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frames are okay?”
    â€œThey’re great. Very . . . I was going to say ‘distinguished,’ but—”
    â€œYou don’t think they’re distinguished?”
    â€œIt’s just, it’s hackneyed to say a middle-aged man looks ‘distinguished’ in glasses.”
    â€œIf you say so.”
    â€œSorry, I always do that. I was in this play—I used to be involved in theater—”
    â€œAh,” he said, too enlightened. She thought of herself as an un-assuming type who’d been transformed onstage rather than someone drawn to the theater by histrionic disposition.
    â€œYes,” she said, “and I had a part where one of my lines went, ‘I’ll try to say this so you can understand where . . . my point of view.’ Shestops herself from saying ‘where I’m coming from,’ then talks about how she almost said it.”
    â€œI know the type.”
    She laughed. “As do I. When I read that line I knew I was—ha, I was going to say ‘born to play the role.’”
    It had been her first professional lead, playing Anna in a production of Burn This for a peripatetic but well-regarded midsized company. Anna was a dancer transitioning into choreography, and though Karyn struggled to move with convincingly terpsichorean grace, in all other ways she found herself melding with the character. The guy who played Pale, the ramshackle drunk with whom Anna falls in love, was too young for the part, but it didn’t matter; he and Karyn had what’s called chemistry (the alt-weekly reviewer, pulling a muscle to avoid the cliché, praised “the principals’ analeptic symbiosis”). With each performance they grew more intense without, she was sure, overacting. He was gay and exceptionally attractive, and the closed fantasy of offstage eros, she thought, enabled her immersion in the show’s sexual energy.
    â€œYou gave it up?” Paul said.
    â€œI did. That was pretty much my swan song, actually, spring of ’98.”
    He sighed for Monica Lewinsky, the vaulting Nasdaq, Sosa-McGwire.
    The production was momentous personally as well as artistically in that it introduced her to Jason. He was already working for the Minnesota Geological Survey but still moonlighting as a musician, and the director put him in charge of guitar noodles and synth mattresses, dignified in the program as sound design. Karyn and Jason didn’t speak to each other during the run, but they exchanged two consequential looks. At the closing party he referenced the where-I’m-coming-from line five minutes before their relationship took a physical turn.
    â€œSpeaking of time’s winged chariot,” Karyn said to Paul. She nodded toward the upstairs bedroom.
    â€œRoger that.”
    Trying to kindle a more spirited atmosphere, she fell backwards on the bed as if flopping down to make a snow angel.
    â€œI can’t believe you called me middle-aged,” he said, playfully, as if he wanted to wrestle. When she mentioned the diaphragm, they locked eyes with an excitement possibly tinted with STI anxiety. It passed.
    December 2004

    Sara’s move to New York was hopeful but noncommittal. She had her mother send her a small box of clothes, but she left everything else in West Seneca and told Lucas to think of her as month-to-month. Briefly she worried that he was gunning to make them more than roommates, but soon she saw that he was devoted to the Anglo American, Gemma, whose devotion seemed more controlled. Sara planned to expand her reach as a writer and proofreader, pledged to stay unattached.
    It didn’t go like that. Her work flattened out, and she spent most of her not quite four months in New York dating an apprentice bike-frame builder from Idaho Falls. Lucas, who had improvidently expensive taste in bikes, had fixed them up during the second week of Sara’s residence. The frame builder’s name (inauspiciously,