Daisy and James (2002)

He’d never had sex like sex with Daisy. And so when she ended things after only three months, it was as if the very air James breathed had been taken from him. He wasn’t sure if he’d loved her. He knew that he’d been in love with her, or maybe with what she could do with her body and could do to his. Miraculous things. During sex there seemed to have been two of her: straddling him, she leaned down to kiss him slowly with her warm, soft mouth while she fucked him in a steady, forceful rhythm, her hips unsyncopated with her tongue; it was as if her upper and lower bodies had separate consciousnesses engaged in entirely different pursuits. He had never felt more alive, and yet he also felt during sex that she was draining something vital from deep within him.

But now she was gone; she had moved from Brooklyn to Seattle, dreary fucking Seattle. His friends were worried about him; they thought he was on drugs. Well, he had been, in a way. Now: withdrawal. Daisy: the only fix that could ever fix him. Daisy: a witch, maybe. A vampire. A sexual miracle. She had been the one, he now believed, who had loved him, who knew more about what love was. She had given him her full attention whether during sex or not, while he lived in fear of losing her. She knew things about him even his closest friends didn’t know: that he had not heard from his sister, Frances, two years younger than him, in three years; that Frances had struggled with addiction to any numbers of things—alcohol, pills, men—and, immediately following what seemed to be a successful intervention initiated by him, she fled, cut ties with James and their parents; that his parents, aged by their sadness about her, no longer spoke of her, at least not to James; that the scar on his hand, which Daisy kissed as they fucked—it was more that she pressed her closed lips against it and moaned into the scar—had been caused by a high school classmate’s penknife.

Now that she was gone, James felt as if she had taken with her all of these intimacies. He was angry, thinking that she had solicited them from him, but then he remembered that he had volunteered his past, his wounds. He hadn’t asked her much about herself not because he didn’t want to know but because he wanted to know only who she was in the present. He was also afraid that asking too much might upset what he perceived to be a delicate balance. Who he saw in front of him—a pale young woman with large green eyes and long dark hair cut into bangs and red and blue flower tattoos on her arms and on both hips and a hoop nose ring and full lips and freckles around her nose, a woman at ease with her body and with the world, much cooler than James and yet genuinely interested in him—was all he wanted to know, for now. Had he known that for now was all there would be, he might have asked her more. Maybe not: there was power in her presentness and magic in the mystery of where she’d come from, everything that had happened to her before they’d met.

It had been an accident: she delivered food for an Italian restaurant, and one Friday night in December, her last delivery of the night, she showed up at James’s apartment with spaghetti. Had the correct address been written on the piece of paper stapled to the bag, had the mistake been hers, she might have simply apologized and left, but the address on the paper was James’s; they were both confused. He offered her the use of his phone, and she came inside. Had someone answered her call and given her the correct address, or were she a different kind of person, not the kind to hand James the bag and say, “Enjoy,” and had he not said—very unlike him—“We could share it,” and had she not been the type to smile and look through James’s kitchen drawers for two forks and sit cross-legged on the couch and hold up a fork for him, then the rest of their time together, including its sudden end, might never have happened.

He sat cross-legged beside her, their knees touching. Later, after they’d had sex on the couch, he told her—the first of his confessions—that when his knee had touched hers, he had felt something, a shock, as if energy were moving from her into him—he wasn’t someone who typically spoke in such a way, he told her—and he couldn’t have moved away from her even had he wanted to. Her response: “I’ve experienced something like that before. I mean, others have experienced that with me.” He had wanted her to say, “I felt it too. With you. Only you. Just now.”

She didn’t spend the night, they didn’t exchange numbers; even after sex, he was afraid to ask. But the following Friday she knocked on his door. She had spaghetti again, but this time they didn’t bother with it. He said her name, nothing more. She came in, put down the bag, removed her coat, let it fall to the floor, kicked off her boots, pulled down her jeans, stepped out of them, then took off her sweater, shirt, bra. She stood there naked except for knee-high tube socks, her thighs firm. She seemed to be waiting for him to undress, but he was frozen: he didn’t want to lose sight of her even for the two seconds it would take to pull his shirt over his head. So she undressed him, then kissed him—his mouth, his back, his stomach, his dick, the tops of his feet—and then backed him up to the couch where she straddled him and fucked him with varying rhythms, stopping only when James whispered, “Not yet, not yet,” because so quickly he was close, and then again she brought him there, but now she knew exactly when to pause, and he was dizzy beneath her. He didn’t know her last name, knew almost nothing about her, except this, how she did this, how comfortable she was with her body and with his. James, beneath her, alternated between extremes of self-consciousness—God, I don’t want to finish so soon, what will she think—and surrender. She was in charge anyway: if she wanted him to finish, he would. She stopped moving her hips but kept him inside her, she kissed him, it was as if he were in a trance and had become his tongue, she murmured into his mouth, and without once more moving her hips, she made him come; it was such a slow, gradual coming that it was a sweet torture.

