Illustration by Leonie Bos

The night before my brother’s second wedding, he held a rehearsal dinner that was, per contemporary tradition, a rehearsal only for the pained social interactions that were to follow the next day. I was one of the guests of honor at an overpriced restaurant in the New Jersey town where we’d grown up, and my gift for diplomacy rendered me essential to my brother’s hopes for a successful weekend. But who tells stories about successful weekends?

I had remained publicly neutral about my brother’s divorce less than a year prior. It had been clear from the start of his relationship with Elyse, never mind the relatively brief marriage portion of it, that it was not going to last until death did them part, unless, ha ha, one of them killed the other. But she had the kind of charisma that, when it shone on you, you couldn’t help but respond, even if, as proved the case for both my brother and me, it would have been far better if we hadn’t.

I knew Elyse first. She bobbed into my orbit at my friend Megan’s fortieth birthday party, at a bar. We were both among the youth contingent at a gathering where most of the attendees were nearing or recently past the magical age being commemorated. I was not yet thirty, and Elyse was, it turned out, not even not yet thirty—she was not yet twenty-eight. Megan had rented out the entire place. She was a lawyer and a sometime essayist, so there were a lot of lawyers and sometime essayists, but Megan was also a bit fancy, so there was a smattering of fashion and magazine and whatever people, too.

I was a whatever person. I had been a middle school English teacher for the first few years after college but realized that I strongly disliked children and teenagers—anyone more than five years younger than me, really. Since then I’d been writing grants, waitering, telling myself that I was really an artist, even though my art was a bit nebulous. I was a performance artist, I guess. I did disconcerting monologues at my friend’s monthly theater gathering in the back room of a bar, and I’d had a weeklong residency at an art space in SoHo where I’d read fortunes with a crystal ball, the content of which was cut and pasted from speeches by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was an acquired taste, though even I hadn’t quite acquired a taste for myself.

Elyse was sitting at the bar by herself when I went up to get another drink, my manyth of the party. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder black cocktail dress, bright-red lipstick, and a furry Russian-style hat. It was late March but freezing outside, so the hat made her seem eccentric but not necessarily insane. That was my sweet spot.

“So, how do you know Megan?” I said.

“Oh, she helped me out of a copyright scrape a couple years ago,” she said. “I decided I was going to be the squire who follows the knight who saved his life. It turns out that means going to parties!”

I knew Megan, I explained, because I’d told her fortune in an especially manic and insulting way, and she’d liked it so much she’d come back three times.

“We’ve been collected,” Elyse said. “It is wise to make oneself collectible.”

“What was the copyright thing?” I said.

“Oh, I got a cease and desist because I was selling shirts with images of the Marvel characters having sex with one another. It was totally fair use, the whole thing was just nothing, but I guess I made just enough money that it was somehow worth it to make a fuss.”

“You . . . make shirts?”

“Oh, no. Well, I mean, yes, in that case. But it was to promote a journal that lasted about a second. I was sort of an editor there. Content wrangler. Put that on my business card.”

We spent a good part of the night talking, pausing to chat with other guests who often approached us as if we were a couple or old acquaintances, which we accepted as our due and lightly elaborated on when we were so inclined. “Stepsiblings,” we said once. “Basically stepsiblings,” we said to someone else.

I might have mentioned Jeremy that first night as we briefly toured our histories. I’m a big fan of my brother, he comes up a lot. He’s always been more mainstream than me, but not, you know, lame. He works for a tech company—I won’t dignify it with a name, but you know it. It’s just for the money, he says. He wants to produce films, and I still think he will, but first there was the pandemic, and now the baby, and maybe he’ll just make money. It’s good to know somebody will have some when I inevitably end up broke at forty-five and require costly organ transplants. Maybe he’ll find me a standby spot in the singularity.

We did a couple more shots than we should have because it was an open bar, and at some point I lost track of Elyse and contented myself sharing an Uber home with a stoned, unspeaking editorial assistant who lived a few blocks from me. She did not want to come upstairs.

Elyse texted in the morning and gave me shit about the direction my night had taken in a low-key, gratifying manner. I felt bonded to her in that ineffable New York way, where you know it’s going to be chill to talk to someone the next time you’re both at a gathering, one more little scrap added to the social mosaic, pieced together painstakingly over years, that reads, “I belong here.” We saw each other at a launch party for an admonitory book about the online alt-right, at a swank cocktail hour hosted by an editor neither of us knew, at a preview of a mutual friend’s unsettling hologram art. By the third run-in, we had gossip, jokes, intimacies.

