CELESTE

Two days after giving Benji her direct line at the zoo, he calls—not to put her in touch with his friend who may or may not want to bring groups of foreign executives to the zoo but to ask her out to dinner. He wants to take her to the Russian Tea Room on Friday night.

“They’ve redone it since the eighties,” he says. “It’s supposed to be over the top now. Do you like caviar?”

“Um…” Celeste says. She has never had caviar, not only because it’s expensive but also because she has seen sacs of fish eggs floating in aquarium water and… no, thank you.

“Or we could go down to the East Village and eat at Madame Vo’s? It’s Vietnamese. Would you prefer Vietnamese?”

Celeste nearly hangs up the phone. She chastises herself for giving this guy her number. He’s an alien species—or, more likely, she’s the alien. He’s used to beautiful, sophisticated women like Jules, who probably grew up with caviar packed in her lunchbox. Celeste’s rent on East One Hundredth Street is a bit of a stretch, so she rarely goes out to eat. Occasionally, she will meet Merritt for brunch or dinner. Many times, if Merritt is photographed eating at the restaurant or if she posts photos of the food online at #eatingfortheinsta, the meal will be comped. Usually, however, dinner for Celeste is the salad bar at the corner bodega or takeout from the cafeteria at the zoo and, yes, Celeste does know how pathetic that is, but only because Merritt has told her.

“Vietnamese sounds great!” Celeste says, manufacturing as much enthusiasm as she can about a cuisine she knows nothing about.

“Okay, Madame Vo’s it is, then,” Benji says. “I’ll come pick you up?”

“Pick me up?” Celeste says. Her block—which is too far north to properly qualify as the Upper East Side, though too far south to be called Harlem—is relatively safe but neither sexy nor fetching. There’s a laundromat, the bodega, a pet groomer.

“Or we can meet there?” Benji says. “It’s on East Tenth Street.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Celeste says, relieved.

“Eight o’clock?” Benji says.

“Sounds good,” Celeste says, and she hangs up the phone to call Merritt.

First, Merritt screams, You have a date!

Celeste’s face contorts into an expression halfway between a smile and a grimace. She does have a date, and it feels good, because normally, when Celeste and Merritt talk, the only person who has exciting news, or news of any kind, is Merritt. Merritt’s romantic life is so populated that Celeste has a hard time keeping the men straight. Presently, Merritt is dating Robbie, who’s the daytime bartender at the Breslin on Twenty-Ninth Street. He’s tall and pale with bulging biceps and an Irish accent. What’s not to love about Robbie? Celeste wondered after Merritt dragged Celeste down to a Saturday lunch at the Breslin so she could meet him. Why didn’t Merritt stay with him?

For one, Merritt said, Robbie was an aspiring actor. He was constantly going on auditions, and Merritt felt it was only a matter of time before he was cast in a TV pilot that got picked up, at which point he’d move to the West Coast. It wasn’t a good idea to get too attached to anyone not firmly rooted in New York, Merritt said. However, Celeste knew that Merritt was afraid to commit because of a truly heinous situation she’d found herself in the year before she and Celeste met.

The man’s name was Travis Darling. Travis and his wife, Cordelia, owned a PR firm called Brightstreet where Merritt had worked right out of college. She had been handpicked for her job as publicity associate from a pool of over a thousand applicants, and both Travis and Cordelia saw Merritt as a rising PR star, the next Lynn Goldsmith. Merritt’s life had become completely intertwined with the lives of the Darlings. She accompanied them to dinner at least once a week; she hung out at their brownstone on West Eighty-Third Street; she went skiing with them in Stowe and joined them for beach weekends in Bridgehampton.

