The Leftovers

by Tom Perrotta

found what she was looking for in the G.R., a regimen of hardship and humiliation that at least offered you the dignity of feeling like your existence bore some sort of relationship to reality, that you were no longer engaged in a game of make-believe that would consume the rest of your life.

It was like traveling back in time, meeting the person you used to be, and recognizing her as a friend.

Now that she knew the truth, she could see that she’d lost a little less than she thought she had, which was almost like getting something back. She wasn’t a tragic widow, after all, just another woman betrayed by a selfish man. It was a smaller, more familiar role, and a lot easier to play.

Nora closed her eyes. Doug had been foggy in her mind for a long time, but all at once he was clear again. She could see him lying beside Kylie, naked and smug after fucking her, earnestly reminding her of his family commitments, his enduring love for his wife, letting her know that she could only have so much, and nothing more. “He didn’t care about me,” Nora explained. “He just couldn’t stand to see you happy.”

She’s out of my league, he told himself, without really knowing what he meant by that, what league either one of them belonged to.

There was nothing to it, Nora thought. You just kept babbling, piling one inane remark on top of another. The trick was to sound like you were interested, even if you weren’t. You had to be careful about that.

It wasn’t so much an ethical objection as a conceptual shift, as though food and animals had ceased to be overlapping categories.

What a beautiful bird, they kept telling one another, which was a weird thing to say about a dead thing without a head.

But that wasn’t the point anymore. Kevin had said he would call her, and he seemed like a guy who could be trusted to keep his word. If he wasn’t that kind of guy, then the hell with him—he wouldn’t be any good to her anyway. On some level, she understood that he’d danced with her out of pity. She was totally willing to admit that that was how it had started—a philanthropist and a charity case—but it had ended somewhere else entirely, her head on his shoulder, his arms wrapped tight around her, some kind of current running between their bodies, making her feel like a dead woman who’d been shocked back to life. And it wasn’t just her: She’d seen the look on his face when the lights came on, the tenderness and curiosity in his eyes, the way he kept holding her and shuffling his feet well after the music had stopped.

No, the only thing holding her back was the thought of what would happen if she actually owned the chair, if she could feel this good anytime she wanted. What would happen if there were no other customers milling around, no salesman hovering nearby, no Karen to meet in five or ten minutes? What if it were just Nora in an empty house, the whole night ahead of her, and no reason to hit the off switch?

The moment you started pleading your case, you’d already lost it.