Sunset Park

would have been too much to hope for, she realized, since he openly admitted that these changes confused him just as much as they confused her. She asked him if he had ever thought about psychotherapy, and he said yes, he was considering it, his life was in a shambles and there was no question that he needed help. Alice sensed that he was telling her the truth, but she wasn’t entirely certain of it, and whenever she replays that conversation in her mind now, she wonders if his passive, self-accusatory position was notsimply the easiest way out for him, a lie to mask the fact that he had fallen for someone else. But which someone else? She doesn’t know, and in the two and a half months since she last saw him, none of their mutual friends has talked to her about a new person in connection with Jake. It could be that there is no one—or else his love life has become a well-guarded secret. One way or the other, she misses him. Now that he is gone, she tends to recall the good moments they had together and ignore the difficult ones, and oddly enough, what she finds herself missing most about him are the occasional jags of humor that would pour out of him at unpredictable moments, the moments when the distinctly unhumorous Jake Baum would drop his defenses and begin impersonating various comical figures, mostly ones who spoke with heavy foreign accents, Russians, Indians, Koreans, and he was surprisingly good at this, he always got the voices just right, but that was the old Jake, of course, the Jake of a year ago, and the truth is that it had been a long time since he had made her laugh by turning himself into one of those funny characters. Meese Aleece. Keese mee, Meese Aleece . She doubts that another man will come along anytime soon, and this worries her, since she is thirty years old now, and the prospect of a childless future fills her with dread.
    Her weight is down, however, more from lack of appetite than from scrupulous dieting, but one fifty-four is a decent number for her, and she has stopped thinking of herself as a repulsive cow—that is, whenever she thinksabout her body, which seems to happen less often now that Jake is gone and there is no one to touch her anymore. Her dissertation stalled for about two weeks after his departure, but then she pulled herself together and has been working hard ever since, so hard, in fact, that she is well into the concluding chapter now and feels she can finish off the first draft in approximately ten days. For the past three years, the dissertation has been an end in itself, the mountain she set out to climb, but she has rarely thought about what would happen to her after she reached the top. If and when she did think about it, she complacently assumed the next step would be to apply for a teaching position somewhere. That’s why you spend all those years struggling to get your Ph.D., isn’t it? They give you your doctorate, and then you go out and teach. But now that the end is in sight, she has been reexamining the question, and it is by no means certain anymore that teaching is the answer. She is still inclined to give it a shot, but after her less than happy experience as an adjunct last year, she wonders if toiling in some English department for the next four decades will be fulfilling enough to sustain her. Other possibilities have occurred to her in the past month or so. A bigger, more demanding job at PEN, for example. That work has engaged her far more than she thought it would, and she doesn’t want to give it up, which she would be forced to do if she landed a post in an English department—which, by the by, would most likely be at a college eight hundred miles to the south or west of New York. That’sthe problem, she says to herself, as she pulls open the door of the restaurant and walks in, not the job but the place. She doesn’t want to leave New York. She wants to go on living in this immense, unlivable city for as long as she can, and after all these years, the thought of living anywhere else strikes her as insane.
    Ellen is already there, sitting at one of the tables along the eastern wall of the restaurant, nursing a glass of white wine as she waits for her friend to show up. Ellen knows more about what Alice’s ex-lover has been up to for the past few months than Alice does, but Ellen hasn’t said anything to Alice about these goings-on because she promised Bing to keep them a secret, and Ellen is not someone who breaks her word. Bing has