Elyse met Jeremy one weekend at my mother’s beach house. We’d seen each other with enough frequency at that point that it felt natural to invite her down. The thought was that we’d have some beach time, walk into town and eat some overpriced seafood, maybe go dancing at one of the trashy clubs on the island. I wanted to be my high school self, dramatic and sentimental and cared for. My intentions weren’t romantic, but they also weren’t entirely unromantic.

I didn’t know Jeremy was going to be there, but we pulled up to the house and there he was, scruffy in a Mets hat, apparently “hot,” though I can’t really see it. He and I look nothing alike. He is sandy-haired, light-skinned, built like the former hockey defenseman gone slightly to seed that he is. I have the swarthy, dark-eyed look of my mother’s people, Syrian mostly, and keep thin by worrying and starving myself. Elyse claims there’s a strong resemblance between us “around the eyes.” Not the actual eyes, mind you, just, you know, around them. Jeremy was there with his girlfriend at the time, Beatrice, though we all knew that wasn’t going to last. She was intellectual, shy; there were admirable qualities. But I knew he wasn’t going to stay with someone who wasn’t conventionally beautiful. He wasn’t—isn’t—that type of guy.

As for me, I bloomed so late that my whole family, myself included, assumed I was gay but not yet fully comfortable with it. Then I got to college and discovered androgynous medievalists, mostly but not always women, and it turned out that was my sexuality. I wanted, in bed, to be treated like delicate human property that sealed a diplomatic alliance; they wanted to be kings. I have continued, with brief exceptions, to cede land to whoever amasses a threatening coalition at my border.

I could tell Jeremy was worried by Elyse from the start because he retreated. He was polite, charming—he can’t help but be these things, my brother—and then within minutes of our arrival he went for a run. Elyse is like a panther; she was aware that some underbrush had been disturbed. It was left to poor, doomed Beatrice to pick up the social slack, as I, stone-faced, immediately opened a bottle of white wine, and Elyse, too friendly and intimate, quickly stripped down to the bikini she had on under her T-shirt and shorts. Beatrice was, like my brother, a few years older than us, but she had the air of a high school freshman suddenly thrown in with the seniors. She assumed Elyse’s attention was fundamentally satirical, which wasn’t quite accurate. It was experimental. She was doing things to see how Beatrice would react, which would then tell Elyse how to feel about her.

“Do you now or have you ever identified as a ‘beach bunny’?” Elyse said. Beatrice had declined a glass of wine when I’d offered, but now Elyse handed her one anyway. Beatrice accepted it and set it in front of her without sipping.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Beatrice said.

“Right. Actually, have you even seen a bunny on the beach? It’s really just the alliteration, I suppose. But are you going to bask in the sun? Are you going to play the part of the apocryphal sand creature today?”

“I can only do like an hour at a time. I quickly turn into a burned bunny, unfortunately.”

“Oh, yikes, we don’t want that!” Elyse said. “Right, Connor? Or do you want a burned bunny?”

“Elyse,” I said. “What are you even talking about.”

The two of us went down to the beach and read on our towels until Jeremy came and found us. He was still sweaty from his run, ready for the ocean. I had no interest in disrupting my torpor, but Elyse was, of course, game, and they sprinted into the surf together. I watched them dive and chat, too far away for me to hear what they were saying, but they were obviously enjoying themselves.

Elyse’s appeal wasn’t straight-up “cool girl,” or whatever we call that now, but that was certainly part of it when she wanted it to be. She charmed him, I learned later, by knowing some things about punk rock and having caustic but not overemotional analyses of the failings of the American left. She was, in some significant ways, basic, but that wasn’t how she presented most of the time, and this is very appealing to people like my brother, who through timidity or anxiety are always afraid that they’re missing out on intense, “real” experiences. As if just getting through a day wasn’t real enough.

When they emerged from the ocean, they were already, on some level, a conspiracy of two.

“You missed some good action out there,” Elyse said.

“Not too cold?” I said.

“Get used to it pretty quick,” Jeremy said, rubbing a faded Tropicana beach towel over his arms and shoulders.

