Long before Marigrace and I became friends, I would watch her doing her exercises outside the showers in the women’s locker room at the 92nd Street Y. My locker was right next to the narrow plastic couch where she would lie in her white cotton bra and high-waisted white cotton underpants doing leg lifts and sit-ups. She was pretty, big-boned, and wholesome-looking, with an old-fashioned brand of innocence that appealed to me.

Our schedules coincided, with Marigrace settling herself down to her calisthenics at the same time I was getting undressed. I would also see her sometimes when I was drying my hair in the bathroom. Looking in the mirror at the mirror behind me, I would see an infinity of Marigraces, each one with her long, blond hair set in a headful of antiquated curlers.

Marigrace’s many friends and acquaintances at the gym would often stop by to talk to her. Eavesdropping on her conversations, I picked up the following information about her: She had a husband named Bill whom she adored. Her building was going co-op. She taught English at a public high school in the South Bronx. Putting cold cream on her face made her feel like a woman in a television commercial. She loved to cook. She loved hot chocolate. She loved the summer. She loved to swim. Her mother lived in Poughkeepsie. She had nine brothers and sisters, all of whose names started with the letter M.

This was over twenty-five years ago. I was aimless, jobless and in between boyfriends, and apart from the Y, the only place in the neighborhood I could go to escape my loneliness and my small cluttered apartment was a little bakery called The Well-Bred Loaf, and this was where Marigrace and I finally, officially met. I had been sitting at a table near the window when she entered the bakery.

Greeting the girl behind the counter like an old friend, she ordered a cup of coffee and a banana nut muffin. After taking a few free samples of the chocolate cake and lemon cookies that lay in a basket on the counter, she stationed herself at the table across from mine. She peeled the wrapper off her muffin, retrieved the New York Times from her bag and settled herself down in her chair with a satisfied sigh. Our eyes met.

After a second or two, she exclaimed, “I know you!” Looking at me for a few more seconds, she said, “You go to the Y, don’t you?!!! You’re the one with the blue gym shorts with the elastic curling around the waist! Aren’t you?”

I nodded. “I’ve had those shorts since I was fourteen. That was more than fifteen years ago. Fifteen years,” I repeated, astonished that I could actually remember back that far.

In response, Marigrace announced that we were the same age: twenty-nine, right on the cusp of thirty. She told me she didn’t feel like thirty; I said neither did I; I felt much older, and furthermore, I never thought I would be living the way I was living now, doing what I was doing now, at thirty, not that I had ever given my future much thought, I added inconsequentially. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her that I was collecting unemployment insurance and working off the books, doing freelance legal proofreading. I lifted up the heavy sheaf of papers that was the deposition of Jerome A. Wiswell in the case of Jerome A. Wiswell v. The Ames Scaffolding Company.

“That’s great to be able to work at home! I wish my husband could do that.”

“What does he do?” I asked.

“He’s been driving a cab since he quit playwriting school,” she said.

“Playwriting school.” I loved that.

“He said he wanted to learn about ‘real life and real people,’ but he hates it. I wish he could just stay home all day and work on his play, but I only make twenty-eight thousand dollars a year and we can’t live on that. We tried when he was in school last year. But it’s impossible. I wish he could find something else to do. All that driving around in city traffic is terrible for him. He’s a diabetic, and stress is very bad for diabetics,” she explained.

I volunteered to put her husband in touch with my editor at the law firm. We went on talking, in the process discovering that we had both majored in English. We discussed our favorite authors, all the while sitting two tables apart from each other, which was just about the proper distance from which to comfortably absorb the impact of Marigrace’s exuberance.

Apart from us both having majored in English and being born in the same year, Marigrace and I had absolutely nothing in common—we were, in fact, complete opposites. I was afraid this wouldn’t bode well for the future of our friendship, and I very much wanted to be friends with Marigrace. I wanted to discover the secret to her chronic happiness and see if I could manage to appropriate some of that happiness for myself. But I didn’t think Marigrace would want to be friends with someone like me, so I decided to keep my bleaker thoughts unexpressed. The idea of censoring myself appealed to me. I was pretty sick of myself, and Marigrace offered me the prospect of learning something new.

My plan seemed to be working out. Every conversation with her left me feeling strangely exhilarated. It was a feeling that would stay with me for hours, sometimes as long as a day.

Marigrace loved talking about herself and she would entertain me with her stories. Inevitably, our conversations would be interrupted by her Y friends; sometimes after they left, she would tell me their secrets. She delivered her gossip lightheartedly, except when she told me about Denise, a sexy redhead who had promised to give her husband, a producer, a copy of Bill’s play to read when it was finished. She was always telling Marigrace about her love affairs.