Who are you? he thought. And then he actually said this as they were lying beside each other: “Who are you?”

“I’m Daisy,” she said.

He had never known another Daisy, but were he ever to meet another—he thought now, his first Friday without her, waiting for a delivery of spaghetti from the Italian place around the corner—whoever she was would be in this Daisy’s shadow. Any other Daisy he might meet, he would probably feel some attraction toward her. The name itself had become an aphrodisiac. And tube socks. And dark hair cut into bangs. And nose rings. And flower tattoos. And any song by Pavement, her favorite band, which James had never heard of before Daisy. When he searched them online, he decided that their lead singer looked like the kind of guy someone like Daisy would date, tall and thin with long, messy rockstar hair that fell over his eyes. James didn’t cut his hair during the three months he and Daisy were together, and she liked to muss it, grab it. He felt, around her, much cooler than he actually was. And yet he still didn’t understand why him. He couldn’t help but ask. “What a silly question,” she said. But he really didn’t know. That she showed up at his apartment every Friday night, that they fucked, that they talked for hours after, mostly him, that she gave him her full attention, why had that not been enough, he wondered now, alone.

They never went on a date, never went on a walk, he never saw her apartment, never met any of her friends, she never met his. It stunned him now to think that their entire relationship had existed in these eight hundred square feet. And it further stunned him to realize that he had seen her every Friday for three months—only twelve times. He had known her only in winter. He had no idea what she wore in spring or summer or fall.

Maybe, he thought, she’d changed her mind, didn’t move to Seattle after all, missed her flight, missed him. Missing Daisy, the only person he’d told about Frances, made him miss his sister too. He wondered where Frances could be. If she might be—no, he would know if she was—somehow, he would know, his parents would. Maybe she would return. Frances. Daisy. Or maybe he’d buy a plane ticket to Seattle, show up at her apartment the way she’d shown up at his. She was the type of person who would like something like that.

A knock on the door. He looked through the eyehole: a tall woman with short brown hair, around his age, holding a bag. He opened the door, and she said, “Here you go,” and he said, “Hold on, let me grab my wallet.” He left her at the door, but then walked back. “You can come in,” he said, but she said, “No, thanks.” She had brown eyes, not green, and had a stud in her nose, not a hoop, and wore high-top sneakers, not boots. She was almost pretty. “What’s your name?” he said, and she said, “Why do you want to know?”

“You look like someone I used to know,” he said, even though she didn’t.

“My name,” she said, taking too long to answer, “is Chloe.”

He waited for her to say more.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I need to get to my next delivery.”

“Right, sorry,” James said. He hurried to get his wallet, and paid her. “My name is James, by the way,” he said, and she said, “Okay, enjoy your meal.”

When she was gone, he sat on the couch, his spaghetti unopened on the coffee table. He mussed his own hair, grabbed a handful of it, pulled it. He would keep growing it out, might never get it cut. He kissed the scar on his hand. He opened his mouth, used his tongue, murmured. He closed his eyes and waited for something to stir inside him.

James and Ellen (2006)

James didn’t know where his sister Frances was or even if she was alive. He hadn’t shared this with Ellen in the two years they had been together. It explained something about him, she thought, especially his recent distance, his moods. Ellen was confident that James had never lied to her other than the white lies all humans tell each other, how does this dress look, great, do you find her attractive, not really, not my type, do you want to have children, sure, maybe. And yet she had the feeling sometimes that he was keeping something important from her. Before sex, this could be a turn on, as if James were someone she could try to unlock, but his emotional absence after sex hurt her, and she’d told him so. He had been defensive, uncomfortable, reluctant to discuss it—until now, in therapy.