For the rest of that day and night, I watched Jeremy and Elyse recognize something in each other. When, after dinner, Elyse decided she had to go to a “real Jersey Shore club” and Beatrice excused herself to go back to the house, my mother couldn’t stop herself from trying to intervene. “Oh, honey, are you sure you want to do that?” she said. “Why don’t you stay out and have fun?” We all pleaded briefly and half-heartedly for her to reconsider, then left her to her fate.

The clubbing was, of course, laughable. The “good place” had a crazy line and a fifteen-dollar cover, so we went to the “bad place,” which featured a band playing barely passable covers of Nineties alt-rock songs. We drank beers out of plastic cups and danced to “Just a Girl” and “Lovefool,” taking turns grabbing each other and spinning around in ways that began perfectly respectably but became less so as the evening went on. At some point Jeremy decided to set fire to the ol’ superego and put away several shots served in neon plastic shot glasses, encouraging us to do the same.

In the midst of this, Elyse went missing for about five minutes, and Jeremy declared that he was “going to look for her,” leaving me to sort of sway mournfully to Savage Garden and contemplate which sins of mine had led me to this particular hell. When they returned, together, I didn’t think they’d been necking, necessarily, but some other line of intimacy had been crossed, some deliberate touch or implied promise of a future one. Or maybe they’d just hit Elyse’s vape pen. I didn’t really care. The whole day had crossover-episode vibes, and seeing them giggling together made me briefly happy about the interconnectedness of all things: family and friends, New York and New Jersey, past and present. Then I was miserable again.

After a raucous, incoherent walk home, Jeremy staggered upstairs to the guest room where he and Beatrice were sleeping, and Elyse and I got ready to go to bed in the downstairs bedroom, which still featured the bunk beds my brother and I had slept in as kids. Elyse heaved herself into the top bunk so hard that the whole contraption nearly collapsed, and I refused, on personal-safety grounds, to sleep beneath her. We arrived at the “compromise” that we would share the bottom bunk.

I was all too aware that I was serving as a weak substitute for Jeremy, whomever she imagined him to be, a warm body to bully and curl up next to. But I, too, was lonely, and charmed by her temporary need, and not above being taken advantage of. We didn’t even kiss, but there was so much desire radiating off her as she curled and shifted around me that we might as well have just fucked then and altered the whole timeline. Alas.

On Sunday morning, I woke to an empty bed, and when I went upstairs, I found Beatrice and my mother on the deck drinking coffee. Elyse and Jeremy had gone for a run together, “before it got too hot.” When they returned, they immediately changed into bathing suits and went down to the ocean, making only the most cursory offer for us to join them.

“She seems really great,” Beatrice said to me.

When Elyse and I drove back to the city, I told her every bad thing I could think of about Jeremy—that he snored, that he didn’t cook, that he mostly read popular non-fiction—and she accepted it all with equanimity.

“You love him so much, though,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “He’s a good brother, but a bad boyfriend.”

“Sucks to be Beatrice,” Elyse said.

I wrote Jeremy an email telling him that I thought Elyse was great and shaping up to be an important friend for me, but that I thought she’d be terrible for him because she was too self-involved and uncompromising. He responded: “Bro. Chill.”

After a few weeks of suspicious silence, the summons to dinner by Elyse arrived. Jeremy was sitting with her at a table in the back corner of the restaurant. “I can’t imagine you’re very surprised . . . ” Well, no.

I assumed it would flame out quickly, become a weird “remember when you dated my brother?” kind of thing that I could bring up when we were high in the future. Instead, over a pizza at John’s on Bleecker a month later, Elyse said, as though she’d just remembered: “Oh! We’re getting married on Tuesday! At City Hall. You wanna come?”

I thought she was joking; she was not. They were doing it “for the insurance and the taxes”—that’s why they needed to get it done by the end of the year—and also because “they fucking loved each other, and why not make a beautiful and stupid gesture?” (Elyse’s words, of course, my brother nodding along, as if such a sentiment would ever have crossed his mind independently.)

“Have you told Mom and Dad?” I said.

“Somehow I don’t think they’re gonna be thrilled,” Jeremy said. “I think I’m just gonna . . . not tell them.”

“You won’t tell on us, will you, C?” Elyse said.

“I think marriage is bullshit,” I said. “I just didn’t know you felt that way, too.”

“I think it’s a little more complicated than that,” Jeremy said.