“I wish she wouldn’t tell me those things. If you’re married, that’s it, as far as I’m concerned. You love your husband and you’re happy with him, no matter what.”

Marigrace told me she had come to New York after college, hoping to find a job in publishing. Her plan was to start as a reader and work her way up to editor. She had heard that publishing didn’t pay well—that it was a profession for rich men’s daughters—but this didn’t discourage her. She had always known how to take care of herself inexpensively with no significant sacrifice to comfort or style.

But when, on the third day of the third week of searching, she was caught in a downpour that ruined her brand-new silk suit and sent pumpkin peach puddles dribbling down the sidewalk from the shoes she had dyed to match, she decided this was a sign from God that she should change plans, so she found herself a job as a teacher and that’s how she happened to be teaching English now at a high school in the Bronx.

The boys nicknamed her Mrs. Big Butt, and when she went to the blackboard to write out in her perfect penmanship the day’s lesson, they would draw lewd pictures of her, which they would slip onto her desk along with pages torn out of pornographic magazines depicting scenes of men and women doing things to each other that would make her cry out in horror.

“Isn’t that kind of stuff against the law?” she asked me. Although her efforts to impart the joy of literature to her students appeared to be in vain, her determination to do so never faltered, and this was what kept her singing cheerfully along with the radio at six-thirty in the morning as she drove along the FDR through a sky that was neither dark nor light.

In between telling me her life story, Marigrace would bring me up to date on her life in progress, which featured as its star—Bill, alias the cutie pie. The cutie pie hung wallpaper in the kitchen, while she handed him the strips. The cutie pie vacuumed the floor while she made the bed. Every night after dinner, the cutie pie made cocoa, while she grated baker’s chocolate into their His and Her mugs.

Marigrace was always saying that she wanted to have me over for dinner, but she didn’t know just when because her husband had recently declared a moratorium on dinner parties. Last month, she had brought home a girl from her job—an English teacher who wrote poetry in her spare time; she had thought Bill might like to meet her. He was always complaining about how isolated he felt in his work. But Bill hated her on sight.

“She kept on asking him about his writing and he hates it when people ask about his writing, so finally he just told her to shut up. I was so embarrassed. I felt like crawling under the table. She was our guest. Sometimes I just wish Bill would be a little more tolerant. I mean, she wasn’t that bad. She meant well.”

Marigrace invited me to dinner two weeks after the New Year had begun. I was living with my boyfriend Nick by then, so I asked if I could bring him along. Just before we were about to leave for Marigrace’s, I asked Nick if he would ever consider marrying me. He said he didn’t think so since he didn’t think he ever wanted to marry anyone. I couldn’t stop crying, and I called Marigrace to tell her we’d be late and she said that would be fine, she would have time to put on some makeup.

Bill was sitting by the window watching a tiny television set when we arrived and he didn’t even bother to look up to greet us. Marigrace pulled us into the tiny kitchen and whispered, “He thinks you didn’t want to come. Please don’t take it personally. It’s just the way he is. He’ll get over it.” Then, leading us into the apartment, she introduced us to Bill.

“Sweetie, I want you to say hello to Margie and Nick,” she told her husband in a cheery hostess voice.

“Marigrace,” he said slowly and deliberately, “can’t you see I’m otherwise engaged?”

I took Bill’s rudeness to be a kind of theater—it was too exaggerated to be taken seriously, and after the scene I’d just been through with Nick, I was grateful to be spared the strain of making conversation. Marigrace had gone off to put the finishing touches on dinner, leaving Nick and me alone with Bill. There was something almost intimate about the three of us being there in the same room, ignoring each other. While Bill watched television, Nick flipped through a book on wildlife preservation and I looked around the room to see what secrets its contents might reveal.

The Christmas cards that hung from a zigzag of string attached by thumbtacks to either end of the windowsill, the dozens of postcards carefully Scotch-taped onto the sliding closet doors, the cookbooks that lay in lopsided piles in the hall, the old red damask armchair, the standing lamp with the tasseled shade, the endless pillows—these were all clearly the work of Marigrace. Bill’s contributions to the apartment were of an altogether different nature. His small but growing collection of original oil paintings were exhibited on the walls, each one lit by a tiny spotlight. Bill used the apartment as a showcase for his own self-expression as well. Taped to the walls were little pieces of white paper. “The heart is a fallow land, where only the brave dare to graze” was written on one. Another said: “The soul of man is like a kitchen where the cupboards are well stocked but the dishwasher is on the blink.” In the hallway, where a big chunk of paint had cracked off the ceiling, he had drawn a picture of a cartoon man with the caption, “Help! Let me out of here!!” ballooning out of the little man’s mouth.