Okay, a lost sister. Not a good thing, but Ellen did feel—she had to admit—relief. They could work with that. Process it. James had hardly finished telling the story of Frances when he said another name: Daisy. Ellen didn’t recognize it any more than she’d recognized Frances. She assumed that it too would be a clue to the mystery James could be, both his most attractive and frustrating trait. Maybe some other loss—his grandmother, a favorite aunt.

“The woman I told you about,” he said, and she said, “You never told me about someone by that name,” and he said, “I did, once, when we started dating.”

She looked at him, then at their therapist, then at him. Afraid, she waited.

“An ex,” he said. “Kind of an ex. We didn’t date very long. We didn’t date at all, not exactly, but were together.”

And then she remembered not the name but the words James had used when he told her: a brief but intense thing. It was on one of their early dates when Ellen had asked him about his most recent relationship. Daisy. Brief but intense.

“Have you seen her?” she asked now.

“No.”

“Have you been in touch with her?”

“No.”

James looked at their therapist as if to ask for help saying whatever he had to say, but their therapist—Carol, mid-fifties, glasses, long skirt—listened with what seemed to be curiosity, hand on her chin.

“I don’t understand,” Ellen said.

James explained that he had been thinking about her lately. Missing her. Not her, he revised, but something about her. About their relationship. Not that it was a relationship, he added. Well, it was, but—he was finding it difficult to explain, he said.

“How long were you together?” Carol asked him.

“Three months.”

“That isn’t long,” Ellen said, though she had been in love with James by three months. “I still don’t understand,” she said. “So you want to get in touch with her?”

James sighed, and Ellen thought: This is the beginning of how things end. His sigh is the moment I’ll remember when I remember how things began to end.

“No,” James said. “I mean, I think about it. Not actually doing it, more like fantasies. But the fact that I’m having them tells me something. Listen, I love you, okay, I want to be with you, but—” He looked again at Carol. “I’m not sure even I understand this.”

Ellen, unable to bear her uncertainty about what exactly was happening, decided to ask: “Are you breaking up with me?”

James said, “No, no—you see, that’s exactly why I was afraid to bring this up,” and Ellen said, “What do you expect me to think?” and James said, “Let me explain, okay. Let me try.”

As he told her more about Daisy, Ellen assumed he was revealing only half-truths. His language was vague or else seemed, to Ellen, watered down. “There was just something about her,” he said, “about what we had, that was, I don’t know, spontaneous. Not like hey-let’s-go-out-to-eat spontaneous, but—I think I mean mysterious, like anything could happen at any moment.”

“But you were together only three months,” Ellen said. “In the beginning, everything’s mysterious and exciting.”

“I’m not trying to compare.”

“But you are.”

“What we have isn’t what I had with her,” he said. “We’re in a loving relationship, but Daisy and I were—”

“Did you love her?”

“Not the way I love you.”

“Did she love you?”

“Not the way you love me.”

“Then it’s about sex,” Ellen said, aware as soon as James shook his head no that she was right.

They spent the remainder of their session, and the next several sessions, talking about sex. Whenever one of them turned to Carol, the other knew to expect something difficult to hear. You’re not spontaneous when it comes to sex. And you are? I initiate. Not as much as I do. It’s good, it really is, but every time it’s the same, we know each other too well. What does this have to do with her? God, you knew her three months, this is ridiculous.

“Hold on, hold on,” Carol said, and then she calmly explained that such discussions among couples were perfectly normal and that it was a sign of the health of their relationship that they were being honest. “You’re not adversaries,” she told them. “You’re on the same team.”

Ellen closed her eyes and wondered if she would ever look back on these sessions, these sensitive conversations, and feel foolish for having tried. She opened her eyes and looked at James. “I need to know that all of this isn’t simply your way of trying to end the relationship.”

“It’s not,” he said. “I do want to be with you.”

She kept looking into his eyes, waited to see something one way or the other; his eyes began to fill. She feared that he would start weeping, that his next words would be, “I’m sorry, it’s true, I’m so sorry, I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore.”

But he wiped his eyes and said, “I really do want this to work.”

And then Ellen took a chance and said what she was afraid to say: “I love you,” she said. “We can talk about this—about anything. I want us to do whatever’s best for us.”

