Stella is in the middle of telling half-a-dozen people about the time she rode in an elevator with Sandra Day O’Connor when Graham shows up at the college young alumni networking event. Thanks to a mutual friend of theirs, she’s heard Graham is in town, known he is likely to be here tonight. She’s just grateful to be holding the wine glass and paper plate of snacks she intends to count as dinner when he arrives. Having her hands full takes the awkward question of handshake or hug out of her hands, so to speak. Ha! She cracks herself up sometimes. Which is an important skill to have when you’re trying to impress people with your best work anecdote and the arrival of the college boyfriend you haven’t seen in four years makes you lose your place mid-sentence. Thankfully, the event organizer, a woman with an oversized emerald green sweater and a Rachel haircut she is too old to pull off, jumps in to introduce Graham around the circle.  

“No introductions necessary,” Graham says when the woman gets to Stella. The way he holds up his hand should have felt dismissive, but it is charming somehow. He is charming, somehow. Stella can tell this is true by the way the organizer and the others in their little circle are smiling, how they are far more attentive now than they were at any point in the middle of her story. Graham’s fingers graze the top of Stella’s arm. “We used to date.” 

Does he wink? She could have sworn he winked.  

Stella tells herself to focus on Graham’s too-small teeth, how they make him look like a rodent. Not the way his hair falls with a jaunty swoop over one eye, or how she wants to touch it. They spent a few semesters together watching movies and eating take-out pizza when they were in college, that’s all. “Ancient history,” Stella says now, but the conversation circle has re-formed away from her and Graham, and no one’s paying attention. It is Washington, DC, in the late 90s. There are the sex lives of far more important people to consider.  

“So what have you been up to?” Stella asks, more concerned with sounding interesting than interested. Clearly, her Justice O’Connor story needs more work. Maybe she’ll tell him about the afternoon she spent driving around in a Cadillac with Lady Bird Johnson and the Secret Service. It’s the kind of thing he’d get a kick out of.  

When Graham says his internship is “basically glorified scut work. Coffee, filing, making copies,” Stella is emboldened. For the entire two-plus years she and Graham had done whatever it was they’d done in college, her at the suburban Philadelphia women’s college, him at the coed partner school a mile away, she’d never gotten the chance to feel more successful than he was at anything. Now, she has a real job where they pay her to think and write and do things that actually matter, and he does not. On impulse, she suggests they should “get together sometime.” Things hadn’t ended well between the two of them, which was mostly her fault, but they are adults now. And she likes the way he’s looking at her.  

Two weeks later, Stella is standing outside the National Archives Building on Pennsylvania Avenue waving at Graham from across eight lanes of traffic. She could wait for him to come to her or… She casts a hasty glance left and right and then darts across halfway, into the turn-lane-to-nowhere that runs through the middle of the street. When Graham hugs her, she feels the full weight of his body packed along her stomach and chest. Their cheeks press against each other. Her breath catches. It is uncomfortable and yet—“Fancy meeting you here,” he says—it is also electric. Or maybe that’s just because they are in the middle of a busy street, flirting with the possibility of getting run over by a cab.  

His eyes are just a touch a beneath hers. The two of them are the exact same height in bare feet, which is why Stella has worn the boots.  

*

It was early in the fall of Stella’s junior year, Graham’s senior year, when he invited her to drive up to his parents’ house in Massachusetts for the weekend. Graham’s dad was an econ prof at MIT. Impressive, sure, but his mom was a legend. She’d graduated from the same college Stella attended, done fieldwork throughout Africa, and served as an adviser to President Carter on human rights abuses in the 70s. Rumor had it that President Clinton was considering asking her to head a new task force on global food insecurity. Stella would have been thrilled just to meet the woman, let alone spend the weekend in her house.  

