BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SUMMER 2001

Lunchtime. Janine has only an hour, during which all the eateries in the Loop are of course thronged with people. Normally she just stays in the office, perfectly happy to reheat whatever she had leftover from the previous night's dinner. (She finds cooking for herself to be something of an involved hassle. She can't avoid having to do it— at least not too many times in a row, not without activating her money guilt —so when she cooks, she'll generally make enough for two people, since that's not a considerably greater hassle, and then she can save half.) She hates fighting the crowds. But yesterday she called Thomas up, and he sounded really down— worse than normal —and when she asked him what was up he said he didn't want to talk about it on the phone. Her evenings this week aren't good— her self-defense class is Wednesday night, Friday she's supposed to be seeing Ingrid, and somewhere in there she needs to pay the bills —so she asked him to come out and meet her for lunch.

They spend forty-five minutes or so at Au Bon Pain. She eats a mozzarella and tomato sandwich; Thomas eats a chef's salad.

J: Everything all right with you?

He explains. A new silence has opened between him and Lydia. They had a fight about something— she'd accused him of living too much in his own head, she'd gone home when she'd planned to stay, they haven't spoken since.

J: Has she e-mailed you or anything?
J: Have you tried to get in touch with her at all?

No, and no. Thomas fears, secretly, in an inarticulate space, that things are really finished this time. He and Lydia had fallen out of touch once before, but that time he only had to overcome his own anxieties about relationships, his own fear; this time he needs to overcome not only his fear of her attention but also his fear of her anger. The image of her face tensed and crying. He only hints at this in small ways. I don't know how to talk to her about this. She seemed really angry.

J: When was this fight, exactly?

Last weekend. Janine thinks that that's been too long, that Thomas should have called her long before. She wants you to call. It's a test, Thomas, she's sitting there trying to figure out how long it's going to be before you call. Trust me. Exasperated: you should have called her that night. (I didn't know, Thomas says, looking miserably down at his salad, and Janine believes him, and this belief fills her with a terrible ache, the desire to pull him close to her, to shield his helpless self from the complexity of the other people in the world.)

Minutes pass. Janine, still feeling rushed, checks her watch: when Thomas sees her she regrets having checked it, but a minute later she checks it again. Thomas feels guilty about making Janine give up time from her day and then talking only about himself. He apologizes, and Janine reassures him in the way that he would want, but he still feels disgusted by his own self-absorption, the morose indulgence of it. A fattiness seems to hang off of him, a corpulence of the emotions.

T: So how are you, anyway?

Janine has been involved with Ingrid for about a month now: she hasn't gone into this with Thomas, in part because she realizes that it sounds bad. That's one thing about sleeping with someone's fiancee: to most people it sounds bad. Janine feels like the situation is actually OK, she feels like she's behaving ethically, but she knows that in order to convey that to most people— including possibly Thomas —she'll need to provide a lengthy follow-up explanation. Why I See It That Way. And she doesn't have time right now for that. In another few weeks Ingrid will be gone, off to Berlin, and then Janine won't need to explain anything. She's actually begun to look forward to Ingrid's departure: she thought the relationship would be fun, a little quickie at the end of the summer, but Ingrid has spent a lot of that time growing increasingly jumpy and nervous (anxious? about getting caught?) which has a long way towards degrading the buzz of the thing. I'm fine, Janine says. Just busy.