The first course was a delicious salad filled with chunks of cold lobster and artichoke hearts, which the four of us ate in silence. It wasn’t until Marigrace had served us the second course (asparagus with Hollandaise sauce) that Bill spoke. Turning to her, he announced that he was ready to be introduced to their guests, and ceremoniously taking the napkin off his lap, he stood up and shook hands with Nick and me. He told us he forgave us for being late—but we should never let it happen again.

Bill seemed to pride himself in his talent for storytelling and for the rest of the evening he regaled us with anecdotes about himself. He told us about his adventures as a cab driver, his “boyhood” in suburban New Jersey, his life in the theater.

The main course was Chicken Marsala with linguine. Marigrace had made the pasta fresh with a pasta machine her aunt Mary-Louise had given her and Bill for a wedding present. It was a splendid meal and I told Marigrace so.

“I love cooking,” she said, smiling brightly and laughing her big laugh. “Maybe a little too much,” she said, glancing nervously over at Bill.

“I don’t know if Marigrace told you, but she comes from a family of giants,” Bill said. “You should see her mother. She’s built like a Mack truck.”

“Oh now, Bill,” Marigrace said in lighthearted annoyance. She must have been through this routine with him a hundred times before. “You always say such terrible things about my mother. But I know you love her.”

“Wrong, Marigrace. Wrong,” he replied, shaking his head decisively from side to side. “I ‘love’ you. But your mother. I wouldn’t say I ‘love’ your mother. I wouldn’t say I even ‘like’ your mother. I would say I put up with her. She’s my mother-in-law, and that’s what one does with mothers-in-law, one puts up with them for the sake of their darling, devoted daughters.”

I didn’t look at Nick; I didn’t have to. I knew exactly the effect Bill’s weirdly antique impersonation of the jerk who must be tolerated for his genius would have on him: It would send him into a whirlpool of self-doubt and self-loathing. Nick was the author of half a dozen unpublished novels and I could hear him thinking: Am I deluding myself like this asshole? Am I just another phony fake like this piece of shit? Should I become a physical therapist like my mother wants me to? These were the sorts of things he would say to himself as he paced up and down the floor of our small apartment, breaking pencils.

I took an almost sadistic pleasure in imagining the thoughts spinning around in his head. He had ended our fight about marriage with a big question mark, telling me that he loved me and he didn’t want to hurt me; it was just that after over a decade of serial monogamy, he had developed the habit of thinking that all his girlfriends were temporary and that marriage was something he would do only after he was dead.

For dessert, Marigrace brought out a bowl of freshly whipped cream and a chocolate cheesecake topped with a symmetrical design of strawberries. “Did Marigrace ever tell you the story of how we met?” Bill asked. Marigrace had told me that their romance had begun when she bumped into him in the fast lane of the pool.

“No,” I said, “but I would love to hear all about it.”

Bill patted Marigrace on the head. She beamed up at him helplessly. Then he leaned back in his chair, and with the self-assurance of a man about to tell a long, amusing story to an eager audience, he began. After delivering a lecture on the importance of physical fitness, he told us that one of the first things he did when he came to the city was join the Y. “And that was where I first laid eyes on Marigrace O’Donnell—in the pool of the 92nd Street Y,” he continued.

“I don’t know if you have ever seen Marigrace swim, but take it from me, she swims ‘like a fish.’ She can ‘literally’ swim circles around any man. And that’s what attracted me to her at first. After I saw her breaststroke, I said to myself right then and there, ‘This is the girl I’m going to marry.’ Let’s just say Marigrace wasn’t too at odds with the idea herself. Three months later, I popped the question, and well, as they say, ‘the rest is history.’”

I glanced quickly over at Nick and was relieved to see that his face was devoid of expression, which was the closest he ever came to dissimulation.

“I know Marigrace doesn’t like me telling people this,” he continued, “but did you know that she was a virgin when we met? But we changed all that. Didn’t we, honey?” he said.

Marigrace looked up at him with a pained, startled look on her face.

