He says he loves red curry, and he grabs a beer from the refrigerator and sits down at the table. He’s better now. He can do this. He can eat and drink and smile. Just like a real person, one who is not seeing the world through cobwebs. One foot in front of the other. One sentence following the sentence before. An occasional smile, a tilt of the head.

“So, how are you?” he says, and the specter of Anneliese withdraws, almost completely vanished now. “How are things at Best Buds?”

“They’re good,” she says. She tells him about seeing the couple, Winnie and Graham, that she’d brought together the night she had the big question for him.

He grimaces a little, remembering. He will probably always think of that night as the start of a cascading series of out-of-control life events. Her wanting a baby, the condom breaking, the further question of when and if they’re going to try to have a baby never quite getting answered. And then Fritzie showing up. Then there’s the art show he mistakenly agreed to.

“Ah, yes,” he manages to say. He tries for a smile. “So I take it they’re still together then? That must make you happy.”

“Yes, and they’re having a baby.”

“Oh, how lovely for them. I’ll bet they want to raise a statue in your honor.”

She is looking down at her hands. Oh God. He has been too sarcastic now, and he’s hurt her feelings. What’s even worse is that the topic has somehow veered over to babies again. Alarm bells sound in his brain. It’s so hard to avoid all the conversational land mines when you don’t see each other very much. You’d think it would be the opposite, that you could keep the subjects neutral for a few minutes of talk—but no. It’s as though all the important, hard stuff naturally lies in wait, jumping out into even routine conversations, like a wild animal leaping out of a tree onto your unsuspecting head.

“Do you think much about our trying again soon?” she says.

Aaaaaaaand . . . we’re off, he thinks. He drums his fingers on the table.

“You know, maybe you’ve noticed that I’m a bit stressed out just now,” he says.

“Yeah, well, I’ve heard good things about sex and stress,” she says.

He squints and decides to go for a joke. “You know, somehow I feel almost like we already have a kid.”

“A kid, not a baby.”

He feels a bitter laugh coming from somewhere deep. “Also, have you noticed that our house is pretty much filled to the rafters with humans now? How many people were actually here eating dinner tonight? It sounded like it was at least a battalion.”

“I don’t think we actually have rafters. Or a battalion.”

“Are you kidding me? We have battalions of people living on our rafters, swinging from the rafters.” He leans his head back and swigs his beer in an attempt to show how careless and carefree he is. But still she is staring at him solemnly. She does not read his funny mood at all. Where is her sense of humor?

He tries again. “You do know that I had no idea when I threw in my lot with you that you were going to bring in so many people. It’s wall-to-wall people around here lately.”

“How is this me?” she says.

“People follow you. This place is like a boardinghouse. In fact, it is an actual boardinghouse, now that I think of it. People come traipsing into my studio, making comments about my work. Why, even Ariana came in to borrow a pair of scissors the other day—”

“What? She did? I’ve told her not to bother you.”

“Everyone bothers me!” he says, trying to strike a friendly, exasperated tone. Amused, even. Not as irritated as he’d felt when he’d looked up to see Ariana standing at the door. “While she was there, she said my work looked so sad, and she wondered if I had given any thought to my brand. My brand! Can you believe this? Since I was going to be interviewed, she thought I might want to decide what my platform could be. She said it looked like I was going for Sad Artist Guy. Which might not be the very best look for me, she thought.”

He means to sound funny/exasperated, funny/ironic. Funny/something. Come on: children, even teenagers, talking about marketing is hilarious. But he obviously isn’t getting that across because Marnie looks stricken. Why isn’t she getting this?

Her eyes fill with tears, and he knows he should want to reach over and pull her to him, to comfort her, to say he understands. But what he actually wants is to go back to his studio, stop the burden of this conversation that is leading nowhere good. He shouldn’t be with humans right now. Even Marnie, with all her faith and hope. He is creating, and the art he’s doing is weird and hard and upsetting, and ohhhh yeessssss, he saw the look on her face when she looked at his painting. He saw how it landed inside her. Is he supposed to apologize for that, too? For what his art is trying to express? Does that not fit in with her all-happiness-all-the-time world view?

“Do you still love me?” she says. Quietly.

Oh God. Not this! “Do I—what?” he says. “Of course I love you. Why would you think I don’t love you?”

Let her go, says Anneliese. She shouldn’t be doing this to you.

“Because you don’t look at me when you talk to me. Because you don’t even really talk to me at all. Because I don’t see you anymore. The last time we spent any time together was the day we went to Fritzie’s school—”

“Look,” he says and lets out a loud sigh. “You know that I’m busy—”

“Don’t,” she says. “I know what it feels like when people love you even when they’re busy. Don’t tell me how busy you are, Patrick, because I know you. And what I know is that you are in some kind of crisis.”

He folds his arms in front of his chest. “I’m doing a very hard thing. It’s the creative process.”

“I know that, and I want to help you,” she says. “Your paintings are devastatingly sad, and that’s all right, Patrick, because that’s what’s in your soul right now, and that’s what needs to come out. But in the meantime, you seem very far away from me, and every day you’re spinning away more and more.” She holds up her hand in the stop position, to keep him from interrupting, which he was about to do. “But whatever is hurting inside you,” she says calmly, and she looks at him so directly with her blue, blue eyes filled with feeling, “I want you to know that I see you and I love you, and I’m willing to wait while you go through it, for as long as it takes. I believe in you, even if you don’t right now.”

He closes his eyes, tries to think of what he can possibly say—thank you?—and when he opens them again, Marnie has left the room.

She says these things, but she doesn’t get it, says Anneliese.

Later, he lies in bed next to her and hates himself.

Maybe he should stand on the rooftop and call out to anyone who is interested—and apparently that is everyone he’s acquainted with—that he knows that he is being impossible, thank you very much, but that he has nothing more to give anybody, and also for their own safety, they should get the hell away from him. Leave him to it.

And while he’s up there yelling on that rooftop, he wants to say that he is shuddering right along with them. He would like very much to stop being him and try on the identity of someone else for a while.