“Well, I don’t want to worry about what’s going to happen a few months from now. We don’t know how you’re going to feel in a few months. Or how I’ll feel. I don’t want you thinking you have to come back home just so we can be together. Or assuming I’m going to transfer there. Let’s just worry about what happens now. Look at it like this. How many girls have you been with? In your whole life?”

He stared. He had seen this look of frowning, pretty concentration on her face many times, but he had never been scared of it before.

“You know the answer to that,” he said.

“Just me. And no one does that. No one lives their entire life with the first person they slept with. Not these days. There isn’t a man on the planet. There need to be other affairs. Two or three at least.”

“Is that your word for it? ‘Affairs’? That’s tasteful.”

“Fine,” she said. “You have to fuck a few other people.”

A cheer went up from the crowd, a roar of approval. Someone had slid home under the tag.

He was going to say something, but his mouth was too tacky, and he had to have a sip of beer. There was only one swallow left in the glass. He didn’t remember the beer coming, and he didn’t remember drinking it. It was lukewarm and salty, like a mouthful of the ocean. She had waited until today, twelve hours before he left to cross the ocean, to tell him this, to tell him-

“Are you breaking up with me? You want out-and you waited until now to tell me?”

The waitress stood at the side of their table with a basket of chips and a rigid smile.

“Would you like to order?” she asked. “Something else to drink?”

“Another martini and another beer, please,” Merrin said.

“I don’t want another beer,” Ig said, and didn’t recognize his own thick, sullen, almost childish voice.

“We’ll both have Key lime martinis, then,” Merrin said.

The waitress retreated.

“What the hell is this? I have a plane ticket, a rented apartment, an office. They’re expecting me to be there ready to work on Monday morning, and you lay this shit on me. What outcome are you hoping for here? Do you want me to call them up tomorrow and tell them, ‘Thanks for giving me a job that seven hundred other applicants wanted, but I have to pass’? Is this a test to see what I value more, you or the job? Because if it is, you ought to know it’s immature and insulting.”

“No, Ig. I want you to go, and I want you to-”

“Fuck someone else.”

Her shoulders jumped. He was a little surprised at himself, hadn’t expected his own voice to sound so ugly.

But she nodded, and swallowed. “Do it now or do it later, but you’re going to do it anyway.”

Ig had a nonsensical thought, in his brother’s voice: Well, it’s like this. You can live life as a cripple or a lame-ass. Ig wasn’t sure Terry had ever really said such a thing, thought the line might be completely imagined, and yet it came to him with the clarity of a line remembered from a favorite song.

The waitress gently set Ig’s martini in front of him, and he tipped it to his mouth, swallowing down a third of it in a gulp. He’d never had one before, and the sugary, harsh burn of it caught him by surprise. It sank slowly down his throat and expanded into his lungs. His chest was a furnace, and a sweat prickled on his face. His hand drifted up to his throat, found the knot of his tie. He struggled with it, pulling it loose. Why had he worn a button-down shirt? He was roasting in it. He was in hell.

“It’ll always bother you, wondering what you missed out on,” Merrin said now. “That’s how men are. I’m just being practical. I’m not waiting to get married to you so I can fight through your midlife affair with our babysitter. I’m not going to be the reason for your regrets.”

He struggled for patience, to recover a tone of calm, of good humor. The calm he could manage. The good humor he could not.

“Don’t tell me how other men think. I know what I want. I want the life we spent the last however many years daydreaming about. How many times have we talked about what to name the kids? You think that was all bullshit?”

“I think it’s part of the problem. You live like we already have kids, like we’re already married. But we don’t and we aren’t. To you the kids already exist, because you live in your head, not in the world. I’m not sure I ever even wanted kids.”

Ig yanked off his tie, flung it on the table. He couldn’t stand the feel of anything around his neck right now.

“You could’ve fooled me. It sounded like you were into the idea the last eight thousand times we talked about it.”

“I don’t know what I’m into. I haven’t had a chance to get clear of you and think about my own life since we met. I haven’t had a single day-”

“So I’m suffocating you? Is that what you’re telling me? That’s horseshit.”

She turned her face away from him, stared blankly across the room, waiting for his anger to subside. He drew a long, whistling breath, told himself not to yell, and tried again.

“Remember the day in the tree house?” he asked. “The tree house we could never find again, the place with the white curtains? You said this doesn’t happen to ordinary couples. You said we were different. You said the love we had was marked out as special, that no two people out of a million were ever given anything like we were given. You said we were meant for each other. You said there was no ignoring the signs.”

“It wasn’t a sign. It was just an afternoon lay in someone’s tree house.”

Ig shook his head slowly from side to side. Talking to her now was like flailing his hands at a storm of hornets. It did nothing, and it stung, and yet he couldn’t stop himself.

“Don’t you remember we looked for it? We looked all summer, and we could never find it again? And you said it was a tree house of the mind?”

“That’s what I said so we could stop looking for it. This is exactly what I’m talking about, Ig. You and your magical thinking. A fuck can’t just be a fuck. It always has to be a transcendent experience, life-changing. It’s depressing and weird, and I’m tired of acting like it’s normal. Will you listen to yourself? Why the fuck are we even talking about a tree house?”

“I’m getting sick of your mouth,” Ig said.

“You don’t like it? You don’t like to hear me talk about fucking? Why, Ig? Does it mess with your picture of me? You don’t want a real person. You want a holy vision you can beat off to.”

The waitress said, “I guess you still haven’t made up your minds.” Standing beside their table again.

“Two more,” Ig said, and she went away.

They stared at each other. Ig was gripping the table and felt dangerously close to turning it over.

“We were kids when we met,” she said. “We let it get a lot more serious than any high-school relationship should’ve been. If we spend some time with other people, it will put our relationship in perspective. Maybe we pick it up again later and see if we can love each other as adults the way we did as kids. I don’t know. After some time has gone by, maybe we can take another look at what we have to offer each other.”

“‘At what we have to offer each other’?” Ig said. “You sound like a loan officer.”

She was rubbing her throat with one hand, her eyes miserable now, which was when Ig noticed she wasn’t wearing her cross. He wondered if there was meaning in that. The cross had been like an engagement ring, long before either of them had ever discussed the idea of staying together their whole lives. He honestly could not remember ever seeing her without it-a thought that filled his chest with a sick, drafty sensation.

“So do you have someone picked out?” Ig asked. “Someone you want to fuck in the name of putting our relationship in perspective?”

“I’m not thinking about it that way. I’m just-”

“Yes you are. That’s what this is all about, you said so yourself. We need to fuck other people.”