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“And it has been said many times before,” added Karen, turning to Clay to explain. “We’re talking about the woman in the burlap sack who got weepy at the podium while thanking the movie star.”

“Ah,” said Clay, chuckling.

Troy laughed too. Then he took off in search of their boss. “Finish your drink and come with me,” said Clay, taking Karen’s free hand.

“There’s no way I’m dancing to ‘Footloose’!” she cried.

“Oh yes you are,” he said, dragging her back to the dance floor, though admittedly with Karen’s tacit consent.

More dancing led to more refreshments, which led to more dancing and more alcohol. By ten, Karen was on the precipice of being wasted. “It’s a marvelous night,” Clay murmured in her ear while they slow-danced to Van Morrison’s “Moondance.” Karen had to agree. At the same time, she wasn’t so wasted that she could escape the conviction that she was betraying both her husband and Clay’s wife. That Verdun wasn’t white somehow made the perfidy even more inexcusable.

Karen was also neglecting her work.

Still, didn’t she deserve some fun? In truth, there had been a paucity of it in her life over the past few years—really, a paucity of it throughout Karen’s lifetime. She had no one to blame but herself. Friends of hers had devoted long periods of their youth and even their thirties to nothing more than the privileges of their age—that is, to altering their brain chemistry via drink and drugs, skydiving and having sex with strangers, all with the single goal of amplifying the experience of being alive. They’d traveled too—far and wide and back again—while Karen had always had a tendency to shy away from experience. Ever conscious of what she perceived to be wasting time, she also struggled to be in the moment, to stop eyeing the clock and wondering and worrying about what came next and thinking she really ought to get home.

But that night, she had no desire to leave. Apparently, neither did Troy or Clay. The band had packed up; the bartender was loading dirty glasses into plastic crates. But the three of them were still there. They were the last to walk through the front entrance when, at eleven, the lights in the ballroom were switched off.

It was drizzling and still unseasonably cold. Usually obsessed with the weather, Karen hardly noticed. It was enough that Clay was near. What’s more, the blur of streaky lights and whizzing traffic made her nostalgic for her youth, when the very idea of urban living, with its heady mix of grit and glamour, had been compelling to her—at least in theory. In recent years, Karen’s romance with danger, to the extent that it had ever even existed, had been replaced by the desire for comfort above all. But what if that impulse, too, was on its way out?

A part of Karen wished that Troy had left earlier and on his own. Another part was relieved by his presence, since it removed any potential question marks or awkwardness regarding what happened next with Clay. In any case, all three were headed to different neighborhoods, so there was no possibility of any of them sharing a taxi or Uber. When the first cab pulled up, chivalry prevailed, with both men offering it to Karen. With as much subtlety as she could manage, she tried to put them off, pointing out that Troy had to wake up earlier than the rest of them.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” he said, ignoring her cue, whether by accident or intent. “You go ahead.”

“Okay—well—good night, everyone,” she said. What else could she say? Besides, it was clearly for the best. She hugged one, then the other. Though her embrace of Clay had a wholly different, more languid feel. “I’m going home to sleep this off,” she told them both.

“Night-night,” said Troy.

“Sleep tight,” said Clay.

Karen pulled the door closed, and the car pulled away.

Out the back window, she watched the two men watching her until they shrank to the size of matchsticks, then disappeared from view, just like they all would someday.



On most nights, Karen fell asleep reviewing the to-do list she kept on her computer and in her head and, despite her fatigue, half wishing it were morning already so she could begin checking things off, from amending the data plan on her phone, to purchasing more individual organic applesauces to put in Ruby’s lunch box, to calling the plumber about the dripping showerhead. Her dreams typically followed suit, the majority of them so prosaic that she sometimes felt embarrassed when she woke up. They also made her wonder if the myriad mundane responsibilities of motherhood had shut off some invisible valve that controlled the imagination until all that was left was the directive to purchase more paper towels. But that night, as she lay in bed—thankfully, Matt wasn’t home yet—all thoughts of household products gave way to thoughts of Clay: the way he stood, the way he danced, the way he murmured in her ear.

Too drunk and aroused to sleep, Karen replayed each of the seemingly magical moments that they’d shared, already half convinced that they would never be repeated. Clay belonged to another world than hers, as well as another marriage. And Karen was under no illusion that there was any vehicle that could successfully transport her between the two. Though it was also true that, at times, Karen felt as if her own husband belonged to another universe. Once, she’d found his lower-middle-class origins to be winningly authentic. She admired the fact that he was the first one in his family to have gone to college and that he wasn’t impressed by wealth. But as she’d gotten older, she sometimes found herself wishing he’d come from a family that was a little more landed, a little more bourgeois, if only so he could appreciate her own occasional longings for luxury and comfort. Matt was always keeping it real, whereas Karen increasingly longed to escape reality. It also drove her crazy the way he mispronounced words and names. She still hadn’t forgotten the time he’d referred to her college-era hero, the French Marxist social theorist Michel Foucault, as Michael Foo-colt.