James and Lily (2007)

She didn’t think he would take it this hard; they had been together only two months. Three months if she counted the month there had been three of them. She had made it clear to him that she wasn’t looking for a relationship that went beyond what theirs was. It had been about sex, mostly, though they had done other things together—movies, drinks with friends, diner breakfasts. And they had laughed a lot; rather, he had, he was a great audience for her.

She knew it was risky, how they’d started. Technically he’d never cheated on his ex with her—though maybe he’d cheated in his mind when the three of them were together. Maybe during sex he’d fallen for her. Seemed so, now. A few times he tried to return to that time, remember this, remember that, but she had changed the subject; she didn’t want whatever they were to each other—two people who liked each other and who were having sex but were not in a committed relationship—to be connected with his ex, Ellen.

He’d explained to Ellen that he hadn’t ended things for Lily, but Ellen didn’t believe him; neither did Lily. “It was already broken before you,” he’d told Lily.

“And I was supposed to be the fix,” she’d said.

From the first threesome, Lily never believed that James and Ellen would be fixed—not by her. But neither did she believe that the addition of her into their bed would hasten their end. She should have known.

Now, having ended things with James, she wanted to leave but stood beside the bed on which James lay naked; he was staring at the ceiling, shaking his head. “I don’t understand,” he kept saying. She wanted to say, “But we were always temporary.”

When she’d arrived to his apartment an hour earlier, she couldn’t say what she’d come to say. And when he kissed her and took off her shirt and pulled down her jeans, she didn’t stop him; it didn’t seem like the right time to say what she’d practiced saying. But was there ever a right time?

After, both of them naked, she finally told him. He thought it was one of her jokes. He laughed, but she didn’t, and that’s how he knew, she could tell.

She got dressed quickly. “I should probably leave,” she said. “I’m really sorry, James. Like I said, it has nothing to do with you. I do like you.”

Only as she moved toward the door did he say it: that he had ended his previous relationship because of her.

“You swore up and down that you didn’t,” she said. “So you can’t say now that you did. You can’t suddenly play that card.”

Two months earlier, he had shown up at her apartment in Brooklyn and said, “Ellen and I are over.” The first question Lily had asked was, “Not because of me, right?” Of course not, he’d said. He and Ellen had barely been holding on for a while.

“How is she?” Lily asked.

“Not great,” James said. “And I feel terrible, believe me, but it’s for the best.”

“For you.”

“It will be for her, too, eventually. Why would she want to be with someone who can’t give her what she needs.”

“What did she need that you couldn’t give her?”

“I don’t know,” James said, “but it doesn’t matter now.”

“When did you end things?”

“A few hours ago.”

“And you’re here?”

“What difference does it make if it was two hours ago or two weeks ago?” James said. “And since when do you care so much?”

“I did get to know her.”

“Not really,” James said. “You made it clear that you didn’t want to know about us.”

“About your relationship.”

“Right, you said you weren’t our therapist.”

“I wasn’t,” she said, “but when you do the things we did, you can’t help but come to know people.”

“Sexually.”

“Yes, but when you come to know people sexually, you kind of know other things about them too.”

“Like what?”

“Never mind.”

“No, tell me something you think you know about me.”

“Fine, you were more into me than her.”

“That’s true,” he said. He seemed to be waiting for her to say more, but she didn’t. “And what do you think you know about Ellen?”

“I don’t feel right talking about this,” Lily said. She could have told James that Ellen also seemed more interested in Lily—more interested in what Lily and James were doing. Even when Lily was giving James head and she glanced up at Ellen astride James’s face, Ellen was watching her. Caught, Ellen closed her eyes and seemed to be pretending to enjoy James’s tongue.

“I liked her,” Lily said.

“No one broke up with you,” James said.

“You should go,” Lily said. But he didn’t.

“Please say something,” she said now, but he wouldn’t look at her. “If you don’t say something, I’m going to leave,” she said, but after another minute passed, and another, she still hadn’t moved toward his bedroom door. She wanted to go, probably should, she thought, but she wanted to hear him say that he hadn’t broken up with Ellen for her. She waited. She imagined someday explaining this, and all that had happened with Ellen and James, to a future lover. Pillow talk about exes. Ellen and James hadn’t been her first threesome but were her first threesome that had developed into something—an arrangement that continued beyond one or two nights, a relationship of sorts.