On the walk home, after I had reassured Nick that it was ridiculous for him to compare himself to Marigrace’s husband—I was sure he had never had anything published in the Teniko Quarterly—we had a long talk about the irrational nature of love. Although he didn’t share my infatuation with Marigrace, he did agree that it was a shame for her to be wasting the waning years of her youth on an asshole like Bill, which made me wonder what I was doing, wasting the waning years of my youth on an asshole like Nick. Our conversation went along the same lines it always did, which in certain respects made it seem as though everything between us was back to normal.

At the gym the next day, Marigrace ran over to greet me at my locker. She was very excited about what a wonderful time Bill had had with us the night before. “He never likes anyone. He never thinks anyone is interesting. But he thinks you and Nick are very interesting. He really had fun with you two! I was beginning to think I’d never find anyone for him to like.”

I told Marigrace that Nick and I had had a wonderful time, too, and that we liked Bill a lot. We thought he was charming.

“You mean that? You really mean that?” she asked, grabbing my arm eagerly.

“Yes, Marigrace. He’s charming and smart.”

“Do you really mean that? You really think he’s charming and smart?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling like a coward and a hypocrite and a louse to boot. If I considered myself to be any kind of friend at all, I would have told her to leave the jerk.

“And he’s good-looking, too,” I added.

“I’m so happy to hear that,” she said with a sigh of relief. “People don’t understand Bill. They get put off by his brashness. My friend Joan hangs up when he answers the phone. My friend Betsy doesn’t even call me anymore. Bill once told her she was pretentious. I don’t think he realizes what he’s doing. He thinks he’s just being honest. I try to tell him to be considerate, that he can hurt people’s feelings with the things he says. But that makes him angry. He tells me to stop trying to control him. I don’t know why he can’t just let things be nice. That’s all I want. For things to be nice.

“He really doesn’t mean anything bad by what he says. He’s just been hurt too much by life,” she continued. “It’s all because of his mother.

“He would kill me if he knew I told you, but his mother is an alcoholic. Bill isn’t strong. He isn’t healthy. He’s had diabetes since he was twelve. But do you think she ever gave a thought to his diet? No, she would leave him to fix his own dinner—candy bars and Spam. Is that anything to feed a growing child—sugar and processed meat, much less a child with diabetes? And now his diabetes is getting worse. His hands and feet are going numb. And the doctors say he can never father a child. His nerves are shot down there, and besides, if there was some other way of getting at it, it wouldn’t matter because there isn’t any sperm.”

I managed to hide my shock as Marigrace continued.

“He likes to cuddle and kiss a lot. We cuddle and kiss all the time. I don’t even know what sex is. I probably wouldn’t like it anyway,” she said cheerfully. “You probably think I’m crazy, but I just know that everything will work out for us. They’ll find a cure for diabetes. Bill will get better. His play will be produced. I’ll be able to quit my job and have children. I just can’t help believing that.”

A few weeks later, a friend of mine told me about a four-room apartment for rent in Washington Heights and I decided to take it, and Nick agreed to move there with me. Although the issue of marriage was constantly on my mind, I vowed to myself never to mention it again. I suppose I hoped that the move to Washington Heights would herald some change for us, and if not, at least it would get me out of my horrible apartment and out from under the eyes of the neighbors, who had witnessed the endless parade of boyfriends following me up and down the stairs for the past seven years.

As soon as we were unpacked and the apartment was at least by my standards somewhat presentable, I called Marigrace to invite her and Bill for dinner Friday night, which turned out to be the night of her thirtieth birthday. Nick had been very much opposed to this dinner party of mine. He couldn’t stand Bill; on top of which I had told him everything Marigrace had told me about her husband—the horrible childhood, the diabetes, the impotence—and this would make him feel even more ill at ease than he usually did with people.

But I insisted. Marigrace had had us over for dinner, and I felt that it would be rude not to reciprocate. Besides, I had never had a dinner party before, and I thought it would be a grown-up thing to do, and something to celebrate our move to this new apartment in this new neighborhood. In response, Nick said didn’t I think it was time for me to stop using words like “grown-up”? No, I told him, fuck you, I will use whatever words I want to. We went on like that for a couple of rounds and finally Nick acquiesced. “Okay, I give up,” he said, “but all I’ll be thinking about the whole time will be—‘The poor guy is impotent. Don’t use the word “impotent.” You better not use the word ‘impotent.”’”

In preparation for Marigrace’s visit, I bought a secondhand couch I saw advertised for sale in the lobby of my building. It was on the shabby side and not really my taste (whatever that was) but I wanted to make sure that Marigrace would have someplace comfortable to sit after dinner. I also thought that it would be good for me to start my new life in this new place in this new neighborhood with a couch.