Travis had always been Merritt’s champion. He asked questions about Merritt’s personal life, encouraged her interest in fashion; he remembered her college roommates’ names. He sought out her opinion because she was young and had a fresh perspective. He would sometimes rest his hand on her shoulder when he was standing behind her desk, and he forwarded her racy jokes from his personal e-mail. When Merritt was out to dinner with Travis and Cordelia, he would pull out her chair. If they were waiting at the bar to be seated, he would usher her forward with his hand on her back. Merritt noted these things but she didn’t protest. After all, Cordelia was right there.

But then.

It was summer and Merritt was spending a weekend in the Hamptons with the Darlings. On Saturday afternoon, the three of them were lying on the beach when a call came in from a client, a supermodel who had just had an altercation with a flight attendant. Words had been exchanged and a fellow passenger had leaked the story—which cast the supermodel in a very unflattering light—to the press. It was a publicity situation that could easily escalate into a publicity nightmare. Cordelia had to go back to the city to deal with the fallout.

I’ll go with you, Merritt had said. You’ll need help.

I have Sage, Cordelia said. Sage Kennedy was a brand-new hire. Merritt had sensed Sage’s ambition and professional envy immediately; Sage wanted to be the next Merritt. Sage was too young and broke to spend summer weekends away, but now that would work in her favor. When Merritt insisted she was more than happy to go back to the city, Cordelia said, You stay here and enjoy. I’ll see you Monday.

Had Merritt been uneasy about staying in the house with Travis alone? Not really. By that point, Merritt had been working for Brightstreet for three years. If Travis were going to make a pass at her, she figured, it would have happened already.

But late that afternoon, as Merritt was rinsing the sand off her feet at the outdoor hose before going into the house, Travis came up behind her and, without a word, untied the string of her bikini top. Merritt had frozen. She was petrified, she told Celeste, but she’d decided to laugh it off as a prank. She grabbed the strings and started to retie them but Travis stopped her. He took both of her hands, pulled her to him, and started kissing the back of her neck. Into her ear he whispered, I’ve been waiting so long for this.

“I was trapped,” Merritt told Celeste. “I could have pushed him away but I was afraid I’d lose my job. I was afraid he’d tell Cordelia that I was the one who took off my top. So I let it happen. I let it happen.”

The affair lasted seven torturous months. Merritt lived in mortal fear of Cordelia finding out, but Travis assured Merritt there was nothing to worry about. His wife, he said, was frigid and possibly even a lesbian and she wouldn’t have cared even if she did find out.

Deep down, she wanted this to happen, Travis said. One of the reasons she wanted to hire you was that she knew I thought you were hot.

As it turned out, Travis was gravely mistaken about what Cordelia wanted. Cordelia hired a private investigator, who followed both Merritt and Travis, accessed their phone records and text messages, then presented Cordelia with all the proof she needed, including, somehow, 8-by-10 glossies of Merritt and Travis showering together in Merritt’s apartment.

Cordelia had swiftly taken the company from Travis, as well as their investments and their brownstone. She fired Merritt and set out to shred Merritt’s reputation professionally and personally—and by then, Cordelia’s friends were Merritt’s friends. Travis forsook Merritt as well. She called and begged him to tell Cordelia the truth: that he had started the affair and he had given her no choice but to be complicit. Travis had responded to her calls and texts by filing a restraining order against her.

Merritt had been suicidal in the aftermath, she confided to Celeste. On bad days she stared at a bottle of hoarded pills—Valium, Ambien, Xanax. On good days, she looked for jobs in other cities, but it turned out Cordelia’s tentacles reached all the way to Chicago, DC, Atlanta. Merritt didn’t get so much as a callback. Every once in a while Cordelia would text her, and each time Merritt saw Cordelia’s name on her phone’s screen, she thought that maybe, just maybe, Travis had come clean and told Cordelia that the affair had been his fault, that he had coerced Merritt, then basically blackmailed her. But the texts were always the exact opposite of apologies. One said: If I thought I could get away with it, I would kill you.

But then, one miraculous day, Merritt received a text from Sage Kennedy, who, Merritt knew, had summarily taken her position in the company. The text said: Cordelia has sold the brownstone on Eighty-Third Street and is relocating Brightstreet to LA. Thought you would want to know.