James and Ellen had claimed that the idea had been mutual, though Lily suspected that it had to have been James’. Still, it had been Ellen who’d approached Lily at a party thrown by mutual friends. Ellen had beautiful, sad brown eyes, and Lily got a vibe from her, from the way Ellen spoke so close to her and, as the night progressed, whispered into her ear. A week later, Ellen got in touch to ask Lily out for a drink. Three drinks in, Lily mentioned in passing—not really; she’d been looking for an opening—that she’d been involved a few times with couples, that she was attracted to both men and women, probably women a little more. Ellen, not looking at Lily, said, “Are you asking about me and James?” Ellen’s obvious nervousness made Lily that much more attracted to her.

And during sex, she had remained more interested in Ellen, even as she did more with James. Just as Ellen seemed more interested in watching Lily give James head than in getting head herself, Lily had been more interested in Ellen watching her than she was in James’ hand in her hair or his tensed leg muscles or his muffled moans between Ellen’s legs. Lily had, in a way, been performing for Ellen, just as Ellen had been performing for her, except Lily was better at it. She could have done without James but knew—she had a good sense for such things—that there could be no Ellen without James, that Ellen seemed really to care about him and wanted him to care more about her and that all this—Lily—was Ellen’s effort to keep someone who probably didn’t deserve to be kept, this man-child now sulking in bed, refusing to speak to Lily, as was his prerogative.

Had she remained involved with James because he was the closest she could come to remaining involved with Ellen? Maybe a question for future pillow talk. She might explain to a future lover: When I gave him head, when it was just the two of us, sometimes I imagined that Ellen was there, watching me, that she was a little bit in love with me, but then imagined-Ellen would turn sad, would cry, would leave, because she did love James, not me. She might say: I stood there after ending things, waiting for him to speak, to say that I hadn’t been the one to hurt Ellen, he had. I waited long enough, I warned him again that I would leave. And then I left.

Ellen and Owen (2012)

“To this day,” Ellen told Owen, “any time I meet someone named Lily, or even hear the name, I swear. It’s been what, five years, I can’t believe it’s been that long, and yet the name still stings. It’s strange how the name James doesn’t bother me. It was for the best. Obviously,” she said, and then kissed Owen.

“But Lily. I mean, I didn’t know her very well—other than the sex. I didn’t know her long, is what I mean. Just a month, the five or six times the three of us, you know, but what gets me is that she was a woman, women shouldn’t do that kind of thing to each other, and I know she didn’t really like him because she told me so. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this,” she said to Owen. “I’m not sure why. Well, you know about what we did, our little desperate experiment to save the relationship, though it was fun, I mean it was physically pleasurable, no question, and Lily was, she was much more comfortable with that sort of thing than I was, with her body, with bodies, and you know about the whole Lily-James debacle, but how could I not have told you this part? How Lily came to see me the day after she dumped James and wasn’t just sorry for what she’d done but said she was into me, had been from the beginning, and when James and I broke up, she wished it would have been me who’d come to see her, not him, and I was like, I was floored, but still hurt and angry. So I, this is so unlike me, I’ve never done anything like this, she deserved it, and yet, I don’t know. So I was like, I’m really into you too,” Ellen told Owen as he stroked her hair.

After sex, Owen had gotten out of bed and gone to the bathroom to wipe himself with a warm wash cloth and then dry himself. Finished, he held the wash cloth under warm water again, wrung it out, and brought it into the bedroom for Ellen, but she said she didn’t want it. He started to put on his boxer shorts, but Ellen said please don’t, just come back to bed. Now, he mindlessly stroked her hair, interested in her story but wanting Ellen to reach the end of it so that he could sleep.

“I put my hand on her face,” Ellen said, “and rubbed her lips gently with my fingers and looked at her like, I was very convincing because I guess there was some truth to it, I was turned on, she was very sexy, the way she carried herself, I was turned on more by the power I suddenly knew I had, which I don’t think I’d ever had in my life, and maybe not since, when you have someone’s feelings in your hands. I’d been on the other end of that too many times. I was used to having my heart ripped out, and with James, it was like, my God, I sat in how many hours of therapy with you, I listened to the story of your sister and the story of Daisy and—”

Owen asked who Daisy was.

