she presses her lips together rather than flashing all her teeth, as I do.
But now, finally, I have a rare glimpse of her teeth. The canines are jagged, protruding like fangs. This might mean I’m prettier than Rosemary, but who knows? Maybe her vampiric teeth appealed to Caleb.
On the train, when she shoves tiny white AirPods into her ears, I mimic her with my bulky noise-canceling headphones. Even though seats are available, Rosemary leans against the door and closes her eyes and taps her feet. I prefer to stand, too, but only ever with my eyes open. Hidden behind dark oversized sunglasses—similar to the kind celebrities wear when evading paparazzi—I’m able to hold prolonged and one-sided eye contact with strangers. Successful surveillance relies on anonymity.
A platoon of bodies in two-piece business suits shoves into the train at Wall Street, and those huddled near the door squeeze closer together. Despite October’s cold snap, the subway cars aren’t heated yet. I manage, in the scuffle, to stand next to Rosemary. When the sleeve of my sweater grazes her denim-jacketed elbow, I wonder if we’ll look at each other. But her gaze never rises. Being two inches taller proves advantageous—I’m able to peer at her screen as she scrolls through artists, albums, finally settling on Hiatus Kaiyote’s “Breathing Underwater.” With a twinge of discomfort, I realize Caleb—my boyfriend, her ex—has blasted this song every time we’ve cooked together the past few weeks, chopping onions to the smash of a cymbal.
Next, I observe Rosemary tweet about a novel she edited, which was apparently reviewed in the New York Times. She deletes and rephrases so many times that I’m tempted to rip the phone from her hands. I know you’re aiming for pride and humility, I’ll say. Let me.
I study her face until she exits at Atlantic Avenue near Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. I follow her. She walks down the street, takes a left, a right, then punches in a code to enter a modern, industrial-chic building with floor-to-ceiling glass windows. It’s an eyesore among the quaint brownstones.
I can’t follow anymore. I go, instead, to a biergarten a few blocks away. Order a pretzel the size of my face, drink seasonal beer that tastes of banana bread. Then I call Caleb and ask if he wants to meet me here.
“Where?” he asks.
I cover the mouthpiece and ask the bartender to tell me where I am. He whispers the name of the bar and winks conspiratorially. I repeat it for Caleb.
There’s a decided pause. “Why are you in Fort Greene?”
“I’m writing a scene that takes place here. Research.”
His voice softens. “Be there soon.”
Once our call ends, I scribble down some details—the crosswalk, the tweet, the tote bag, her denim-jacketed elbow brushing against the sleeve of my sweater. The beginnings of a book—my book. I’ve found, I think, a story worth telling. Until now I’ve written only short fiction, twenty pages or less; I haven’t been intrigued enough about anything to sustain an edifice of words. But life has finally begun to interest me. To prove the believers right and the nonbelievers wrong—I fall into both categories, depending on the day—I will write a novel.
When Caleb arrives thirty minutes later, he gazes around the bar uneasily, as if expecting a ghost. I call him over.
“How’s that scene?” He settles onto the stool beside me. “Trying to describe a slant of light hitting a fancy brownstone?”
I force a laugh, unsure if I’m being mocked. “Exactly.”
“Work was mental, I’ve been eyeing the bar across the street practically since the day started. This was a more ambitious trek than I was anticipating, though.”
Caleb lives in Washington Heights, while I reside two hundred blocks south in Greenwich Village, conveniently nearer to his office in the Financial District. Would he want to see me as often if I lived elsewhere?
“You must really like me,” I say.
“Obviously.” Caleb brushes a strand of hair off my forehead. It’s movie stuff but feels nice. “I’ve actually been here before.”
I choose to look surprised. “Have you?”
“Well—my ex lives in this neighborhood.” His hand is still on my forehead, still playing with my hair. “We came here a few times.”
“Oh, shit. I didn’t realize—you think she might randomly walk in?”
“God, I hope not.” His hand moves from my head to wrap around the beer glass the bartender has brought. “There are a zillion other bars around here.”
“It won’t happen,” I say, more confidently than I feel, and touch his arm. Anchoring him here, with me.
Two days later, on my day off, I return to the corner where Rosemary works and locate a bench where I can read. I’m carrying a book she edited called One of the Herd, an essay collection by a woman who grew up on a Wyoming cattle farm. I took it from a box of forthcoming releases in the storage room at the bookstore where I work. The publication date is still a few weeks away, but I’ve promised myself I’ll skim quickly and carefully, without damaging the pages or the spine, and then slide it back into the box before it goes on sale. I want to claim this physical manifestation of her, if only for a short while.
Between surveillance of the building’s revolving doors, I manage to digest thirty-two pages before Rosemary emerges, rummaging in her New Yorker tote for her Ray-Bans.