For reasons she still can’t explain, Stella had resisted calling what she and Graham were doing “dating” when they got together her sophomore year. Pretty much everyone they knew was doing the casual hook-up thing; she and Graham were just doing it longer than most. But then Graham went to France for study abroad, and suddenly the boyfriend-girlfriend label became a whole lot more appealing. Not because Stella had any expectation that they be exclusive while he was abroad—she didn’t—but because the letters Graham wrote her while he was in France loosed something inside her. By the time they had their reunion at his uncle’s place in Maine over the summer, she was in love. While it was true that things had felt less zingy since they’d gotten back to school, Stella remained hopeful. And now she was meeting his parents. Lots of Stella’s college friends were boarding school kids, rich, or both, and she was starting to think there were people at school who thought she was interesting because of her small town Missouri upbringing—which was totally hysterical. And totally different from how she was obsessed with the students who’d grown up abroad and spent Thanksgivings with Uncle “Marty” (Scorsese) in Palm Beach; those who quoted poetry in Italian, read philosophy in German; the students who simply knew things. The people like Graham, in other words. Still, Stella had gotten pretty decent at, if not blending in, at least fitting in during her two-plus years as a Midwestern transplant on the East Coast, and she’d always been good with adults. She could handle Graham’s parents.  

The first indication that Stella might be out of her depth occurred shortly after they arrived in Cambridge. It was late, and his parents made only a quick appearance to say hello, their grim, pale faces reminding Stella of the portraits she’d seen of Quaker abolitionists from the 1830s, despite Graham’s insistence that everyone in his family was Episcopalian. After they went to bed, Graham took her on a tour of the house. Stella inhaled the charm of every creaky step. The wrinkled glass panes in the mullioned windows, the walls of books, the landscapes in gilt frames. It was like nothing Stella had ever seen in real life, but exactly like everything she’d imagined. Graham even pointed out an early printing of Little Women on display in the room off the hall—the library!—and a leather-bound copy of The Scarlett Letter under glass in the guest bedroom. “We’re related,” Graham said with startling nonchalance. If she’d been related to them—to Alcott, anyway, she was less of a Hawthorne fan—Stella would have dropped the information into conversations every chance she got. Stella had written a paper on The Scarlet Letter in high school where she’d argued that the only reason the book was still required reading was that the misogynistic blowhards in charge of setting curricula were so threatened by actual feminism that they had to use a hundred-and-fifty-year-old book about a woman a hundred years before that to discuss society’s messed up gender norms. It was the best C Stella ever got.  

As Stella got ready for bed that night at Graham’s, she decided it was best not to read anything into the fact that The Scarlett Letter was the book enshrined next to the four-poster double bed she’d be sleeping in tonight, alone.  

At nine the next morning, Graham rapped on Stella’s door. “Breakfast!” He stepped into the bedroom and gathered her into a hug. “Good sleep?” Stella willed herself to relax. The truth was she’d spent much of the night dreaming about lying in a casket that was being lowered into a grave with a wobbly crane. Every time she tried to sit up and beg for someone to free her, the coffin would tilt and she would slide to the opposite end. Stella blamed the house’s sloped floors. When she was unpacking her toiletries the night before, she dropped a lipstick and it rolled all the way to the back of the room. There was no way that could be safe. The whole back wall was liable to disintegrate into a heap of rubble if they weren’t careful. She was the daughter and granddaughter of brick layers. She knew things.  

Graham pressed his nose and lips against Stella’s collarbone. Her neck. “You smell good.” He made his way up to her chin before Stella started fussing with the barrette that held the sides of her hair back from her face. It wasn’t much of a stretch to assume Graham’s parents wouldn’t appreciate finding them making out in the bedroom. And anyway, she was still obsessing over their impending doom. The house must have been expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars, or maybe even a million, she had no idea; it was within walking distance of one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Houses like this, in these kinds of neighborhoods, did not collapse, she told herself. There was simply too much money and history holding them up.  

Stella stepped back from Graham and checked herself one more time in the mirror. She was wearing her favorite thrift store blazer and vintage silk tie, a pair of perfectly distressed Levi’s, the Docs she’d bought on her first ever trip to New York City. It was her power outfit, the masculine flourishes intended to give her 1940s starlet curls and red lipstick a little more edge. She knew her mother would have told her to play it safe and wear something more conventional, “Or at least a pair of blue jeans without holes in them!” but Stella also knew that playing it safe was how her mother had ended up spending her entire adult life in the middle of rural nowhere. Stella believed in wearing clothes that made her feel good, and this outfit made her feel amazing. Playfully, she grabbed Graham’s hand, swung his arm. They were a couple in a gum commercial, carefree and beautiful, sauntering down the street on a cloudless summer day, and she was about to charm some parents.  