Marigrace wore a green ribbon in her hair and a strand of pearls around her neck. She had on a green velvet dress with matching green suede pumps, and she was wearing lipstick and eye makeup and perfume. She looked beautiful. Bill was wearing a tuxedo and he had a white carnation in his lapel. He smelled of Canoe. They looked like a couple of children dressed up for Halloween, in clothes they thought adults wore to fancy cocktail parties in the 1940s. I figured Marigrace’s velvet dress and Bill’s tuxedo must have come from the thrift shop on East 83rd Street and Third Avenue, where Marigrace bought most of their clothes.

Bill was in very high spirits. He smiled good-naturedly when he complained about the directions I had given them. “You forgot to warn us about that turnoff at 181st Street,” he said as he handed me his white silk scarf. “We ended up going over the George Washington Bridge.”

I was opening my mouth to apologize when Marigrace, grabbing hold of Bill’s arm, interrupted. “It was really my fault about missing the turn. I was in charge of navigation. Bill was ready to kill me, weren’t you, honey? I’m such a fruitcake.”

I invited them to sit on the couch and help themselves to the white wine and cheese and crackers I had laid out on the cocktail table. Then I excused myself and went off to attend to dinner. Despite all my preparations, there seemed to be no end to the chores that remained to be done, and I found myself spending all my time in the kitchen, leaving Nick to play host. But as it turned out Bill left Nick with little to do. Whenever I went in to serve another course, he was telling one of his anecdotes, which from what I could gather, sounded like well-rehearsed pieces of dialogue, designed to establish him as the original character he believed himself to be.

I was relieved to see that the bottle of wine I had bought at a discount liquor store on the corner was managing to keep Nick, an easy drunk, occupied, and I was relieved also that Bill was too enthralled with his own performance to notice that Nick wasn’t giving him the kind of response his wit deserved. But then Marigrace, his ever-faithful audience of one, was taking care of that, laughing appreciatively at stories she must have heard a hundred times before.

I didn’t take a break from the endless drudgery that this dinner party of mine required until we retired to the living room after dinner. I plopped myself down on the couch and reflected on the evening’s progress. I had decided not to make my old standard, roast chicken, and my friend Barbara’s recipe for beef stroganoff had turned out to be fool-proof, just as she had promised it would be. The dessert, a birthday cake I had bought from the bakery up the street, was great, too. And everything looked so lovely: the flowers Marigrace had brought, the wineglasses, the food, the linen tablecloth on which I had strategically placed a candlestick to cover an old oil stain. The party was a success and I felt as though I had achieved some long overdue rite of passage.

Marigrace was sitting next to me on the couch and Bill was sitting down beside her. Nick, who had barely said a word all evening, sat in a state of semiconsciousness in the chair across from us, drinking what must have been his fourth or fifth glass of wine.

“This could be a nice place if you fixed it up,” Bill was saying. He rubbed his hand across the armrest of the couch, an action that dislodged the lace doily I had put there to hide the worn-out upholstery. He looked at me and then at the couch thoughtfully, almost sympathetically, all the while running his finger under the tear in the binding. I told him that I had bought the couch from one of the neighbors to tide us over until we could find something we really liked.

“I can’t see why anyone would want to buy someone else’s worn-out furniture,” Bill said.

“Sweetie, don’t say that,” Marigrace interrupted. “All our furniture is secondhand.”

“That well may be, Marigrace, but our furniture comes from the wealthiest homes in Manhattan and it isn’t torn.”

“Well, I happen to think this is a very nice couch. It’s very comfortable. These feel like down cushions,” she said, punching in the cushion she held in her lap, trying desperately to make up for her husband’s rudeness. But I didn’t feel offended; the idea that Bill would brag that his garbage was better than my garbage was so ridiculous, it more than canceled out any possible insult I might have felt.

When I returned to the room with a bottle of sherry, Bill was saying something about how people weren’t really all that complicated. “I would say that most people can be summed up in one or two words,” he said.

“That seems like a strange thing for a playwright to say,” Nick said. “Aren’t writers supposed to be interested in the complexity of human nature?”

“True, true,” Bill said. “Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that a person can’t be boiled down to the sum of his or her parts.”

“Really?” Nick said, pouring himself more sherry.

“Yes,” Bill said, sipping the glass I had just given him.

“Okay, then,” Nick said. “Let’s play. You go first.”

“No, let’s not,” I interrupted. I knew what was coming. Nick was angry. And he could get really ugly when he was angry.