She turns west at the corner. I slip the book into my own tote—its illustration a bespectacled woman carrying a teetering stack of Jane Austen novels—just in time to watch the back of Rosemary’s royal-blue cotton dress disappear inside a café. I’m thirsty, too, I realize, and in need of caffeine. So I follow her inside.
Rosemary ponders the chalkboard menu. Does she read every item but then order the usual? I peg her as a nonfat latte kind of woman.
“I’ll have an iced dirty chai, please,” she tells the barista.
“That’s what I always get,” I murmur, more audibly than intended.
Rosemary turns.
I’m mortified but also electric. Words bubble up. “I rarely see anyone order it,” I blurt out, as if to explain. “But I know people like it, that’s how I found out it existed.” I can’t seem to stop. “Espresso in chai.”
Furious at the brutal mundanity of what is now officially our first encounter, I blush a deep crimson. Then Rosemary says, “Yeah, it’s pretty good.” Her gaze sweeps over me. “Cute tote, by the way.”
Her voice is raspy, lower than I expected. Alluring.
I glance down. “Thank you so much.”
I want to hear her again, but she ducks her head to check her phone, signaling the end of our conversation. The espresso machine gurgles. The barista hands her the chai—Rosemary’s fingernails are violet—and then her mouth encircles the straw. I order the same, still vibrating with nervous energy, and step into the bright October sunlight.
Rosemary is gone.
I was prepared to wait all day for her emergence. Now I don’t know what to do with all this extra time. I walk a few avenues over and sit alongside the Hudson, zipping my floral-print bomber jacket up to my chin. The seasons are changing, ushering in peak foliage. Golden leaves litter the sidewalk. The wind is biting when it blows. I no longer apply deodorant to the insides of my thighs to prevent them from chafing.
In my iPhone Notes app, I document a few details—the blue cotton dress, the raspy voice, our dirty chai, her violet fingernails. Later, I’ll sculpt a scene.
It’s only a few minutes before eleven; apparently, Rosemary takes early coffee breaks. Maybe she brewed her first cup around dawn and drank it slowly in her kitchen, savoring the steam. Maybe her routine involves grabbing another coffee before boarding the subway and then attempting to drink it jostled against the other commuters. And finally, when pre-lunch fatigue sets in, she ventures out for her third cup. I drink coffee all day, too, hoping it will successfully jolt me into action. Perhaps we also have dehydration in common.
Or it’s possible Rosemary enjoyed a late night with friends yesterday, maybe even a date. She might have been naked in another man’s bed this morning. But I can’t imagine why a woman in love with someone else would send her ex-boyfriend—Caleb—an email asking if he was well, asking to see him again. What could require they meet face-to-face, other than a desire to repair and rekindle?
That’s partly why I’m here. To find out. A narrative is beginning to form, one in which I am braver, bolder, more reckless. Observations are useless without accompanying actions. Maybe I should have spilled coffee on her tote, cried uncontrollably about a pretend breakup to elicit her concern, stolen a bag of coffee grounds and made a run for it. Motivated by a commitment to my craft, I’m free now to make strange decisions emancipated from social convention. Welcome to my intellectual experiment, welcome to my ambition. Who would dare fault me for my ambition?
—
I met Caleb nearly six months ago, back in May, on Tinder. I was twenty-four and had never been someone’s girlfriend. Now it was time. I wanted to become worthy of love and well-equipped to describe it.
In my Tinder profile, I revealed I was a writer and native New Yorker with a literary tattoo and an orange tabby cat named Romeo. (Some men took it upon themselves to make the same bad joke about whether I could make room for another “Romeo” in my life; those men were swiftly eliminated.) In photos, I showed off my toothy smile with a Rocky Mountain backdrop (outdoorsy-ish) or holding a beer (low-maintenance; “chill”) or peeking through the shelves of a bookstore wearing my tortoiseshell reading glasses (nerdy-chic).
Caleb’s Tinder profile mentioned only that he was a mathematician working in catastrophe modeling who had moved from the UK. He provided just one photo—one!—of himself, standing in a beautiful wool coat and scarf on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with the Manhattan skyline twinkling behind him. I rarely swiped right on men who provided fewer than three photos, but something about Caleb’s open, easy, almost sheepish smile endeared him to me. It would be fun, I thought, to share my city with him, experience it anew.
Before Caleb, I made aggressive eye contact with handsome men at the bookstore, gazes that were long and hard but never led to anything real, and so I’d come home hungry, already swiping on my way through the door. I sometimes went on as many as three Tinder dates a week with wannabe singer-songwriters and actors and filmmakers and poets. First dates were enjoyable because I could be anyone, and so could they; we performed our parts well. There was laughter and long lingering touches and cans of cheap beer and self-congratulatory conversations about “making art.” Then we would fuck. In bed, I gave each man whoever and whatever they wanted. It would lead to a second date, and to a third. But then they’d stop texting me back. I suspected it was because we could no longer convincingly validate the roles we were each attempting to play. I told myself not to take it personally—if they didn’t truly know me, if I hadn’t let them in, then the person they were rejecting was definitively not-me.