Graham stopped at the door. “Aren’t you going to…?” His face broke out in lines: three horizontal forehead creases and two parallel lines between his eyes. “You know.” He tipped his head to the open suitcase on her unmade bed. 

Stella gave his arm a lighthearted swat when she realized what he was talking about. “Of course, I am!” Then she shoved all the poking-out-bits into her suitcase, zipped it closed, and set it out of the way. She even hummed—See how relaxed I am? How calm?—as she pulled up the sheets, smoothed the blanket, plumped the pillow.   

 “What an adorable munchkin you are,” Graham said, leaning in for one last kiss.  

*

Traffic thrums on either side of them as Stella and Graham stand in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Metro station on one side, the Archives on the other. It has been almost two weeks since they spent an hour talking only to each other at the alumni event instead of collecting business cards the way they were supposed to. Afterwards, Graham would wait four days before emailing Stella, and she would wait three more before responding; they would agree to meet six days after that. They are the model of casual indifference. Now, Stella tugs at Graham’s sleeve and the two of them dash back to her side of the street.  

“Nice shirt,” Stella says when they are safely on the sidewalk. Her voice is higher than she would have liked. “Sturdy cotton,” she adds, deeper now. She has seen Graham in a dress shirt and tie exactly three times: his college graduation, the networking event, and now. He looks good, and—Graham tilts his head from one side to the other—also strangely like a pigeon. “Lots of threads,” she says, for no other reason than to fill the space between them. 

Stella and Graham walk around the Archives building toward the heart of the National Mall where the Smithsonian museums stretch between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. The daffodils are blooming and their jaunty yellow heads wave and cheer them along their way. “I thought we could go to one of the museums,” Stella says. She doesn’t make enough money to suggest one of the restaurants on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the museums are free. “The Hirshhorn, maybe?” She points between the Natural History Museum and the West Building of the National Gallery to one of her favorite art museums, the donut-shaped building in the distance. “It’s got a great sculpture garden.”  

Graham rakes his fingers through his hair. “I am familiar with the Hirshhorn,” he says with a grin. 

Right. Of course. Because, unlike her, Graham has lived on the East Coast his entire life. The pinch in her throat forces Stella to acknowledge that she’s been trying to impress him. She thinks of the weekend one of his boarding school roommates visited him in college. A group of them went out for Thai food in West Philly, saw a movie at Penn. The guy was the grandson of some bigwig art collector, Graham told her. Hirshhorn himself, for all she knew. Stella reminds herself to take a breath. Graham’s pretentiousness. Her insecurity. This is old news. Old them.  

Graham loops her arm companionably through his. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me. I’m just happy to get to see you.”  

The physical ease Stella feels at Graham’s touch surprises her. She attributes this to the overall unreal-ness of the day: the brilliant sky with dollops of mashed potato clouds; the tulips, more electric than any she’s seen before. Later, Stella will blame this peculiar unreality for disconnecting her from her very real, very regular life. 

*

After Stella finished making her bed in his parents’ guest room, Graham led her downstairs to the kitchen where his mother was waiting for them. The woman sat at a wrought iron, glass-topped table in what might have been called a sunroom, only this morning there was no sun. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a leaf-dappled flagstone patio with a brick wall around it. There was a stone planter with a single tree whose limbs and few remaining gold leaves dangled protectively over the entire space. It was gray and austere, a place for sipping gin and tonics and hosting intimate cocktail parties while a string quartet played in the background. It was not a space for swing sets or treehouses, or even grass.  

“’Morning, Mom,” Graham said, pecking his mother on the cheek.  

Stella smiled pleasantly, no teeth. “Good morning, Mrs. Armstrong.”  

In the split second of silence that followed, a vital question Stella hadn’t thought to ask before exploded and sent shrapnel tearing through her brain. The woman had her Ph.D. What if she expected Stella to call her Doctor? Stella looked to Graham. A little help here? But he was leaning against the kitchen island reading the newspaper.  

Graham’s mother set aside her pencil and the Times’ crossword puzzle and surveyed Stella. “Call me Bunny.”  

No way that was her real name.  

