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something. She was late to the event. She didn’t know anyone, hadn’t lost anyone, wasn’t part of the history. This was all okay with her.
    It was January. She found an apartment on the Lower East Side through a guy she met in her acting class. Larry’s grandmother had lived in the apartment for decades, keeping the rent low; now she was in a nursing home, adrift in an Alzheimer’s haze, only occasionally convinced she would soon move back home. The family, having cleared the apartment of its doilied furniture and ancient knickknacks, sublet it to Anne at what even she, new to New York, could tell was an insane bargain. This was because Larry hoped to have sex with her. She took the apartment and dropped the class.
    Sometimes he came by, supposedly to pick up his grandmother’s mail or check on the faucets. “I never see you anymore,” he’d say, barely dampening the complaint in his voice.
    “I’m so busy,” she’d say, never specifying at what.
    Larry worked in commercials. He was the husband strolling through the house in the real-estate ad, the man grimacing with hemorrhoidpain before exhaling in relief. In between these shoots he took classes and auditioned for plays. “Keeping busy’s important,” he told Anne. “An unstructured life is a terrible thing.”
    She politely agreed, then left as soon as possible, abandoning him in her apartment. She knew he wouldn’t disturb anything or rifle through her things—he was a transparently honest person, which was one reason he wasn’t a very successful actor—and also that he wouldn’t find anything of interest if he did.
    She was not, in fact, busy at all. If her life was unstructured, at least it was terrible in ways she enjoyed. She had saved enough money to tide her over while she looked for work, and she believed that something perfect would come along—without knowing what it might be—and that before it did she shouldn’t accept substitutes. Her confidence in the universe’s generosity was mystical, and no less strong for not having been confirmed. She spent her days in coffee shops on Houston Street, reading Stanislavsky and scanning ads for casting calls. People at auditions kept shaking their heads and saying, “This part isn’t right for you, but trust me, it’s only a matter of time,” and she believed them. She heard the phrase so often that she came to see
a matter of time
as a literal, physical thing she could wrap around herself like a blanket, comforting and soft.
    Finally she took a job at a temp agency in Midtown, mostly because she thought waitressing was a cliché. She did data entry in the off-hours, leaving the days free for auditions. In the waiting areas she always saw the same people, who became the closest thing to friends she had, although she knew they really weren’t, that they would resent anyone who broke through. She was cast as a fairy in a
Midsummer
that, being post 9/11, obliged her to wear a turban and carry a hand grenade. Even though the production was awful, she felt the lights on her face and knew the audience in the darkness was watching her, and her blood boiled like a kettle, dying to be poured.
    The play closed after ten days, and her nights were free. Larry had stopped coming around. One evening she saw him inside a bar on Avenue A, holding hands with a woman across a tiny table, his eyesglassy with triumph. She didn’t care about him, of course, but a physical ache rippled across her skin. She went to a poetry reading that night at the New School. The reader was middle-aged and Irish, with ghostly, blue-green eyes. Each poem concerned the dissolution of his marriage and his resulting loss of faith in the world, which he thought had already been lost. This was the worst part, his poems seemed to say: you believed your cynicism would save you from hurt, only to discover a secret, uncherished vulnerability in your soul. Anne sat in the front row, bought his book afterward, and told him that his work