Maybe now it was time to try someone sweet, straightforward, foreign. Good with numbers, definitively non-artist. Caleb was a solid candidate.
Our first date, we met at a bar in my neighborhood, with a jukebox and a fish tank and a collection of dusty board games. He was more attractive than his picture suggested, more attractive, even, than the men who’d ghosted me. His hair was long and dark, brushing his shoulders, and this abundance felt important somehow.
We settled at a table in the back. With other men I’d grown accustomed to the way we monologued at each other, crafting ourselves on the spot. Most of the men I chose were loud and opinionated and arrogant—but at the time I’d been too generous, calling it confident. Those men were good talkers but not particularly good listeners. I probably wasn’t, either.
But after mere minutes in Caleb’s company, I was surprised by how wonderfully rare it felt to be listened to, looked at, questioned; it was generous and thoughtful rather than pointed, destabilizing.
“So, Naomi, please put me out of my misery,” he deadpanned as I finished my first pint of beer around the thirty-minute mark. “What’s this ‘literary’ tattoo? Can I see it?”
I laughed and tugged down the back of my shirt, revealing tight cursive letters on my upper back: and the walls became the world all around.
“Maybe not as sophisticated as you were expecting,” I said. “But Where the Wild Things Are was one of my favorite books as a kid. My parents read it to me almost every night.”
“Oh, that’s lovely. A real homage to reading itself. Cheers,” he said, lifting his beer in a toast, “to our imaginations.”
Happy to have his approval, I beamed as we clinked pint glasses.
“I was actually pretty nervous about it,” I said, “so my best friend, Danielle, forced me to write a list of pros and cons. I think she was worried I’d tattoo my crush’s name on my ass or something.” (That was one of my clumsiest and most uncool self-deprecating anecdotes.) “But if she approved of the pros, she promised to drive me.”
Danielle had sat beside me as I clutched her hand and cursed and counted from zero to ten on a ceaseless loop until it was done. What I had really wanted that day was to experience a tolerable amount of pain. (The first time my body was altered, I was a teenager under anesthesia, and something inside me was taken; for my second alteration, I wanted to feel it—a scar I alone had chosen, decorative and expressive and notable, a scar that meant something other than lack.)
“Danielle sounds like a good friend,” Caleb said, tracing the letters of my tattoo so softly that I shivered, rendered momentarily speechless.
The pleasing lilt of his Welsh accent, and his smile—open and bright, like a loaf of bread just sliced—resulted in my deviating from all my other planned anecdotes and inquiries, and in the process, becoming more myself.
“I have a lot of anxiety,” I heard myself say, to my utter horror, two hours and three beers later.
Miraculously, Caleb’s face remained unchanged.
“I’m terrified of being a cliché because I talk about writing more often than I actually write,” I babbled, full speed ahead. “It wasn’t always like that—I used to write all the time. My brother, Noah, and I both found things we loved and were good at as kids, which is kind of rare, isn’t it, so I thought I would’ve accomplished more by now. Noah has already been in threeBroadway musicals, and he’s only nineteen! It’s kind of insane.”
I frequently talk about Noah because his life is objectively interesting, and by association people might assume mine is interesting, too. Everyone wants to be famous, or at least fame adjacent, and so I expected Caleb to ask a few follow-up questions about Noah’s career, but he didn’t. He only widened his eyes expectantly, creating more space for me to speak.
“It’s obviously way more common to be a child actor than a prodigy novelist,” I continued, “but I still feel an insane amount of pressure pretty much all the time.”
“You shouldn’t worry so much!” Caleb laughed, not unkindly. “We’re still young, aren’t we? There’s no rush. You’re lucky you found something you’re passionate about.”
I felt a strong urge to reach across the table and clutch his long warm fingers, but I didn’t. Why had I told him so much so quickly? On first dates I tended to skew toward upbeat, lighthearted, inoffensive.
Caleb’s eyes, soft and searching, and his sliced-bread smile, so open and bright, made me feel new, feel refreshed.
“Okay,” I said, sheepish. “I want to hear more about your life now. Sorry for dumping all that on you—”
“Please don’t apologize,” he said emphatically, and then raised a playful eyebrow. “What else would you like to know?”
Everything, I almost said aloud. “What kind of catastrophes do you prevent?” I asked instead.
“Oh, I don’t prevent them; that’s impossible. I model equations to estimate possible loss.”
“There’s a metaphor in there somewhere,” I said.
His laugh, when it came again, soothed me. My body loosened as I listened. He went on to describe how his University of St Andrews residential college resembled a castle, and how every Tuesday students attended formal dinners wearing black robes in the grand dining hall. All were required to stand as administrators and faculty processed through the center aisle. Students were not allowed to sit until each member of the procession was seated. I imagined him in his robe, standing very regal.