“Are you kidding?” Ellen said. “I never told you about Daisy? There’s another name I have a hard time, I definitely have to tell you about Daisy, story for some other time, but anyway, I sat through hours of, and I actually cried over James’s sister, my tears were real, and I listened to James talk about his needs and to his reassurances that he loved me and wanted to be with me, and I was kind of like, okay, we’re this modern, evolved, healthy couple able to talk honestly about our pasts and our desires in the context of wanting to be with each other and fulfill each other, and that made me happier than I’d been before James ever brought up Frances or Daisy or the idea of a threesome. Anyway,” Ellen told Owen, “I’d been on the other end. Too much. And now even after all of the warning bells, this man is going to leave you, this man already has one foot out the door, he’s too chickenshit to end things and so he’s bringing up his lost sister and this Daisy he’d known about five minutes, he’s already gone, I felt that truth in my body, and yet I decided to trust him, to trust that some day I wouldn’t resent all the hours processing our feelings and wouldn’t feel embarrassed by agreeing to a threesome and being the one to solicit it, not that it wasn’t pleasurable, like I said, but that he’d actually leave me for her. Maybe when she showed up and professed her feelings for me, and I decided to, you know, I still can’t believe I had it in me, maybe it was really all about James, because I was so, I did love him despite what a shit he was in the end, and my anger toward Lily, and what I did to her, was really about James, and it felt good to know that he was probably hurting, but it was too late, even had he called me and begged and said he’d made the worst mistake of his life, it was too late. Anyway, all I had was this moment, Lily in my apartment, the same one where we’d all, Lily confessing her love, I’m not sure if it was love, her something for me, and without giving it much thought I went to her and put my hand on her face and rubbed her lips and kissed her and led her to the bed and undressed her and just, you know, put every bit of my, everything I knew how to do, some of which I learned from her, from what she’d done to me, to get her so turned on that, I swear I didn’t even think I had such power,” she told Owen, who was now fully awake, his hand still touching Ellen’s hair but no longer stroking it.

“And just when she was about to, you know,” Ellen told Owen, “I got up from the bed and stood beside it with my hands on my hips, and she looked up at me with this look of anticipation, like what was I going to do now, and then I said please leave, and even then I think she thought it was part of some sexual game, but when I said it again, leave, it dawned on her what was happening, and she sat up and looked at me, and her face, I recognized it as my own, what mine must have looked like when James hurt me, and I had to stop myself from crying, for me, and maybe for her, and by the time she’d dressed and gone I felt such shame about what I’d done, and, okay, here’s the truth, which I may not have realized had I not just told you this story, that why I hate to hear the name Lily even now has something to do with James but as much to do with my shame—not what she did to me but what I did to her.”

Owen, no longer interested in sleep, waited for Ellen to continue. In the room’s quiet, the ceiling fan seemed louder. The windows were open, letting in cool night air. Owen was afraid to ask the question he wanted to ask. Because he had already heard the story about James, many times, he had come to see Ellen as someone who had been hurt and who needed to be protected and who would be that much more deeply wounded should things not work out between them. They had been in a relationship for nine months and had moved in together a month ago. He was happy, but whenever he imagined their relationship ending, he assumed that he would be the one to leave her, not the other way around. He was aroused by the story Ellen had just told him; it presented a side of her he hadn’t known existed. Not that she’d been part of a threesome, which he’d known about, but that she’d been capable of hurting someone, even if that someone had hurt her first.

He didn’t want the moment to pass without asking. “Tell me about Daisy,” he said.

“Ellen,” he said, “are you awake?”

“I’m sleepy,” she said.

Owen put his hand under the sheet and gently rubbed her stomach. She turned away from him, and he lay beside her in the dark.

He listened to her breathing change.

“Ellen,” he said, but she didn’t respond.

“Ellen,” he said once more.

Owen and Daisy (2014)

He kept asking Ellen about Daisy. She said, “Never mind, it’s stupid.” He kept asking. She said, “I don’t want to talk anymore about James.”

“I’m not asking about James, I’m asking about Daisy.”

“Same thing.”

But he kept asking, and eventually she told him.

She didn’t know too much, she said, Daisy was just this woman James had dated years before Ellen met him, not even dated, they’d had this brief but intense thing, James told her, but he was, it became clear to Ellen, obsessed with this Daisy. It was almost as if she had some kind of magical sex power, the way James talked about her during therapy when they were processing their honest feelings.