“I trust you were comfortable last night. That you slept well.” The woman—Bunny—spoke in a way that allowed for no alternative interpretation.  

“Yes, thank you.”  

Bunny followed up with nothing. Graham followed up with nothing. Which left Stella.  

“It was lovely, actually.” Ever since Stella heard a very chic, very rich, very lovely senior from Connecticut using the word, she had embraced it as her own. (The woman had also been a fan of delight, but Stella knew better than to try pulling that off). Should she sit down? Stay standing? Stella shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Surely Graham or his mother were about to say something. Any second now. Truth be told, Stella’s mattress last night had been too hard for her taste, but the blankets and pillows? Stella felt her lips parting, her jaw softening. They’d been a delight, In fact, she’d have to say those blankets and pillows were the most undeniably delightful bedding she’d ever experienced in her heretofore delightful— 

“What’s so funny?” Bunny asked.  

Stella looked down in surprise. At her arms, her legs. As if expecting to discover that her body had gone rogue, and she needed to rein it back in. 

“Why are you laughing?” Bunny insisted. 

But Stella hadn’t been laughing. She’d been smiling, trying to look pleasant. Could this be a test of some sort, a secret WASP hazing ritual that Stella, despite being white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant herself, couldn’t possibly understand? Again, she looked to Graham for help, but he was chewing on his finger, still reading. So Stella did what she often did when the situation called for her to be confident and poised and she felt anything but, when she was determined to show that she got the joke, of course she had, because she’d been joking, too, and wasn’t it all just hilarious? Stella laughed, for real this time.  

“Graham,” Bunny said, never taking her eyes off Stella, “It’s time to put away the paper. Your friend and I need an interpreter.” 

Forget how Stella and her best friend Iris had tracked down Bunny’s Pulitzer Prize winning series on female genital mutilation in Somalia on microfilm at the school library and taken notes. Forget the box of chocolates that cost five hours of work study income Stella had brought as a hostess gift. There was no denying it. Stella was in over her head and drowning fast. How naive she’d been to assume she and Bunny would get along, to think that Bunny might have found her impressive in some way. And they hadn’t even gotten to the lox. 

*

The Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden is buzzing with landscapers wielding weedwhackers when Stella and Graham arrive, so they decide to start with the art inside the building. After half an hour meandering through the circular galleries, they have concluded that Jaleo serves the best tapas in town, that any movie other than Titanic should have won Best Picture, and that American Pastoral was brilliant, even if Stella did like The God of Small Things better. They are standing in silence before a Picasso linocut, and it’s as if they have both just realized how uncomfortable things between them ought to have been. A caption on the wall says something about different kinds of etchings, copper plates versus zinc, dry and wet techniques, but Stella isn’t making sense of any of it. All her energy is concentrated in the nerves at the base of each and every hair follicle on her arm, the very same arm that is within some small fraction of an inch from Graham’s.  

“I’m headed up to Maine for the summer,” Graham says, his eyes never leaving the Picasso. “After I finish my internship.”  

Maine is craggy rocks, cute accents, and salty hair. It is the one perfect week the two of them spent at Graham’s uncle’s place near Acadia National Park when he got back from Avignon, her playing Bach Preludes and Fugues on the old upright piano while he boiled the fresh-caught lobsters they’d picked up on the pier, the two of them entwined on the floor in front of the stone fireplace, the old record player spinning out a gravelly Billie Holiday. 

“I’m going to write.” 

Stella’s body hums with the memory of translucent onionskin pages folded into red, white, and blue airmail envelopes, all the letters Graham wrote her during his semester in France. She thinks of the stuffed armchair she used to sit in at the campus center to read them when it was cold outside, the bench beneath the gingko where she went when it was warm. Sometimes she’d stop by the campus bookstore first and buy herself a Mozartkugel chocolate in honor of all the hours they’d spent together in her practice room before he left, her prepping for a piano jury, him working on problem sets. He’d listen to anything she played, but he loved Mozart, and sometimes, after she finished practicing for the night, they would lock the door and have sex beneath the Steinway grand.  

“Did you hear me?” Graham asked. 

