A few days later, Eric books a room at the Jersey City Marriott for the afternoon, and there are a few things happening downstairs that have put him in a bad mood, a conference on constitutional law and a K–8 concert that involves a popular squirrel character. The lobby is full of lawyers and kids on leashes. He takes a call from his assistant, who is managing a fiasco that has to do with a shipment of acetate film. Are you saying we are dealing with vinegar syndrome, he says as I undress. He hangs up the phone and sets his shoes by the door. He examines me with the back of his hand, and without the palm, the contact is remote, a quiet scrutiny I try to meet casually, though I am insecure about my breasts, which hang apart and feel deadened when I am not turned on. He asks me to take off his watch and I do it, clumsily, as he peers at my face. I try not to be worried by his expression, but he wears it even after he removes his pants, the searching look of a person who keeps finding nothing, which gives me the impression that the nothing is me. There is too much foreplay, a salvo of businesslike kisses that feel less like kisses and more like place setting, the fork and the spoon, and his fingers operating all the reliable dials. But he can’t get hard. I do my best. An endless hand job and obliterated bicep, the condescending suction of a hopeful but ultimately futile blow job, and the desperate wish that sometime this all will end. When it does I lie next to him and think of the pictures, the soundless rutting of husband and wife. I squeeze his shoulder, and when he pushes my hand away I am relieved.

* * *

After an hour of trying to find something on TV, we go downstairs and sneak into the concert. The kids have been let off their leashes and are crowding the stage during a soft techno prelude to “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” When the lights come up, a seven-foot-high papier-maché Big Ben is there with two enormous, functional human hands. Behind it, there is a projection of a throbbing London Eye. When Eric passes me a flask, I notice Big Ben is telling the correct EDT. There are parents, zoned out or pathologically alert, a man using his wife’s back to sign some papers, a woman pumping milk next to the hot dog cart.

* * *

The squirrel turns out to be animatronic, but when he comes out, the hall erupts, and a few kids need to be carried away. Eric and I are trying to be cool about it, but as we pass the gin back and forth it turns out that “Wheels on the Bus” is not so bad at 150 bpm, and while we are not the target demographic, we are stunned by the squirrel, whose eyes are dark and wet. When Eric looks at me, I know we are somehow having the same thought, which is that kids these days have never had to see the prototypes, and now the uncanny valley is gone.

* * *

Back in our room, we are both mellowed. He opens the window and puts the radio on, and we smoke a flat joint I find in the bottom of my purse. He keeps saying he doesn’t feel anything, but then he takes a comb out of his briefcase and spends a while putting different parts in his hair. He comes back from the bathroom with a middle part and takes me into his arms, and all the faucets are on. There is a song on the radio that he likes, some supermarket standard that was big in the eighties, and I am coming to the realization that he is high and I am not. I’ve pulled too hard on an insufficient joint and I feel the exertion behind my eyes. He asks me to dance with him, but the song is bad. I think you need to have been alive in the eighties to like the music. I think you need a specific neural groove, a pane of nostalgia to sweeten what is sexless and extroverted and most suited for the mall. Still, I dance with him, though with the lights up I can’t relax. I try to make it funny, but then I see Eric’s disappointment and I don’t know what to do with my hands. He asks me to stop and tells me to lie facedown. I ask him if something is wrong, and he hoists me up and takes me from behind as a sleepy radio voice is introducing “Come On Eileen.” You have nowhere else to go, he says. He asks me to say it back to him.

“I have nowhere else to go,” I say, and when it’s over, he takes a shower for a long time, and then he apologizes profusely. He tells me that as a kid he had intricate immune deficiencies that sometimes forced him to keep his teddy bear in a jar, and it is this same immune response that dampens his ability to produce sperm. Because this deserves reciprocation, I tell him I got an abortion around the same time I learned to shoot a gun. I tell him more about the Polaroid camera I received from my mother, how for weeks I took photos of trees and telephone wire before I turned the lens on her. How she was a willing subject, until she saw what she looked like in the photos and asked me to stop. How I thought her resistance was petty and vain, a boring thing I’d seen less interesting adult women do, then I looked at the pictures and knew that she was right. She wasn’t simply unphotogenic. She was bare in a way that film betrayed so dramatically that she became grotesque.

* * *

At home, we create a flank of fire with red and yellow tulle. Akila drapes it over her shoulders and shreds newspaper for the papier-maché. Eric brings up some vinyl and we shape the horns to “Dancing Queen,” though we are deep into ABBA’s lesser-known songs by the time we fashion the breastplate from foam. After the hot glue dries, we go outside and spray-paint it silver. Akila shows me her archive of comic books, and aside from a few that I am not allowed to touch, I am free to browse. They vary in condition and age—thin newsprint issues with ads for milk and Tekken, Girlfrenzy! issues that skew more female, and incidentally a little more butch, older issues openly courting Generation X, between the ads for Gap and Gushers the grungy, long-haired Gothamite that is Bruce Wayne’s son, a coked-up twentysomething cramped by his dad’s Depression-era style.

* * *

Eric and I make more mistakes. Most notably the first (and last) time Eric calls me baby, which happens as he is trying to direct my attention to the mail, and which I can see he immediately wants to take back, because it feels preposterous, and because, we realize a moment later, Rebecca is in the room. The next day, we meet for lunch at a Wyndham in Teaneck and I arrive back at the house and find Rebecca crouched in the garden with her trowel. She picks through the fennel and lavender with her hands and inspects her palms. She says it was meant to be a butterfly garden, but this season a few things have gone wrong. The flowers came up pollen-poor and the population of natural predators was high. Curious deer. Beetles and spiders waiting in the daisies for painted ladies and red admirals. Hummingbirds deterred by sterile lilies. Now the garden is full of weeds and exoskeletons. Rebecca takes her trowel and starts prying out the weeds. I ask if she wants any help, and she says that she is fine. Her T-shirt is damp, yellow in the pits. She talks to herself, calls it opportunistic growth. She goes in with her shears and starts trimming around the lavender, but by the time she gets to the river mint, she is pulling it all up with her hands.

“I feel like I am the only one who hears that dog,” she says, and it is only after she mentions it that I hear the baying. “We bred them like that. We made them needy and physically unfit. They used to be wolves. Now there are pugs with asthma.”

“I never understood the appeal. Of pugs.”

“I saw your paintings,” she says, reaching for the peat moss. She has kindly kept her back turned, but still my lunch, the room service, is rising into my mouth.

“Which ones?”

“All of them,” she says, and naturally I can only think of the most damning ones, paintings I went to great lengths to hide. Paintings that are reconnaissance, that are longing, and disproportionately of her. Somehow, I also wish I had been there, to see her when she saw herself in them.

“What did you think?” I ask, and she looks over her shoulder, her face flushed and mean. I can’t tell if she is looking at me or the neighbor’s dog.

“I think they need work.”

* * *