“No,” Nick said. “It will be fun. Isn’t this the kind of thing people do at dinner parties? Play parlor games?”

“Well, then,” Bill said, and after clearing his throat and adjusting his bow tie, he began. “Well, take me, for example. I could be aptly described as a cynic. And you, Nick, you, too, would fall into the category of cynic. And Marigrace is nothing if not an idealist. As for Margie, she is a neurotic if ever I saw one.”

Marigrace put a hand on her husband’s arm, a look of vigilance and fear on her face.

“Sweetie,” she implored.

“Okay now. My turn?” Nick asked.

“Indeed. Please,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Proceed.”

“How about we play charades instead?” I interrupted.

Nick paused for a moment, leading me to hope that he was having second thoughts about inflicting harm on this poor, sick, impotent man.

“The one word for you would be ‘insecure.’ Two words would be ‘insecure asshole,’” he said. “You’re like a guy in a wheelchair who goes around challenging everybody in the bar to a fight when he knows no one would dare beat up a cripple,” Nick continued, ignoring the look of horror on my face.

“And the way you bully your wife, who for some mysterious reason worships the ground you walk on. Excuse me for overstating the obvious, but like all bullies, you are fundamentally weak. You’re a bully because you’re weak. You’re weak; you’re very, very weak.”

“That’s enough, Nick!” I shouted. And turning to Bill, I said, “Nick’s just drunk. He’ll say anything when he’s drunk. And he’s a mean drunk. A very mean drunk.”

Marigrace had grabbed hold of her husband’s hand at the beginning of Nick’s assault and she didn’t let go of it for the rest of the evening, which consisted of me serving aperitifs, to put the final touches on my perfect dinner party. Bill didn’t say another word. He just sat there sunken into the couch like a stuffed animal until Marigrace, after thanking us enthusiastically for the lovely party, led him out the door to safety.

After they left, Nick and I had a huge fight. I threw back at him something E. M. Forster had written about it being a delicate task to break a butterfly on a wheel.

“Not so delicate! Not so delicate! You fucking asshole,” I shouted, telling him that I knew damn well that it wasn’t on my behalf that he had attacked Bill so viciously. It was his pride he was defending. His stupid man pride. How could he talk that way, knowing what he knew?

“The man is impotent! He’s sick! How could you? How dare you!”

I didn’t expect contrition from Nick; still I wasn’t prepared for the fury that followed, although I should have been, because this was how Nick always reacted when I criticized him for doing something he already felt guilty about. I don’t remember what he said to me, but as usual, instead of backing down, I said the worst thing I could possibly have said: I told him he was just like Bill. That his ego was as fragile as Bill’s.

“You were upset because that asshole was upstaging you! That he was doing all the talking! You know what an asshole he is, but that didn’t matter to you, did it? Because you’re an even bigger asshole!”

“You’ll say anything to win your point, won’t you?” Nick yelled back at me. “You are such a dirty, dirty fighter.” And then he started banging his head against the wall and I pulled him away as I shouted, “I can never win with you, can I?”

In the morning, I called Marigrace to explain again that Nick was drunk and he hadn’t really meant what he had said. I begged for her forgiveness. “Besides,” I informed her, “we broke up last night.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Marigrace said. “I feel it’s our fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I told her. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“I just want everything to be nice,” Marigrace said. “Why can’t everything just be nice?” she asked me. “And you went to all that trouble. It was such a lovely party. You bought me a birthday cake. With candles. Everything was so delicious. We never get asked to anyone’s house for dinner. It was such a treat. That’s why we got dressed up. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong to think that people can get along.”

Soon after all this happened, my membership at the Y ran out and I joined a gym in my new neighborhood. I had resigned myself to the thought that Marigrace was out of my life forever when I got a card from her saying that we should “let bygones be bygones.” I called her right away, but she wasn’t home.

Marigrace got back to me during her lunch break.

“Has Bill recovered yet?” I asked hopefully.

“Well . . . not exactly. But I’m working on it. He just needs more time, I think.” The reason she was calling, she explained, was to ask if I knew any real estate lawyers. Her building was going co-op and her landlord had just come out with the black book and they didn’t have enough money for the down payment, but she had heard that there was a way she could buy her apartment without putting any money down on it at all. I gave her the number of a lawyer friend of my brother’s.

When I suggested that we meet for coffee at the Well-Bred Loaf, she said she was very busy. Our friendship was over, I decided. That made me sad, even though I knew—at least in the back of my mind I knew—that we had never really been friends. Marigrace had been an experiment for me, an experiment that failed. As for how she regarded me, I don’t think I had any actual existence for Marigrace at all—except as a person who knew things about things. This was the conclusion I reached when, over the course of the next several months, she continued to call me, soliciting my advice.