“I always said you should…” Stella doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Novels or essays. Short stories. A manual for the IRS. She would read anything, as long as he was the one who’d written it. From the corner of her eye, Stella sees Graham’s hands, tented in prayer. She thinks, this is what he does when he wants to make a point, and it occurs to her how well she still knows him, how much of him she has retained. No matter what happens, she is likely to spend the rest of her life with little calluses of Knowing About Graham that can’t be sloughed away.  

“That’s why I’m doing it,” Graham says. “I have to see what happens.”  

And Stella knows he isn’t just talking about the writing.  

*

The three of them, Bunny, Graham, and Stella, sat at the breakfast table that first morning in Massachusetts. Graham’s dad was playing racquetball the way he did every Saturday morning, and Graham’s younger sister was away at boarding school.  

“Graham tells me you like lox,” Bunny said. 

“I said she’s never had lox,” Graham clarified. 

Bunny furrowed her brow, like Stella’s lox-less status was one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. 

 “Juice?” Graham jumped up from the table and headed to the fridge. “Mom always does fresh-squeezed.” 

“Sure.” Stella eyed a plate piled with wet orange ribbons streaked with dull white veins. Lox. Brine cured salmon. Which was totally different from plain old smoked salmon, and not just because of the Yiddish name. She’d looked it up. The strangeness of Graham, a guy who was super serious about being a WASP, being equally enthusiastic about exposing her to a Jewish delicacy would be lost on her until much later in life. From Stella’s perspective, lox was just one more thing that Graham knew and she didn’t, one more mark of his worldliness and her bumblefuckness.  

Stella took her time unfolding the stiff cloth napkin and spreading it across her lap. Her only previous experience with salmon anything was her mom’s salmon cakes, and they involved canned salmon, whisked egg, saltine crackers, and a frying pan. She liked those just fine, so she’d been holding out hope that the lox would taste pretty much the same. Now, though, seeing—smelling—the lox in person, she no longer thought that was likely.  

Next to the mound of lox was a bowl of little green mystery pellets and a platter with a brick of cream cheese, four bagels sliced in half, and little piles of thinly-sliced red onions, translucent tomato slices, and lemon wedges. If only Stella had told Graham from the beginning that she didn’t actually like fish. But that would have required her to have known what lox was the first time he started raving about it—or to have confessed her ignorance. It was bad enough that Stella had never eaten something Graham said was so amazing, but to not even know what it was?  

“Please,” Bunny said, offering the platter to Stella. “Help yourself.” 

As if she were playing the claw game at an arcade, Stella homed in on her prize and dropped down. When the piece of lox she drew out was small enough to go down in one swallow, if she folded it just right, she could have whooped with joy.  

“That’s nothing,” Bunny tsked. She reached across the table and deftly slid two more slices onto Stella’s plate. “I ordered this from the best Jewish deli in town especially for you.” 

“Thank you?” Stella sensed that Bunny would interpret her upspeak as a character flaw, but she couldn’t worry about that now. “I can’t possibly—” As soon as Bunny’s fork was out of the way, Stella slid in with her own fork, trying to reverse course. “I want to make sure there’s plenty for everyone. Mr. Armstrong—”  

But Bunny was faster. She whisked the plate away so quickly that the contents of Stella’s fork plopped on the table. The breath escaped Stella with an audible ooph. She had no choice but to scoop the whole lot back onto her plate and pretend she hadn’t just engaged in a fork battle with Bunny and lost.  

“Dr. Armstrong won’t be joining us until it’s time for the party,” Bunny said. 

Stella fumbled for her napkin to dab at the smear the lox had left on the table. What party? 

“This looks delicious,” Graham said quickly. Stella watched as he spread a thick layer of cream cheese across a bagel and began stacking lox, tomato, onions, and the tiny green balls on top. Then she followed his example. On her first bite, Stella used her teeth and lips to nudge the lox out of the way. She reminded herself that she hadn’t even eaten bagels and cream cheese until she started college. Now she loved them. This was no big deal. 

Bunny waited until Stella’s mouth was full to say, “Graham tells me you’re majoring in anthropology.”  

Running her tongue around the front of her teeth to catch any cream cheese ooze, Stella nodded. She’d been hoping that their shared anthropology majors would be a point of connection between her and Bunny, and she wanted to be ready to say something smart.  

