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“The apartments are all rent-stabilized. I’m subletting sort of illegally.”
A realtor at a party informed me that under New York City law, we could transfer the lease if I established cohabitation with my great-aunt for twelve months; a utility bill under my name would suffice.
It was hot as always when I stepped inside my door. Air-conditioning would have necessitated rewiring the unit and drastically raising the utilities-included rent, so I lived without it.
A first sleepover, whether it was sexual or platonic, had a way of making you both more and less comfortable around the other person; you’d jumped a fence of intimacy, but now you saw each other in the blunt morning light.
“Everyone thinks they’re a fraud,” he said. “Except for the actual frauds.”
the only lonelier fate than rejection was never exposing yourself to its possibility.
“You want to come? I don’t believe in God or anything,” he said. “It’s just a nice place to sit with your thoughts.”
Maybe this was how normal people were all the time: unguarded, receptive to joy, life as a series of gardens to wander through, not thorns to sidestep.
I pressed the Delete key and saved the file.
Perhaps because of my fixation on plotting, I’d long been uncomfortably aware of how little it would take to derail one’s course in life
No great loss; maybe even a gain. Sometimes the only way to start over in life is to burn down the house.
He had become what he’d aspired to in his relatively modest field of dreams: a midlist writer with a tenured teaching job and a family.
