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about the Paramount. They never let you finish a drink.
    “I just have to accept the fact that it isn’t going to happen,” she says, after the bartender has left. “I love him and I’ll miss him but I can’t keep doing this. I don’t know why he bought that stupid ring but he clearly never had any intention of giving it to me.” A tear slides down her cheek. Not being wanted always hurts.
    The ring is a two-carat diamond that Maya found five months ago in one of Roger’s kitchen drawers. For two weeks she was giddy and impatient and excited. For two weeks she lived life with an excess of energy. For two whole week she expected every single moment to pop. But nothing happened. Five months later, it’s clear to her that nothing is ever going to happen. The engagement ring is Roger’s pistol on the wall and Maya is tired of waiting for the third act.
    I didn’t like Roger Childe from the very beginning. Heintroduced himself to me as an entrepreneur, and the contempt I felt was swift and complete. “Entrepreneur” is a term magazine writers ascribe to you; you don’t ascribe it to yourself, especially not when you’re the president of a Jersey City dot-com that your father bankrolled.
    He had other pretensions—name-dropping A-list players, wearing monogrammed sweaters, using the word cinema in mixed company—but Maya didn’t mind. All she noticed were his handsome face and his lovely compliments and his coordinated J. Crew separates.
    But it wasn’t just his mail-order-catalog perfection that put me off, although having both the Barn Jacket and the Fisherman Cable Knit didn’t help. He had a prep-school patina, which lent him an air of entitlement that seemed entirely out of place in the early twenty-first century. He knew all the right people and went to all the right places and could buy all the right things and his life would no doubt follow all the right formulas.
    Maya was dazzled by his confidence. Before she lost her agent, she’d seen Roger and herself as a top-one-hundred power couple in the making. She’d change the way a generation thought with her books, he’d change the way a generation behaved with his software, and New York magazine would spotlight them in a glossy cover shoot that made her look beautiful and edgy.
    “A month ago it was no big deal that he hadn’t asked me to marry him,” she says, “but I’m thirty now and can’t live my life like a carefree twenty-something. I’ve drawn up terms of reference.”
    “Terms of reference?” Three gin and tonics have slightly muddled my brain, but I’m reasonably sure I’ve never heard the term “terms of reference” before.
    She reaches into her leather backpack and withdraws a sheet of white paper. It’s crumpled and creased and she runs her hands over it several times, trying to flatten it. The corners still curl up.
    “Today,” she announces in almost sententious tones, “is the first day of the rest of my life. Here is a year-by-year breakdown of what I hope to accomplish in my fourth decade of existence.”
    But the breakdown really isn’t year by year. It’s more month by month and in some severe cases day by day. The first term of reference— “have talk with Roger to see where this is all going”—has minutes attached.
    “He was very evasive,” she says, when I ask how the talk went. “I just wanted to know if he thought there was a point to all this. I mean, I didn’t need the ring right there and then, only a word or two of encouragement. But he kept hemming and hawing and saying things like ‘We’ll see,’ as though I’m a car he’s not sure he wants to buy.”
    He is weighing the pros and cons of marrying Maya. He is looking at all the available information and trying to decide if she’ll be a credit to him. Will his name gain luster in association with hers? He doesn’t know yet. Maya’s an incomplete stock report.
    This is the level of calculation Roger works on, the sort you read about in