“How?” Elyse said.

“I don’t know,” Jeremy said. “It’s not like we don’t love each other.”

She rolled her eyes and finished her beer.

So I toasted them and bought another pitcher, and then we moved on to getting thoroughly trashed at the Kettle of Fish, which somehow still, twenty years after the smoking ban, reeked heavily of fresh smoke. When Jeremy got up to use the bathroom, I embraced Elyse.

“I hope you kids know what you’re doing!” I yelled over the Lil Jon, playing it a little slapstick.

“Oh, gosh, it doesn’t matter,” Elyse said. “Why are you so worried?”

“He’s a serious guy, El,” I said. “He’s taking it all really seriously, and he’s pretending he’s not.”

“What’s this about?” Elyse said. She looked at me clearly for what seemed like the first time in months, and I felt the thrill of her assessment.

“I just want everybody to be happy,” I said.

“The thing is, nobody stays happy, right?” Elyse said.

But they could! I thought. If they took proper care.

The City Hall scene was familiar to me from friends’ previous impulse marriages: Hispanic and Chinese and Russian couples dressed to the nines and smiling shyly with entire families in tow, some admixture of practicality and sentiment infusing the whole room with a slightly absurdist glow. That one could change so much with a bit of paperwork and a few simple words!

I tried to catch Jeremy’s eye, but he had an easy, impenetrable grin fixed on his face, with no offer to go beyond it. Elyse was manic with excitement, gorgeous in a form-fitting white sweater dress. Hanging out in her apartment that morning, vaguely “helping,” I’d resisted the urge to kiss her, or tell her I didn’t know how I felt about her, exactly, but that I needed to say something. I lacked, and lack, courage.

Once it was done, I tried to put her and Jeremy out of my mind, worked on my own stuff, attempted to take myself more seriously. I met up regularly with my friend Marcus to work on our pilot about a family that runs a failing amusement pier on the Wildwood Boardwalk, but we couldn’t seem to figure out the third act. One day, I let slip to my mother in a manner I can’t quite recall that Jeremy had married Elyse; within an hour, I had a furious call from Jeremy accusing me of sabotaging him. He didn’t believe me that it wasn’t deliberate, and to be fair, I didn’t quite believe it either.

Elyse and I met up for dinner soon after that.

“You realize your hostility toward your brother has an effect on me, right?” she said.

“I love my brother,” I said.

“Hmm.”

Sometime later, she abruptly said: “He is rather serious, isn’t he?”

“What happened?”

“He doesn’t like it when I fuck around, ‘waste my potential.’ I have to convince him that it’s perfectly natural for me to meet my friend Thomas at ten am to get high and see the restored Inland Empire. You know, like, that’s the job.”

“What does he want you to do?”

“Get a real job? Or at least worry about it.”

“He makes a ton of money,” I said.

“I know, but that’s, quote, ’not the point.’ Sigh. I don’t know. There are some philosophical differences we have to work out.”

When they came back from their Italian honeymoon, Jeremy was suddenly seized by the urge to move out of the city. In his telling, the time away had made him realize that New York was making him anxious. He wasn’t sleeping well, he wasn’t doing good work, going out was boring and stressful. I wondered, in response, whether things with Elyse might be causing this, rather than “the city,” but he rejected that possibility. Things with Elyse were good, except for some minor, typical disagreements and misunderstandings. And anyway, why would a marriage that was barely a marriage—a technicality, really—be causing him so much trouble? I let the rhetorical question linger, but he chose not to pick it up.

He’d gotten it in his head that Boston or its surrounds was the answer to their problems. His company had an office in Cambridge that he could commute to, and he’d gone to college in New England and still harbored a romantic notion of the region. There seemed to be some idea that if he secreted Elyse off to a place where she wouldn’t know anyone and where there was nothing fun or sexy to do, he might be able to reform her into the kind of person he would have wanted to publicly marry.

I don’t think Elyse was actually sleeping with other people. She just liked to talk about the possibility, and to stay out late doing drugs, and to not have to account for herself. This was, in some circles, considered normal. But what friends my brother did have were people he’d known since college, or for far longer. They’d been with their partners for years, sometimes a decade, and despite their liberal politics, they were conservative in their manners. The fact that Elyse did not conform to this type had originally been the appeal, of course.