Owen asked what Daisy’s last name was, and Ellen gave him a look and said, “Why would you want to know?”

“I knew a Daisy in high school who, you’re not going to believe this, sounds exactly like James’ Daisy.”

“Don’t call her James’ Daisy. She was hardly his.”

“Okay, not James’ Daisy, what was her last name?”

“I doubt she’s the Daisy you know.”

“I think she might be.”

“Come on, what are the chances?”

“I really think she might be.”

“So what if she is.”

“I just think it would be funny.”

“What would be so funny about it?”

“Jesus, we’re just talking,” he said, and they lay beside each other in bed in silence. They had just finished watching a TV show on Owen’s laptop—a show Owen loved and Ellen tolerated. He turned off his beside lamp and closed his eyes. But a few minutes later Ellen turned on her bedside lamp and said, “Were you ever with this Daisy?”

“No.”

“She wasn’t someone you, like, had a thing for or anything.”

“I was just curious.”

“I don’t like to say her last name.”

“You don’t have to, let’s just forget it.”

“Yeah, but then I come off as the jealous girlfriend.”

He sat up and said, “I’m not James! I wasn’t the one who—”

“Okay, okay.”

He took a deep breath and calmly said, “I only asked a question.”

“That was a rough time for me,” she said.

“I understand,” Owen said, “but I’m not him.”

“I love you,” she said. “Let’s just go to sleep, okay.”

“Okay,” he said, but in such a way—curt, not conciliatory as her okay had been—to make her feel badly for having questioned his question.

She turned off the lamp on her beside table and they lay there ten minutes, fifteen, Owen annoyed that he couldn’t sleep.

Ellen hadn’t moved, and Owen was sure she was asleep, but then in the dark she said it—the last name.

“You didn’t have to say it,” Owen said. “It was no big deal.”

“Well,” Ellen said.

“Well what?”

“Did you know her?”

“No,” he said. “Different Daisy.”

“What was your Daisy’s last name?”

“She wasn’t my Daisy.”

“Sorry,” Ellen said. “What was not-your-Daisy’s last name?”

“Brannon,” Owen lied.

He thought of that lie now, six months later, he and Ellen over, Owen having moved out and into his own apartment. Ellen had been the one, after all, who had ended things, though he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t been asking for it. For the three months preceding the breakup, he had been spending more time—too much, Ellen had told him—at work and with friends and not enough quality time—that was what Ellen called it—with her. He had been distant, Ellen had told him. Even when he was with her, she said, he seemed somewhere else, and that was a red flag, she told him, that was what James had been like near the end, and Owen had been defensive and was more than ready to fight about this, how he was not James, why was she always comparing him with James, my God, it was like he was part of their relationship, he was sick of James this and James that, and then she had become defensive too, what was Owen talking about, if there was one thing Ellen didn’t want to talk about, it was James, and Owen had said, “Well, you could fool me.” It was true, though, he knew, that James had been part of their relationship, just as every person Ellen had ever dated had been part of their relationship, and every person Owen had ever dated had been part of their relationship, and all the people the people they had dated had dated, they were all in bed together, and maybe that was why, as Ellen and Owen were sliding toward the end, Owen found himself masturbating about Daisy.

Once he knew her last name, he had looked her up online. He was able to find her address—she lived in Brooklyn—and where she worked and her email address, but no images of her, and so when he masturbated, he closed his eyes and conjured a composite Daisy from different women, some he knew, some strangers he passed on the street and saw in coffee shops. And now he had finally summoned the courage to send her an email. He had written a draft weeks ago and had revised it many times. He decided to be as brief as possible, mysterious, not too much information.

He wrote that he believed they had a mutual friend, someone they both used to know. James. He had lost touch with James and was trying to contact him. Sorry for such an out-of-the-blue email. Any help you could give me, I’d be very grateful. Yours, Owen. He debated yours. Cheers was ridiculous. Sincerely was too formal. Best was blah. Take care meant you were not expecting a response. Talk soon meant that you were expecting one; it was presumptuous. Finally, he tried no sign off. Just his name, Owen. Yes, that seemed best. He read through the email once more. He moved the cursor over the blue send box. Gradually, he exerted pressure with his index finger on the track pad, and his message was gone.

Then the wait began.

