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had cost only $90 at the consignment shop, I considered it casual wear—were wet.
    “There’s room for one more,” Samuel said, lifting up his huge umbrella a little higher.
    I’m usually too proud to accept generosity from men, especially if they’re handsome, but in this case, doing battle with a cheap accouterment seemed the more emasculating position, so I tossed my umbrella into a trash barrel, mumbling something about it being a useless piece of garbage, and stepped under theirs.
    It was awkward, walking up the street like that, bumping against one another, each of us getting wet in a different place, but I liked the feeling of being between them, hovering slightly above both, protected by their umbrella and, for the length of time it took to walk four blocks, a part of their lives, even if an insignificant part.
    As we were passing the Nut House, Samuel smiled at Charlotte, more confirmation, I thought, that they’d just spent fifty minutes there. Because Charlotte had already brought up drugs, depression, and suicidal longings, it didn’t seem wildly inappropriate to ask if they had a counselor there, but remembering how offended “Carlo” had been by my vacation question the night before, I attempted a bit of discretion.
    “Nice building, isn’t it?” I said. “I used to go there to see a shrink, not that I needed one.”
    “We went there for the same reason,” Charlotte said. “We fired our counselor this morning. She kept trying to make us change the things that aren’t working in our marriage. I mean, if it was that easy, why would we have been there in the first place?”
    “They always want you to change,” I said. “It’s depressing.”
    Almost everyone I knew, with the exception of Edward, was in or had been in therapy at some point in his life, ostensibly to solve his problems. But for some, going into therapy was a costly but effective way to settle into a holding pattern until they’d figured out an airtight rationalization for clinging to their neuroses and counterproductive habits. After all, there’s room for only so many geniuses and prodigies in the world. For the rest of us, our best shot at individuality comes in the form of unique character flaws and neurotic patterns.
    “What really happened,” Samuel said, “was that she, the counselor, finally got me, the husband, to see that Charlotte, the wife, had a point about getting an apartment in town. As soon as we settled that, Charlotte decided we didn’t need her anymore.”
    “It was generous of you to go along with the idea,” I said.
    He shrugged. “I was outnumbered. I had no choice.”
    Like most men, it seemed, he took a completely passive attitude toward his marriage and let his wife figure out what was required to keep it together.

Dishwasher People
    I knew the apartment was wrong for them as soon as we walked in. I’d written the description based on information the owner of Cambridge Properties had given me without ever having visited it, but I saw now that despite its attractive layout, much of the character and style had been sanded, painted, and Home Depot’d into bland facelessness. Everything in the place was depressingly new and functional. It was perfect for the customers I thought of as Dishwasher People.
    There are customers who want a living space that fits in with their lives, their taste, and their aesthetic sense of balance and proportion, and then there are the people who want a dishwasher. In the former category, there are people who walk into an apartment or a house and pay attention to the height of the ceilings, the exposure of the windows, the way the rooms flow one into the other, the width of the floorboards. In the latter category are the people who ask: “Is there a dishwasher?” and then, if the answer is yes, plop down a deposit. The former group looks for a place that will be a good staging ground for the drama of their lives, the latter looks for the location of the cable hookup.