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some lasted longer than a weekend, but rarely did they go as long as three or four.) Our Sunday nights were spent decoding our weekends, flopped on the sofa in our gowns, smoking cigarettes and eating the sandwiches no one ever requested. So we’d sit, sometimes with a glass of wine, going over what had been said, what it meant, new revelations, sensual progress. My stories were of going down one road, and hers were of detours. Mine, constancy; hers, change.
    Don’t you get bored? she’d say, and I’d tell her not at all. In fact, the more time I spent with Martin, the more it seemed as if nothing could be more complicated than being with just one person.
    Don’t you get tired, I asked her, talking about favourite bands and favourite movies? You don’t get much past that, I imagine.
    She laughed slyly. I get far past that. It’s when they shut up that the fun begins. I’m just playing the field, baby. I’m taste-testing.
    But once in a while, that hurt she’d showed the night she cried in her room crept in.
    Maybe there’s something missing from me that you’ve got, she said one night. Your guy sticks around for it.
    You push yours away, I said. You let them all know you’re not serious.
    Her eyes went dark. I don’t tell them. They just know, Jolene. They sense that
thing
that I don’t have.
    What is it, then?
    If I knew …, she said, and I started trying to move the conversation off the thin ice. I didn’t know how to help her. How can you help someone name an absence? The truth was, though, I felt it as well and didn’t know what it was, or what to call it. It just made me cautious. So I took care not to harm my friend with my own happiness. This was why I made certain that Martin and I spent our weekends away from the dorm. While at Bard, he and Molly never met, although his gifts to me — found things, little boxes, tokens — filled our house.
    I thought what I had with Martin inoculated me against disaster, or at least the kind of unfathomable loneliness Molly seemed to suffer from. Martin had already addressed our age difference, dismissing it, as I had, as an inescapable detail. I’m not giving up a chance at happiness because it looks strange to some people, he’d said, sensibly. (He was not always sensible. It was not the topnote of his personality. If I had to say what was, I’d say it was a quality of attentiveness. Attentiveness and its corollaries of daydreaming, a hatred of disorder, wariness.) Sometimes in the silences between talking, a solemnness would enter between us, and I’d be tempted to ask what was wrong, but I wouldn’t. It was part of this vigilance I understood, obscurely, to be how he liked to be in the world. Plus, I didn’t want my peace disturbed, and I knew averting my attention from such formless auguries was how to maintain it. I was learning about who he was, bit by bit, taking it in and settling it among the other details until a picture of a man who had overcome sad beginnings emerged. His first ten years had been years of incremental losses; he’d been sick, his mother had moved away, then they’d been forced to leave home and go overseas to keep the family together. Many of the middle years I knew nothing about, thirty or so years in which he might have been married, divorced, been crushed by love, escaped death, considered other lives. That would come later, I thought, I would fill in those spots later.
    My own beginnings, meanwhile, surrounded me still, and this disparity between us (I had no missing years) sometimes crept up on me and made me feel that I was falling in love with a pair of book-ends. But I loved him. I loved him, and I knew the edge of happiness in his life was unfamiliar to him, and I wanted to protect it. He would lie in my bed on the last nights of his visits (he came twice a month for long weekends by the beginning of my senior year) and tell me he wished we already had years of shared life behind us. He longed for a common past. So