“And you told Whitney?”
“I told her within the week.”
“Why?”
“I’m a terrible liar. I’m terrible at holding shit in.”
“You must be a bad lawyer, then.”
“Not that kind of lawyer,” he said. “But, yeah, I melted down over the course of the week and came clean.”
“What’d she do?”
“She made me point her out. She, like, made me hunt her down at the library just to give her a look. Then she mercilessly trashed the way the girl dressed and her haircut and my taste and my pathetic lack of restraint, et cetera. It was interesting, she was always sort of too cool for school about everything up to that point. Nothing seemed to phase her. Never jealous about other girls. Never worried about me. She had it all figured out when I met her. But then from that point forward…”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno, it just took a while to get back to normal. It was terrible. It’s one of my strongest memories of law school. Just being on the phone with her in between classes. Worrying that I’d miss a call and she’d come after me. It was like I was wearing an ankle monitor. You know how when people get struck by lightning it changes their pH levels, or whatever? That’s what happened to her—and that’s how I thought it was gonna maybe be forever. This one stupid fucking thing had changed her chemistry. I thought about ending it almost daily, and it killed me, because I knew I didn’t want to, but maybe I had to. I just couldn’t keep living under that cloud. Then gradually things got better. Returned to normal. But, man, I was not gonna fuck up again. I was so conditioned against it. Not even because I thought it was the most horrible thing you could do to a person—it’s not like I’d had some long-standing affair. I just couldn’t fathom dealing with the fallout again. It was like extra-bad food poisoning, or something. You’re not gonna tempt fate eating raw tuna again even if it was just one fluke piece that made you sick.”
“Tuna or fluke?”
He shook his head. He hadn’t heard Jenna make a dad joke before. The glasses of Moritz were framing this new version of her. “So yeah,” he said, “you especially don’t test the fences if you think you’re gonna end up with the person in the long run.”
“And yet you orchestrate this scheme.”
“Well, right, that all happened a while ago. That was during the first year we were dating, and I guess everything was more fragile. Then everything changed. I know on paper it looks like I’ve been with the same person all this time. But in reality, for both of us, it’s like we’ve dated several different people. At least three Whitneys. Probably three Wills. You lock into new routines, new comforts, new ideas about things. You change a lot, especially when you’re together in your twenties. It’s just different, I dunno. And, yeah, things had just felt extra right for a while, and so I asked her to marry me, and she had these…surprise reservations. And she was the one who suggested the whole thing.”
Jenna’s eyebrows flinched.
“So I went along. And, you know, once you’re in it, it’s not exactly twisting your arm to be out there talking to cute girls again, but there was still a part of me that was deeply deeply conditioned to feel nothing but guilt about putting myself in that position. I just felt properly trained off of tempting myself with situations like those. It took a little while to be okay with it, to sort of deliberately expose myself to it.”
“And now what? You’re just back to where it was? You’re free for a month and then able to snap right back to normal?”
“I guess so? I hadn’t thought too hard about it. We had this name for it—1-2-3—and when—”
“Even though it was 1-2-” She smiled at her cleverness.
“Yes. Exactly.” He felt his phone in his pocket but didn’t pull it out. “Doesn’t have the same pop, does it? But when we came clean, I dunno, I thought we’d just return to how things were. Hop on a plane, get back to New York, everything behind us. But instead we’re stuck here in whatever this is.”
“And did you like being out there? I mean, once you were deprogrammed?”
“It’s funny,” he said, “I didn’t even tell Whitney this, but the first thing that happened—and this is ridiculous to say out loud—but you just start to see women in the world a little differently again when you’re single. I mean, there’s this thing for so much of your life where you just can’t help but picture women naked, in their underwear, getting undressed, whatever. At least that’s how it was for me. Maybe it comes from growing up at the beach—the constant bodies, the constant bikinis, the bathing suits on every size, age, whatever. And so wherever I went for years, it was just a thing, it was wiring. But then, as I got older, busier, it sort of faded away. I hadn’t noticed for a while. Most of the time I’m riding the subway I’ve got my nose in paperwork, or I’ve got a podcast distracting me. But Day One with Whitney out of the house, I was riding the train to work, and there it was, that long-lost filter—all I saw was every woman in her underwear. My age. Younger. Older. Non-discriminating. It was one of those New York spring days when people were losing their minds, just skin everywhere. Pasty legs in sundresses, sleeves off the shoulder. But I could see straight through everything, too.”
“Sounds violating.”
“Sure,” he said. “So, apologies to everyone. It’s not the most conscientious