At first, Merritt didn’t believe it. She was wary of Sage Kennedy. But when Merritt checked Business Insider, she saw it was true. She wondered if maybe Travis had preyed on Sage Kennedy after Merritt left. She was afraid to ask, though she did text Sage back to thank her for the information. She had, essentially, been set free.

Soon thereafter, Merritt found a job in PR with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and although she took a pay cut, she was grateful for the fresh start. She introduced herself to Celeste in her first weeks of work by saying, “You’re the best-looking, most normal person who works at any of our zoos. Please let me use photos of you in the literature.”

Celeste had been stupefied by Merritt’s blunt honesty. “Thanks,” she said. “I think.” They had gone to lunch together in the zoo’s cafeteria, and over tuna fish sandwiches, a friendship was forged. Merritt credited Celeste with “saving” her, although Celeste saw it as the other way around. Celeste had been bound and determined to move out of Forks Township and make it in New York City on her own, but even she had been confounded by just how on her own she actually was. The city was home to ten million people and yet Celeste had a hard time meeting anyone outside of work. She had two sort-of friends on her block: Rocky, who worked at the bodega, and Judy Quigley, who owned the pet-grooming business.

Rocky had taken Celeste on a date to the Peruvian chicken place on Ninety-First Street but then he confessed that although he liked Celeste and thought she was very, very pretty, he had neither the time nor the money for a girlfriend. Mrs. Quigley was a pleasant woman and she and Celeste shared a love of animals but it wasn’t like they were ever going to go out for cocktails.

Merritt was the New York City friend of Celeste’s dreams. She was fun, sophisticated, and plugged in; she knew everything that was happening for Millennials in the city. She told Celeste that her experience with Travis Darling had jaded her, but all Celeste saw was her tender heart. Merritt was remarkably patient, kind, and maternal when it came to Celeste, and she knew that Celeste could handle her pulsing, frenetic world only in small bites.

“I don’t know what to do,” Celeste says to Merritt now. “Benji came to the zoo with his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s daughter. He and the girlfriend were arguing and then I noticed him staring at me. Then he asked for my card. For a friend, he said, and I believed him. I gave him my direct line. So do you think he broke up with his girlfriend already? He wants to take me to Madame Vo’s, which is all the way down on Tenth Street. It’s Vietnamese.”

“Madame Vo’s is on everyone’s list because SJP eats there,” Merritt says. “But I don’t like the way they seat twos. It feels like you’re on a date with the couples on either side of you.”

“Should I cancel?” Celeste says. “I should probably cancel.”

“No!” Merritt says. “Don’t you dare cancel! I’m going to help you. I’m going to transform you. We are going to make this Benji fall in love with you in only one date. We are going to make him propose.”

“Propose?” Celeste says.

Later, Merritt comes over to Celeste’s apartment and she uses Celeste’s laptop to Google Benji—Benjamin Garrison Winbury of New York City. In a matter of seconds they discover the following: Benji attended the Westminster School in London, then went to high school at St. George’s in Newport, Rhode Island, and college at Hobart. Now he works for Nomura Securities, which further Googling discloses is a Japanese bank with a headquarters in New York. He sits on the board of the Whitney Museum and the Robin Hood Foundation.

“He’s twenty-seven years old,” Merritt says. “And he sits on two boards. That’s impressive.”

Celeste’s anxiety ramps up. She has met several board members of the conservancy; they’re all wealthy and important people.

Merritt scans through images of Benji. “The mother has resting-bitch face. The father is kind of hot, though.”