Whenever Marigrace called, she would fill me in on some new detail of her life. She often mentioned the summer and how much she was looking forward to getting away. This always gave me a twinge of regret. She had once promised to invite me to the house she and Bill rented with her mother and nine brothers and sisters every summer on the Jersey Shore. I liked seeing myself as part of this big happy family, playing volleyball on the beach, frolicking around in the waves, toasting marshmallows by the shore.

Oddly enough, I was always able to help Marigrace. Either I knew someone, or I knew someone who knew someone, or the solution was easily within my grasp. Once her problem was solved, she would call to tell me that everything was wonderful again.

Marigrace’s calls for help became more and more desperate: Did I know where Bill could learn how to proofread? His feet were numb! How could he drive a cab if he couldn’t feel his feet???!!!! Did I mind giving the number of that cousin of mine—the one who taught English to soldiers in Germany? She heard living was cheap there and health care was free! That might be the answer to all their troubles! Did I know where she could buy a car for under five hundred dollars? Hers was stolen by gunpoint at the 96th Street turnoff when she was driving home from work.

I hated all those awful stories, and the thought occurred to me whether Marigrace’s eternal optimism could have anything to do with all her bad luck. This got me thinking that maybe my way of looking at the world wasn’t all that bad. At least I saw things for what they were, sort of.

I started to dread those phone calls, and when several weeks passed with no more cries for help from Marigrace, I hoped that I would not be hearing from her anymore. But then sometime around the start of the New Year, my phone rang at eight in the morning and there she was asking me to please go to her apartment right away. I was the only person she knew who didn’t have a steady job. They had put an ad in the Sunday Times to sublet their apartment for the summer and Bill was supposed to show it at ten, but last night his right eye had hemorrhaged, and she had to rush him to the emergency room of St. Luke’s at four in the morning. Without a sublet, they could never afford to get away. She had already used up her allotment of sick days for the year due to all of Bill’s illnesses.

She left her keys with the cashier at The Well-Bred Loaf. I hadn’t been to Marigrace’s apartment since her dinner party. The building had embarked on an ambitious self-improvement campaign since then: The ugly brown aluminum facades that had been cropping up on so many of the other buildings in the neighborhood now adorned the entrance; there were new brass mailboxes, and big blotches of plaster scarred the dirty halls like gigantic bandages, harbingers of a paint job to come.

Inside Marigrace’s apartment, however, an astonishing deterioration had taken place. The kitchen sink was piled high with dirty dishes; the bed was unmade; empty medicine bottles and used hypodermic needles were everywhere. The things of Marigrace’s that I had admired so much—the cookbooks stacked in lopsided piles, the Hallmark cards from her many friends and families, the pillows I had thought were so charming—now struck me as pathetic and very much out of place.

Bill’s quotations were still there, Scotch-taped to the walls; I read them now with renewed interest. There was one I didn’t recall seeing before: “I came to New York looking for love.” That was what he had said when he was telling us the story of their courtship. What luck for him to have found Marigrace, of all people.

Marigrace didn’t say goodbye to me when she left the city that summer. I did hear from her, however, at the beginning of September, a week after she got back. I was out when she called and the message on my answering machine said, “I’m back in the city. Unfortunately. I’m back teaching in the Bronx. Unfortunately. There just weren’t any other alternatives.” This was the closest I ever heard Marigrace come to despair. But when I spoke to her later that evening, she sounded as bright and cheerful as ever—in spite of the fact that the summer hadn’t turned out exactly as they had planned.

She and Bill had ended up taking jobs as caretakers on the estate of a wealthy stockbroker and his wife in New Jersey. Marigrace had seen an ad in the local paper and she thought this might be the answer to all their problems. They tolerated it as long as they could. “There’s nothing quite like freedom,” she told me. But everything was looking up again: It looked like she had a good chance of getting a job teaching English at a private school in the Bronx! She was very excited about it. But the really great news was that Bill’s eye had healed completely. He was convinced it was a miracle, and ever since it happened, he had been going to church every Sunday. He had also joined a faith-healing group.

The last time Marigrace called me, she said she was thinking of moving to Florida. She had heard that life was easy there—that people went swimming during their lunch hours and that for under $800 a month you could rent a garden apartment—with a swimming pool, to boot. She was very excited about it. They might even be able to buy their own home, she told me breathlessly, if only they could manage to flip their apartment, as the lawyer I had sent her to had advised. Did I happen to know of any honest real estate agents? The one they were working with tried to trick them into signing an exclusive contract.