And continued. Days, weeks. He considered sending a follow-up. But he knew that if she had been intrigued, she would have responded. He would seem needy, desperate. Maybe she actually was in touch with James and had checked with him first. That was what Owen would have done if someone asked him for a friend’s contact info. Of course, how stupid, how could he not have thought of that. James would have said, “I don’t know anyone named Owen.” Maybe, Owen thought, Daisy and James were married. God, how embarrassing. He couldn’t stand the thought of not meeting her.

He started to compose another email. Hello again! He replaced the exclamation point with a comma; he hated exclamation points. Then he replaced Hello again with Hi, Daisy. He wanted to write her name. Then replaced this with Daisy, hi. He wanted her name to be first, his own to be last. Just wanted to check in about the email I sent a few weeks ago about James—our maybe mutual friend. Stupid, stupid. He trashed it.

He couldn’t wait outside her place of work—she was an archivist at a museum in Brooklyn—because he didn’t know what she looked like. He knew that she was around his age, maybe a few years younger, mid-thirties, and that could narrow things down, but even if he stood outside and watched people arrive in the morning and leave at the end of day, it would be difficult to know who she was. The only way, he realized, would be to show up at the museum and ask for her.

The next morning he arrived ten minutes before the museum opened and waited on a bench near the entrance, pretending to read a book. It was an overcast late-autumn morning; he couldn’t tell if it was the chill in the air or nerves making him shake. He wanted to put his hands in his jacket pockets, but then he wouldn’t have been able to hold the book. He’d chosen a much-praised experimental novel he’d found unreadable and which he’d kept on his bookshelf at home though he had no intention ever to finish it. He sat on the bench, reading the same passage over and over, growing frustrated with its impenetrable style. He’d chosen to bring it because Daisy, he imagined, would like such a book.

At eleven o’clock he tried the entrance door, but it was locked. A guard, hearing him pull on the door, unlocked it, but didn’t tell him it was all right to come in. Owen entered, holding the door open for a family behind him, and then walked to the information desk. A man with a gray mustache asked Owen if he could help him, and Owen said, “I’m here to see someone. An old friend who works here. Her name is Daisy.”

“I’d have to see if she’s available,” the man said. “Who may I tell her is here?”

“My name is Owen.”

“Is she expecting you?”

“We don’t have an appointment, but we’ve exchanged a few emails.”

The man asked Owen’s last name, and Owen told him. “Please excuse me,” the man said, and he picked up the phone on the desk. He spoke quietly enough that Owen couldn’t hear much. The man hung up the phone and said to Owen, “She should be right down.”

As he waited, Owen shifted between worry that his decision to come here could end only in humiliation, and confidence that this risk he had taken would turn out to be his greatest triumph, a story he would be telling—he and Daisy would be telling—years from now.

When the woman approached the information desk, Owen saw her face first: long dark hair, a nose ring, green eyes. She was attractive but looked nothing like the composite women he had imagined. She was wearing jeans and black boots and a long white cardigan. She arrived at the desk and looked at the man sitting behind it. The man pointed at Owen.

“Hello,” she said, “I’m Daisy.”

Owen offered his hand, and she shook it. “Owen,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you like this, but I wasn’t sure if you received my email.”

“Yes,” she said. “Something about someone named James?”

“An old friend of mine.” Owen wanted badly to look at the rest of her, but felt it might seem inappropriate to allow his eyes to travel down her body. He looked into her eyes, which were pretty, and at her nose ring, determined to remain there, but then he couldn’t resist and moved his gaze down. She noticed.

“Four months,” she said.

He didn’t understand.

“Sometimes people are afraid to say something,” she said. “That they’ll be wrong and insult a woman.”

She opened her cardigan to show him: a bump beneath her sweater.

“Congratulations,” he said. “Your first?”

“Third.”

“Well,” he said. “Best of luck.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Now, about James.”

“Yes, our mutual friend.”

“There was a James,” she said, “but I don’t remember his last name. It was a long time ago.”

“That’s probably him.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” she said.

“When we were still in touch, he mentioned you,” Owen said. “He spoke very fondly of you, actually.”

She smiled politely, and Owen waited for her to say something.

“Is everything all right?” she said.

“I hope so,” Owen said. “To be honest, I’m a little worried,” he said. “I’m a little worried about James.”