 “Not an easy major,” Bunny said.  

No one ever said majoring in anthropology was hard. Physics, yes; math, sure. But anthro? And yet, there was nothing about Stella’s college experience that had been particularly easy. Stella wouldn’t go so far as to call herself an admissions mistake the way some people joked about themselves, but that was more because she avoided putting anything painful into words for fear it might come true, not because she didn’t believe it. 

“I didn’t mean intellectually,” Bunny clarified, “although I suppose it might be that, too. I was referring more to the unique… challenges one faces in getting an undergraduate degree in a field that requires graduate school and field work and many additional years of expensive study to be successful.” Bunny smooshed her lips together and the two creases along the sides of her mouth deepened into marionette jowls. “Even with perfect grades in college, there’s no guarantee of funding for grad school, and for many people, taking on additional debt simply isn’t advisable, especially if they are already saddled with undergraduate obligations. Are you saddled with undergraduate obligations, Stella?” 

“Mom!” Graham stopped wolfing down his bagel. He reached for Stella’s knee underneath the table. “That’s none of your business.” 

Stella was certain that the loans she’d taken out to help pay for school and the two Bs she’d gotten freshman year flashed in neon across the freckles on her nose and cheeks. The next time she bit into her bagel, she forgot all about her plan to eat only a tiny piece of the lox she’d avoided the first time around. Instead, she pulled away before her teeth had completely cut through the flesh, taking a long strand with her. For one miserable second, the lox lolled from the corner of her mouth like a second tongue. Stella sucked it in and began chewing. Her cheeks filled with fish but her epiglottis remained closed for business.  

“Mom doesn’t mean anything with all her questions. She’s just trying to get to know you.”  

Bunny raised her eyebrows in a not-particularly-convincing fashion.  

“Go on, Mom, tell her.” 

Stella reached for her glass. Water would have been better, but orange juice would have to do. When the juice met the lox in Stella’s mouth, a sting rose in her nose, tears sprang to her eyes. She leapt from her seat, napkin clutched to her face just in time to catch the liquid that dribbled from her nose. “Bathroom?” she squeaked. 

Bunny waved her hand toward a hallway Stella hadn’t even noticed until now.  

“Second door on the left,” Graham called.  

Stella lingered in the bathroom until the clank of dishes being rinsed and loaded into the dishwasher subsided and the burble of Graham and Bunny’s conversation dissipated. And then she waited a few minutes more before splashing water on her face, checking her teeth for wayward lox, and, ever so quietly, turning the doorknob and venturing into the hallway. She was surprised to discover Dr. Armstrong leaning against the kitchen countertop reading the paper. It was comforting how much he looked like his son. 

“Aha,” Dr. Armstrong said. “You have emerged.” He was wearing khakis and a teal striped Oxford button-down. Butter-colored socks peeked from between his loafers and the cuff of his pants. His damp hair, wavy but not as thick as Graham’s, was the only indication that he’d just come from the gym. 

How much had they told him? Stella wondered. “My stomach…”  

Dr. Armstrong pushed up from the countertop, unfolding to his full, rather impressive height. “I wouldn’t give it another thought if I were you. Lox isn’t for everyone.” He retrieved a mug from the cupboard, filled it with coffee, and handed it to Stella. “What is, when you think about it?” 

Stella felt absurdly grateful. Clearly, Graham took after his father in the looks and behavior department. With any luck, Bunny’s influence had been mitigated by all those years of boarding school.  

“That’s quite a nice jacket and tie you’re wearing,” Dr. Armstrong said. “Very Annie Hall.” Then his eyes traveled to Stella’s knees and stayed there. “You’ll want to finish getting ready pretty soon, though.” 

Self-consciously, Stella crossed her right leg in front of her left, nearly covering the hole over her left knee. With her right hand, she picked at the webbing of threads along her upper thigh.  

“We’ll be leaving for Nana’s party in…” Dr. Armstrong glanced at the clock over the stove. “Thirty minutes.” 

There it was again: the party. Please don’t let this be one of those times her mother had been right about her clothes. Stella was trying to determine the best way to ask Graham’s dad what he was talking about when she caught the spicy amber scent of Graham’s Hermes cologne.  