A long time passed, maybe a year, maybe more, without any more calls from Marigrace. I liked to think that one of her dreams had finally come true—maybe the one about moving to Florida, where she could go swimming every day during her lunch hour, or after work, in the pool outside the garden apartment that cost just $800 a month.

Then one day I ran into her on the subway platform at Columbus Circle—she was waiting for the downtown local; I was waiting for the uptown express. Another year had passed by then and I was in a relatively good frame of mind, having come to the conclusion (temporary) that it was pointless to be spending my life worrying about my life. After breaking up with the man who succeeded Nick, a saxophone player with an addiction to pizza, porn and cocaine, I decided that it was time to take a break from men for a while, but then Nick called to apologize for being such an asshole with Bill and, most of all, with me, and I ended up marrying him. He had many flaws, but he always knew how to make me laugh, was grounded in ways that I was not, and on the balance, these things seemed to more or less compensate for what a jerk he could be.

I was still proofreading legal documents; it was easy work and I was good at it. I assumed that eventually I would find something that would make better use of whatever talents I happened to possess.

Marigrace saw me before I saw her. She was smiling her famous smile and she looked beautiful—her long blond hair was in a ponytail that reached her waist, and she was wearing a navy-blue-and-white polka dot dress with navy-blue polka-dot shoes to match. My first thought was: Where did she find those shoes?

I considered it best not to tell her that I married the asshole who had treated her husband like a punching bag, but as it turned out, the subject of me and my life never came up. Her smile intact, she told me that Bill had left her for a seventeen-year-old girl he met when he was working as a substitute teacher at a high school in Queens. He was very happy and was planning to marry the girl as soon as she turned eighteen. It was too bad things hadn’t worked out with him, but that was life.

She was happy for Bill and she would always be grateful for the time they had had together. As far as love was concerned, she hadn’t found her someone yet, but she knew that one day she would, for there is someone out there for everyone; of that she was certain. I was thinking of asking her about the job at the private school she had mentioned the last time we spoke, but on second thought, I decided not to. A moment of silence elapsed between us and then a garbled message came blasting out of the loudspeakers. Like everyone else on the platform, we peered helplessly up at the broken-down speakers and then down our respective tracks, on the lookout for the lights of an approaching train—hopefully ours. The one that pulled into the station turned out to be the one Marigrace was waiting for.

Hesitating for a moment, because neither of us seemed to know how to say good-bye, Marigrace got there just in time to squeeze herself through the subway doors, and as she did, she turned to me and said something, but whatever she said was drowned out by the sound of a boombox that a trio of boys had brought along to accompany them as they prepared to entertain the people waiting on the platform.

I watched Marigrace through the graffiti sprayed on the subway window as she made her way down the aisle. The train wasn’t crowded but she was standing, her hand holding the rail overhead. I remembered her once mentioning that she never sat down in the subway because she had heard that she could burn more calories standing than sitting.

She was right across from where I stood, apparently too lost in her thoughts to notice me. I watched as she bent her head down. On her face was a look of such naked anguish that my instinct—borne of respect for Marigrace, or horror, I can’t say which—was to turn away.

The boys with the boombox were gyrating to their loud music now, doing back flips and cartwheels and twisting their bodies into impossible shapes. It was quite a spectacle, and I got so caught up in it, I ended up missing my train. Then I heard the sound of Marigrace’s train gearing up.

I turned around and there was Marigrace waving at me. She looked every bit as radiant as when I used to watch her at the 92nd Street Y, and then later after our first official meeting at The Well-Bred Loaf, when I chose her to be my guide out of the gloom and doom of my dark night into the light of her bright day, where everything was wonderful and anything that was broken could be fixed.

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Maxine Rosaler’s short story collection,  The Missing Kidney and other stories  (Delphinium Books, 2025) was on the Kirkus List of Best Fiction Books 2025 and was an Oprah Daily Best Summer Reads of 2025 Pick. Her novel  Queen for a Day, (Delphinium Books, 2018) was nominated for The Kirkus Prize and was one of ten fiction books included in the Jewish Book Council’s 2021 list of recommended books. Stories of hers have appeared in  The Southern Review,  Prairie Schooner,  Glimmer Train,  Witness,  Fifth Wednesday  and other literary magazines and have been cited in editions of  Best American Short Stories  and  Best American Essays. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts fellowship.

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