One night they had an especially vicious argument about her supposed domestic obligations. She’d gone to the Met to see an exhibition that she was planning to write about, but hadn’t told him that she was meeting an ex-boyfriend there, with whom she spent the rest of the day in the park and then had a long dinner. She’d come home tipsy and happy, and he’d laid into her about how selfish and uncaring she was. She got so frustrated that she walked across the neighborhood to my apartment, where she arrived with only a text as a warning minutes before. I had, in fact, been in the very slow process of seducing my friend Liza—this had involved a poorly prepared vegan stew, Bitches Brew, and a number of provocative heavy silences—when I received Elyse’s message. The first half hour of her visit thus involved a delicate volley of small talk until Liza reluctantly (I hoped) did the polite thing and excused herself from the scene.

The indefinite postponement of the night’s expected culmination was, perhaps, what made me more forceful than usual in my dealing with Elyse.

“I don’t understand why you’re still doing this,” I said. “It’s just a piece of paper. Clearly you’re not happy.”

“That’s not always true,” Elyse said. “When we both calm down, it’s fine. We’re just both, like, amped up most of the time.”

“It’s called incompatible,” I said. “Someone needs to cede control.”

“You’re great at that, right?” Elyse said.

“You came here! I was having a great night.”

“Right, but you still told me to come up.”

There was a pause that I allowed to linger.

“Well, how do you feel?” I said.

I sat down on the floor so that we were at eye level. She straightened her back so that I was now looking up at her. She crossed her arms, held back the hint of a triumphant smile.

“You’re really fucking cute,” she said. “Brother. In law. It can be complicated.”

I thought she might have misunderstood me.

“I don’t think you should be with Jeremy,” I said slowly, trying to be firm. “I don’t know if that means you should be with me.”

“Right, because one Thompson kid hasn’t been enough.”

“Maybe it’s just the wrong one,” I said.

I looked up at her with what I hoped wasn’t a completely abject expression. Though, why not?

“You get points for gumption,” she said. “If nothing else.”

I got off the floor and we went for a long walk through Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, and then Sunset Park. When we got back to her neighborhood, she led us to her and Jeremy’s apartment.

“This is where you want to be?” I said.

“You’ll be the first to know,” she said.

I didn’t hear from either of them for a couple of months, the longest I’d probably ever gone in my life without communicating with Jeremy, and by far the longest without talking to Elyse since we’d met. Then they wrote to me, separately, on the same day.

Jeremy texted first, while I was out at dinner with some theater friends: “hey, I think Elyse and I might be splitting up. it just isn’t good for either of us right now. really really sad about it. call me when you can?” Then, an hour later, a text from Elyse: “been thinking about you a lot. wrong thompson kid?”

Guess which one I responded to first.

During their two months of silence, they’d apparently been too busy fighting with each other to stay in touch with me, and neither had felt ready to let me in on the depth of their dysfunction. Jeremy, I was shocked to learn, had taken to smashing plates and glasses in frustration; Elyse had, more than once, stayed out all night to be away from him, even staying in a seedy hotel on Atlantic Avenue one night as a kind of self-annihilating gesture. My parents seemed to be relieved, for the most part, by the news of their separation, though my mother, with her fundamentally conciliatory nature, did wish that they could have “found some happiness between them.” Still: “At least there were no children.”

We didn’t start sleeping together until after the divorce was finalized. That was important to me, if not particularly so to Elyse. On good days, I told myself Jeremy would understand, or that he could be made to understand. We had the same blood, after all.

It didn’t require much subterfuge to keep our relationship secret. Jeremy moved to Cambridge, proving to himself, at the very least, that his desire to become a New Englander had not been entirely motivated by a wish to protect Elyse from the evils of the big city. I talked to him frequently, and commiserated with his distress, though, as I had suspected he might, he seemed happier, lighter, as soon as he’d decided to end things with her. I had plenty to talk with him about, as I’d managed to turn a fairly bizarre, self-enfolding monologue I’d written into a “one-man show,” and it had been accepted by a small, prestigious theater festival. I felt, for the first time, like my work might be coalescing into something like a career.