“Surprise!” Graham said, sauntering into the kitchen. “We’re going to my great-grandmother’s ninety-fifth birthday party!” He draped his arm over Stella’s shoulder, nudged aside her dangly beaded earring with his nose, and whispered, “Tu es tellement sexy.”  

Heat stormed Stella’s cheeks. She wasn’t sure if she was more mortified at being called sexy in front of Graham’s dad or at being blindsided by the party.  

Dr. Armstrong made a noise that sounded very much like a chuckle and then made a show of snapping open his newspaper. 

“You never thought to mention your great-grandmother’s birthday party until right now?” Stella hissed, squirming out from underneath Graham’s arm. “I would have brought a pair of pants without holes in them. Or maybe even a skirt. I would have gotten her a present.” 

Graham reached for her again, totally unperturbed. His face said, You’re so cute, instead of what it ought to have said: I’m a fucking asshole who should have known better.  

When Stella caught Dr. Armstrong watching them over the top of his paper, the grin on his face the mirror image of his son’s, the myriad ways Stella had miscalculated piled up like bricks, column after column—enough to jack-up and re-level every floor in the entire house.  

Stella made the best of things when they got to Nana’s party. She’d never believed her mom when she said, “The first thing people notice is your smile,” but now Stella clung to the adage, smiling extra wide as she was introduced to each new aunt, uncle, cousin, friend, or neighbor. When the photographer took pictures of Nana in her wheelchair surrounded by all the guests, Stella made sure to stand in the back where no one could see her legs. 

By some tacit agreement, Stella and Graham never once talked about that weekend in all the remaining months they were together. Stella wasn’t sure if this was because things genuinely got easier between her and his parents, or if she just got better at pretending she knew what she was doing. 

*

The longer Stella and Graham stand in the Hirshhorn staring at the Picasso, the more certain Stella is that Graham has heard something about her current living situation. Just because she hasn’t talked to him directly in the last four years doesn’t mean he hasn’t talked to any of their mutual friends. Certainly no one had spared her the details of his last relationship: how gorgeous the woman had been, how accomplished, but also how devastated she was when he broke up with her, how she told anyone who’d listen that Graham was too hung up on “the one that got away” to be in an adult relationship. Stella had wondered about the identity of Graham’s runaway heartbreaker—how could she not?—but like so many things where Graham was concerned, she couldn’t let herself think about it too deeply.  

Then came the alumnae event. Talk of Maine. All this electricity. 

“We should go outside,” Stella says. She is mining her cheeks for moisture. “The landscapers are probably done by now.” She is aware of her hands, fluttering like erratic butterflies. They are too small, her hands; her fingers, too short. She used to dream of performing Liszt—Totentanz, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, all those flamboyant etudes—but Stella’s hands are made for Mozart. She is good at Mozart. She’s won prizes for Mozart. But it’s nearly impossible to be content with what you’re good at when what you want is something different all together. 

Graham reaches an arm across Stella’s torso. Ever so gently he winds her around to face him. “Look at me.” 

Stella’s eyeballs are too heavy for her to lift them off her boots. She is thinking about the nature of choices, those she’s made deliberately and those she’s made without realizing a choice existed in the first place. Right now she can think of a dozen small decisions—actions, really. No, gestures, they were that tiny—that ended up being far more consequential than she ever could have anticipated. The thought makes her want to sit down in the middle of the gallery, rest her head against the wall, and wait for the immediate future to pass.  

Graham brushes his fingertips beneath her chin. “Earth to Stella. Tell me what you’re thinking.”  

There are tears collecting in the corners of Stella’s eyes, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing tears.   

Graham drops his arm and steps away.  

He knows.  

“People said you were living with him, but I didn’t believe them.” Graham’s voice is taut. “He was supposed to be your afraid-of-commitment fling.”   