We wandered into three different bars during our first night together, a pub crawl of our own making. The air was warm—too warm, perhaps, for early May. Pollen floated by. He sneezed twice, so I blessed him twice. “I appreciate it,” he said, tilting his head back to prepare for a third, “but you don’t need to say it again.”
On each short walk between bars, I frequently glanced at him strolling beside me, surprised he was still there.
At our final destination, a dark, subterranean dive, all the barstools were occupied, so we leaned against a pool table no one was using. “So, Naomi,” Caleb said, “my next question might come as no surprise. Where can I read something you’ve written?”
I was hoping he would ask.
Later that night—after Caleb pressed me against the wall of a nearby building for a memorable first kiss, unexpectedly passionate and unrestrained for a man whose first impression oozed rare calm and composure—I emailed him the link to a story I’d published the previous year. Vaguely autobiographical, it focuses on a twenty-seven-year-old jazz drummer I met when I was sixteen. I fictionalized our relationship and its eventual end as if it were equally significant for both of us, giving myself closure. I was proud of the story, and proud of my byline at the popular online literary magazine that accepted it, and proud of having received fifty dollars, the price of eight dirty chai lattes, for having published it.
Days passed without hearing from him, which felt ominous. It was a short story, meant to be consumed in an hour or less! Maybe he’d read it and hated it, maybe he’d gleaned something undesirable about me from its subtext, maybe—
When Caleb’s email finally arrived in my inbox ten days later, it contained more than I’d hoped for. You perfectly captured the emotional rush that (certainly in my own experience) comes after a breakup, he wrote. There’s a sadness to it, but an optimistic and cleansing feel, too. The praise was gratifying, but I was most excited by the subtle revelations of the life he’d lived before me, all the stories worth excavating. Loving someone, I thought, required learning all their stories—a perpetual excavation.
Of course, it helped that his word choices—optimistic, cleansing—implied he had moved on, a clean break.
So, after our next date, I took Caleb home and molded him to me. Skinny but strong in the arms, he lowered me to the mattress and pulled off my shirt and unclasped my bra and helped me wriggle out of my jeans. “Why am I the only naked one?” I said in mock-indignation, gesturing at the heap of my clothes. He laughed and stripped and put his mouth between my legs. For the first time I dared myself to look at him, really look at him, without breaking eye contact as I always had with other men. It invited a rush of feeling I wasn’t prepared for, had never felt, and so I scrambled onto my hands and knees and stared at the wall, waiting.
My sudden movement appeared to both perplex and amuse him.
“What are you doing?”
“Fuck me from behind,” I said, hoping to convey a seductive authority.
When he snickered, I turned around to look at him, hurt and confused.
“Sorry,” he said. “Erm, it’s just, I dunno, like you’re doing some kind of routine? I want to look at you.”
I was shocked into silence. He tickled my ribs and tried to apologize, but I shook my head and said it might be true. None of the men who came before had ever cared enough to notice.
Naked and propped against my pillows, we talked. He told me he used to panic about forgetting his dreams and so, during college, he got in the morning habit of whispering what he still remembered into a recording device.
“What did you do with them, did you listen to old dreams, what did they mean for you?” I asked.
He said he liked the act of verbal recounting. “It woke me up,” he said.
I told him the stuffed animals in my childhood bedroom seemed to come alive in the darkness and creep closer to me.
“Spooky,” he said.
“I liked them,” I said.
In the morning we tried having sex again, and this time it was better, it was great. I stopped thinking.
Caleb asked me on another date, and then another and another—until one July morning, after waking up with a sore throat, fever, and chills, a doctor confirmed I had the flu. For six days I could barely get out of bed, which was physically inconvenient at best and romantically catastrophic at worst; because we hadn’t yet discussed exclusivity, I feared Caleb would meet someone new while I was bedridden. Someone he liked better. I feared being out of sight, out of mind.
If this was an elaborate ruse to get rid of me, sorry, but it hasn’t worked, Caleb texted on the sixth day. I’m good at making soup and tea and reading bedtime stories (I can bring Where the Wild Things Are). Anyway, let me know if my services are requested. 
I reread the text over and over and felt, for the very first time, that I might be capable of falling in love—despite how the icky verb itself, falling, suggested loss of precious control.
Finally, in late July, after almost three months of dating, we entered into an official relationship. My first ever. Just like that, I was someone’s girlfriend: Caleb’s.
My mother, after seeing a picture of him, said, Oh, he looks like a model. My father, after learning Caleb was a mathematician, said, Ah, a real smarty-pants. Caleb was an ideal, but also real, and now mine.
At this point, Rosemary didn’t exist. I spent the whole summer with no knowledge of her. ...
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