That period had a fugitive, reckless quality. Elyse and I made out through an obscene body-horror movie at the Nitehawk, then snuck into a superhero sequel to come down. Things exploded all over the screen, and we stared, happy. So much waste for our enjoyment. We drove to beaches we didn’t know—Asbury Park, Seaside Heights—renting tiny houses or staying in decrepit motels, drinking ourselves stupid and watching HBO, terribly amused with ourselves. She came with me to the Hudson Valley to see my show at the festival, where we were wantonly “together,” out loud, in a way that we weren’t usually. People seemed to enjoy the monologue—they laughed, and did that thing after where they insisted, wide-eyed, that they’d “actually” really loved it. Actually! Elyse betrayed no surprise at the quality of the show. Either she took it for granted that I was good, or she didn’t care one way or the other. I tried to believe this indicated unconditional affection.

By the time I got up to Cambridge to visit Jeremy a few months later, he was dating Margaret. Massachusetts Catholic, lawyer with a lean-in vibe, but self-aware about it—the right kind of person for him. I could see how comfortable he was with her, and I could tell Margaret was nervous around me. I was giving off a spiky energy, probably. Secretly in love, high on my talent. I had some irrational hostility built up toward Jeremy too, a combination of jealousy for having had Elyse and contempt for screwing it up. Elyse was not mentioned, and it occurred to me to wonder whether Margaret knew about her existence at all. Perhaps some of Elyse’s amorality had rubbed off on him, allowing him to justify doing what he needed to do, including selective omissions, to secure future happiness. If I’d thought he would have been able to pull it off indefinitely, I’d have approved.

The next day, Margaret had work to do, so Jeremy and I walked to a brewery near his house, a big industrial space that smelled like ripe hops and an indoor swimming pool.

His first question, after minimal small talk: “Have you heard from Elyse lately?”

“Sure, a little,” I said.

“She doing okay?”

“She seems good, yeah.”

“Not too good, I hope.”

“No?”

“She used me, dude,” he said. “I don’t even know how to talk about it. I just know it wasn’t right, how she treated me. She thought I was some kind of joke.”

I took a long pull of beer and tried to find a way to navigate this.

“Love is fucking weird,” I said, insightfully. “Neither of you has to justify it. You both learned something about yourselves. Maybe that’s enough.”

“What did she learn?” he said.

“Well, I think she learned what she didn’t want,” I said.

He grimaced.

“Are you . . . I’m not going to tell you who you should be friends with,” he said.

“Okay.”

“But you should be careful.”

“Got it.”

“Seriously. Don’t get involved with her. I don’t know if that’s even the kind of thing you’re into right now. But just . . . don’t.”

I went back to New York and reported the whole thing to Elyse. She was amused, but not, I don’t know, uproarious. His lack of generosity clearly unsettled her. It made me wonder whether there was something I was missing, something neither of them was telling me.

In general, life moves too slowly for me, the same things always happening, me half learning lessons and just as quickly forgetting them. But that period went by too quickly. Elyse and I stumbled through dinners with friends and parties and museum visits and nosebleed seats at the opera, amusing ourselves and each other. We brainstormed a lesbian heist screenplay that would have been absolutely unwatchable. When we were apart for any length of time, we texted each other filth, things I would have been embarrassed to say or enact in person. I convinced myself that gravity did not exist.

After all of six months together (but who was counting?), Jeremy announced that he and Margaret were engaged. They wanted to do “something small” with “a few friends and family” in our hometown in October. Though this was not part of the official announcement, Jeremy told me that Margaret, at thirty-six, was very anxious about having children—the time had come and, given her Catholic family, marriage was crucial in order to achieve this end.

“Do you love her?” I said.

“For sure.”

“Maybe you should take a minute, though.”

“Margaret doesn’t really feel like she has a minute,” he said. “So, you know, smoke ’em while you got ’em.”

Elyse was immediately dismissive, though Jeremy suddenly seemed to come up with more frequency than usual (often something like “Oh, Jeremy hated when I did that” after peeing with the bathroom door open, drinking beer in bed, etc.). Even if neither of us explicitly acknowledged it, his decision to commit to Margaret made us self-conscious about our entanglement’s lack of definition. It wasn’t that I wanted, necessarily, for things to be official between us; even in the blur of my infatuation, I knew that this would be inviting disaster. But I felt some kind of grief for what the relationship couldn’t be. If our relationship was unconventional—in truth, we rarely had sex, and when we did, it was more theoretical than bodily, more gear than flesh—it at least had the potential to appear normal from the outside. I got mopey. Elyse’s response to this was to bully me, which I accepted as my due and tried to enjoy. I wasn’t writing enough, so she banned me from reading the Times for a week, which she enforced by quizzing me on the news. If I got anything right, even by accident, I was sentenced to more time in ignorance. This did not lead to increased productivity.