The words leave Stella feeling more insulted than ashamed, although she suspects a kinder person, a better person—the sort of person she very clearly is not—would experience those feelings in the opposite order. There’s so much she didn’t understand about herself when she and Graham were dating, so much she doesn’t understand about herself even now. It wasn’t long after they got back from that first trip to his parents’ that Graham started making plans for the two of them for after he graduated. He would stay in Philly while she finished school, then they’d spend a year in Europe traveling to all the places she’d always dreamt of visiting. Stella had agreed because—well, because she saw no reason not to. It was all so far in the future. Meanwhile, there were more trips to his parents’, a flight to Missouri to meet her parents, talk of her joining his family on a trip to Costa Rica. How could she not be enchanted with the grace and ease with which Graham moved through life? When she was with him, she got to experience his privilege by extension. It was like gold dust sprinkled cross her cheekbones. The problem was, a part of her couldn’t escape the fear that she was delusional to believe the two of them could ever make it as a couple in the real world.   

One night in the spring, two months before his graduation, Graham started talking about how he and Stella were going to get an apartment together, go to grad school in the same city, and then, when they were both established they’d… “you know.”  

The very next day, Stella met Paul at a party, and two days later she cancelled her spring break plans with Graham.  

For the final weeks of the semester, Stella floated between Graham and Paul. She’d thought it would bring her clarity, this experiment of hers. Maybe it had, too, because after Stella started seeing Paul, she began reframing the grand questions of her life in terms of what she deserved rather than what she wanted. Who was she to think she belonged anywhere other than in a world where the lack of privilege and wealth made it a whole lot more difficult to accomplish anything? 

“I never planned it this way,” Stella says now. She could have been talking about the chemistry between her and Graham this afternoon or about Paul moving in with her last year, but she could just as easily have been talking about her break-up with Graham four years ago. Stella had gone from Graham to Paul, one man to another, like she’d had to choose between them, instead of considering the possibility that she could, or even should, choose neither. 

“I think this is exactly how you planned it. It’s what you do.”  

They are outside the museum now, beneath the circular canopy of the Hirshhorn. It reminds Stella of an alien spaceship: the museum’s curved legs, the ship’s retractable landing gear; the center courtyard fountain, the flame and smoke exhaust of burning propellants. 

“Instead of making difficult decisions for yourself, you put a bunch of obstacles in the way to make them for you,” Graham says. 

Stella doesn’t like where this is going. She is with Paul. She likes Paul, probably even loves him. She definitely loves how seldom they fight, how he never makes her feel like an idiot. But things between Stella and Paul have always just happened, rolled, one thing atop the other, like a boulder on a not-particularly-steep hill. She’s not sure she’s ever chosen him.    

“You couldn’t handle how serious we were getting so you sabotaged us with Paul. Now you’re, what? Trying to use me to get out of your relationship with him?” 

Self Doubt, jaunty and insouciant, sidles up behind her—Hey, Stell-Stell, how’s it goin’—his familiar arms stretching around her waist from behind, his pointy chin digging into the bony part of her shoulder. Stella’s brain (or is it her heart?) has been pirouetting from DC to Maine and back again ever since Graham said he was going up there for the summer. She has vacation time saved. She could go to Maine for a few weeks and write alongside Graham without risking her job. But is that what she wants? There are no guarantees with her and Graham, but with Paul, if she goes to Maine, he absolutely will not be waiting for her in the light-filled apartment with the Roman shades she made from a pattern in Martha Stewart Living when she returns.  

It is too simplistic for Stella to argue that Graham underestimated her when they were dating in college, and too easy for him to say that she’d been afraid of commitment, although she suspects that both are true to some extent. She’d been worried about what would happen if she followed Graham more deeply into his world only for him to discover she wasn’t half as unique or interesting or beautiful as he’d imagined. And he’d been worried about…? Well, Stella can’t say for sure, but the way he’s shifting back and forth on his feet, his face and neck splotched red, suggests there’d been something.  

Stella thinks of the homemade pasta she and Paul picked up at the Farmer’s Market over the weekend, how the two of them will eat it tonight on the couch watching Must See TV’s line-up of sitcoms topped off with a hospital drama. Although Stella has kept every one of the letters Graham wrote her in college, she has never re-read them; she’s known instinctively that she should not. As she watches Graham’s retreating figure heading back to the Metro by himself, she imagines being beamed up into the Hirshhorn spaceship above her, disappearing once and for all. On this fantastically beautiful afternoon in the middle of a life that has seemed mostly fine until now, something to be proud of even, Stella thinks it’s too bad the same instinct that has protected her from Graham’s letters hasn’t done a better job of warning her about today.