A month before Jeremy’s wedding, Elyse started suggesting—jokingly, I assumed, and then less so—that I bring her as my date. This was so obviously impossible that I didn’t even understand her point.

“I’m just saying, if you want me to be a part of your life, it has to start somewhere,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “But not here.”

“Aren’t I?” she said. “A part of your life?”

“You’re something.”

“I see. Something bad.”

We went in circles on the subject a few times, with her digging in more and more about my unkindness. It was the only time I’d ever said no to her, which I suppose is what made it worthy of conflict. The compromise, arrived at under exhausted duress, was that she would come with me and stay in my hotel room, but would not, under any circumstances, interact with Jeremy or anyone else at the wedding. Yes, I know.

Elyse insisted on dressing like a character gone incognito in a Hollywood thriller, with sunglasses and her scarf tied under her chin, which, in Princeton, just made her look like the median wealthy local. That first night at the hotel was perfect. We took edibles and spent what felt like forever in the Jacuzzi, ordered bloody burgers from room service and ate them naked on the bed like animals, groped each other desultorily in the mess. We were proving a point about how much fun we could have together, I think, egging each other on.

The next day I was supposed to wake up early and help Jeremy with whatever was needed—get Margaret’s family “settled,” keep my parents away from each other, whatever. I showered and dressed and promised Elyse I would visit.

As I walked Margaret’s parents back to the hotel a couple of hours later, I nearly crashed into Elyse walking in the direction we’d just come from. She turned her head so that I couldn’t catch her eye and did not stop. When I got back to the room, I texted and called her but received no response. Her phone, I discovered, was on the bedside table. I went about my further duties with a fatalistic cheer. I knew something disastrous was going to happen, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The time for the rehearsal dinner came, and I still hadn’t seen or heard from Elyse. I got dressed as slowly as I could, tying and retying my tie, trying to make it look like it hadn’t been done by a ten-year-old. When she didn’t show, I walked to the restaurant. There was my family, and some friends of Jeremy’s I didn’t like, and Margaret’s family, and, presumably, some friends of Margaret’s, and, sitting at the bar, her back to the whole scene and apparently unnoticed by Jeremy or my parents, yet extremely visible to me owing to the brightly patterned Grey Gardens kerchief she’d been wearing for the past twenty-four hours: Elyse.

Instead of screaming and running out into traffic, or feigning illness and spending the entire night in a toilet stall, I grinned like a moron and babbled non sequiturs at the assembled dignitaries. I was too nervous to eat the hors d’oeuvres; even water wasn’t going down easily. After almost an hour of this—we were still in the mingling stage somehow—Jeremy took me aside.

“Are you coked out?” he said.

“I wish,” I said. “Just excited, I guess.”

“That’s not like you.”

“I’m really happy for you,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

I could feel myself trembling. Elyse had really thought, she told me later, that it would be fun, in a perverse way, for her to be there in secret, and she’d thought that I would be able to handle it. She’d gotten spooked by her proximity to the family and the bride and needed to get out of the hotel, then had enough drinks and Xanax that making a mysterious visitation without revealing herself somehow seemed the best way to reconcile the various strands of inner and outer conflict she was facing. Lined up in a certain way, her sitting at that bar wasn’t worse, really, than marrying and divorcing Jeremy in front of me. It was control. But this was too much. The setting, my lack of sleep and hydration, the public role. It made Elyse’s presence feel less like a farce than a haunting.

“Over there,” I said, jutting my chin toward the bar.

He turned, and for just a moment I wondered, gratefully, if I’d hallucinated her presence, if maybe it really was just a well-kempt lady of Princeton drinking alone on a fall Friday night. But when Jeremy turned back to face me, I knew I’d been right.

“What is this?” he said gravely. “What is the point of this?”

“I told her . . . ” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “You told her.”

“She’ll leave,” I said. “She’s making some kind of point to me. It has nothing to do with you.”

I could hear the stupid panic in my voice as I tried to ascertain what he was thinking. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that it actually might have been about him, at least a little bit. And if that was the case, despite everything going on in that moment, I felt, more than anything else, jealous.

“Stay here,” he said to me, and walked to the bar. I saw him tap her on the shoulder. She turned and smiled up at him, her radiant best, as though she’d just been waiting for him to come over and say hello so that she could offer her congratulations. He embraced the role of gracious host. I couldn’t hear them, but I could read the gestures clearly—this is too crazy you’re here, you should come say hi to everyone!; oh, no, I couldn’t, but thank you; seriously, we’ve got plenty of food; thanks, but I actually have to head out in a minute. She moved smoothly, slowly, like she was underwater, and I imagined I could see the rage radiating off his casual gestures. It all unfolded with a grim lucidity. They parted with a brief, tight hug and he walked back over to me.

“She’s crazy,” he said. “But what’s your fucking problem?”

He moved away from me before I could answer and then walked over to Margaret, joining the conversation she was having with her uncle or whomever. Before I could decide what to do, Jeremy clinked a fork against his glass and started delivering his welcome speech. I watched Elyse float past and out the door while the group was distracted, her face a blur.

She wasn’t in the room when I got back that night, and she’d taken her things with her.

By the time I gave my toast at the reception the next day, in a tent on the battlefield lawn in the late-afternoon dusk, I was in a fugue state. I’ve seen pictures. I looked great. Jeremy didn’t speak to me beyond public address and to tell me where to stand for the photos. I couldn’t even cry; I didn’t understand what was happening. When it was finally all over, I sat in my hotel room staring at TV shows until dawn, then took the first train back to the city.

A significant part of Jeremy’s discomfort, I’m convinced, was the reminder that he was settling for something far more conventional and less interesting than what he’d briefly had. But Elyse’s vanishing act felt less explicable. For most people, embarrassment would probably cover it. But she was not someone who had ever expressed that sensation in my presence, and I wasn’t sure she was capable of it. Of course, her silence was more pregnant with meaning than whatever the truth was, which I suspected, ungenerously, was mostly just a childish compulsion to cause trouble.

One Monday night a few weeks later, I went to her apartment unannounced. She buzzed me up, and I started crying as soon as she opened her apartment door.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I know!”

She spent the night comforting me, as though the source of my upset was something other than her. I asked her if showing up at the rehearsal dinner had been her way of breaking up with me.

“I didn’t think so at the time,” she said.

“Did you break up with me?”

“Well, not very successfully, obviously,” she said, and smiled.

When I left in the morning, it was with a resolve not to return. If she wanted me, I told myself—wanted anything from me—she would have to seek me out.

And so. It is increasingly clear to me, holed up in my mother’s empty, neglected beach house, that I’ve conjured the best of Elyse to keep myself company during what has otherwise been a solitary time. This was also true when I was in the city, but loneliness can be disguised by fun, by activity, even by worry. Here, the world is an abstraction. I read, I work on my new play (guess what it’s about). I take long walks past the old fishing pier, past the undeveloped blocks with expensive houses, all the way to the water tower, and then back toward home. It’s still too cold to sit outside most days, but it’s warming up.

I made sure—using my mother as intermediary—that Jeremy and Margaret weren’t planning to stay in the house before I claimed it for a while. Margaret is some significant number of months pregnant, my mother conveyed tactfully, and they want to stay close to her hospital and doctors. The moppet Margaret is gestating will help, I hope, improve upon our current impasse, at least provided it keeps adding cells at the expected pace.

Elyse knows where I am. I imagine her in a small, powerful car, slowly rumbling down the quiet block, pulling into the driveway. Rented, borrowed, stolen? I will listen to her story and decide whether to believe it.

The people next door have big parties out on their deck on the weekends, multiple generations crammed together in coats, grilling and listening to contemporary country music and shouting over one another at an unnecessary volume. They must be renters, carrying on like that. The other night it was warm enough for me to sit on my own deck for hours while this happened, passive-aggressively “reading” but mostly just spying on them. I watched a family of three—mother and father in their late thirties, a little boy maybe five years old—that mostly kept to themselves, looking bemused by everything going on around them and rarely interacting with anyone else. I thought at first that they were the ones living in the house, that they had been overrun by their rowdy family, but no, they left after a couple of hours. They were just polite relations with an exit strategy.

Eventually I went inside and let the neighbors rage on without me, contemplating noise complaints deep into the night. The weeks are quiet, at least. But I don’t know. Maybe the silence is worse.