“Merritt, stop,” Celeste says, but she peers over Merritt’s shoulder at the screen. She expects to see pictures of Benji with Jules and Miranda, but if those pictures existed, they’ve all been expunged. There is a photo of Benji with friends in a restaurant raising cocktails and one of him posing on the bow of a boat. There’s a picture of Benji with a guy who must be his brother at a Yankees game, and in the picture Merritt is referring to, Benji poses with a refined older couple, the mother cool and blond, the father silver-haired and grinning. There’s Benji hoisting a tropical drink under a beach umbrella and one of him in a helmet sitting astride a mountain bike.

“Girlfriend is gone, I’d say,” Merritt remarks. “Thoroughly scoured from his feed. Let’s check Instagram—”

“I don’t want to check Instagram,” Celeste says. “Help me find something to wear.”

Celeste meets Benji outside Madame Vo’s at exactly eight o’clock on Friday. Merritt advised Celeste to show up ten minutes late but Celeste is always prompt—it’s a compulsion—and Benji is already waiting, which is, she decides, a good sign. Celeste has borrowed a dress from Merritt; it’s a rose-gold Hervé Leger bandage dress that Celeste knows retails for well over a thousand dollars. Merritt was given it for free to wear to the opening of a new club, Nuclear Winter, in Alphabet City, and when Merritt is photographed in something as much as she was in this dress that night, she can never wear it again. Celeste is also wearing Merritt’s shoes—Jimmy Choo stilettos—and she’s carrying Merritt’s gold clutch purse. The only things she’s missing are Merritt’s wit, charm, and confidence. Celeste calls upon advice her parents have been giving her since she was old enough to understand English: Be yourself. It’s wonderfully old-fashioned and possibly ill advised. Celeste has always been herself, but that hasn’t won her any popularity contests. Genus: Girl Scientist. Species: socially awkward.

“Hi,” she says to Benji as she steps out of her Uber.

“Wow,” Benji says. “I almost didn’t recognize you. You look—wow. I mean, wow.” Celeste blushes. Benji is taken aback, maybe even awestruck, and it doesn’t seem like an act. Celeste is unsure whether to kiss him or hug him and so she just smiles and he smiles back, looking into her eyes. Then he holds the door to the restaurant open and ushers Celeste inside. “Are you hungry?” he asks.

Benji is nice. Celeste didn’t think there were any nice guys living in New York. The men she sees on the subway and on the street all seem to leer at her breasts or swear under their breath if she’s taking too long with her MetroCard. The men at the zoo are no prizes. Darius, who took Celeste’s job in primates when she got promoted, has confessed that he spends nearly half his paycheck on internet porn. Mawabe, who works with the big cats, is addicted to the video game Manhunt; he offers to teach Celeste to play it every time they have a conversation. The problem with people from the zoo in general is that they relate better to animals than to humans, and that’s true for Celeste as well.

When Benji tells Celeste that he works for the Japanese bank Nomura, she pretends this is brand-new information. “You mean to tell me you’re just another soulless private-equity guy?” she says, hoping it sounds like she is subjected to dates with such guys every weekend.

He laughs. “No, that would be my father.” He then explains that he heads Nomura’s strategic-giving department, so it’s his job to give money away to meaningful causes.

“Eventually, I’d like to run a large nonprofit. Like the Red Cross or the American Cancer Society.”

“My mother has breast cancer,” Celeste blurts out. Then she bows her head over her crispy spring rolls. She can’t believe she just said that, not only because it’s the world’s most depressing topic but because she hasn’t discussed her mother’s cancer with anyone.

Benji says, “Is she going to be okay?”

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Celeste’s mother, Karen Otis, had stage 2 invasive ductal carcinoma that reached her lymph nodes, necessitating eighteen rounds of chemo and thirty rounds of radiation after her double mastectomy. She rang the bell at St. Luke’s for her final treatment back in July and she isn’t supposed to have a follow-up appointment for six months. But she was experiencing back pain so she’d gone to see her doctor this week. He ordered an MRI, one that Karen nearly refused because it was so expensive and Bruce and Karen were already loaded down with medical bills for treatments that weren’t covered by Bruce’s modest health insurance. However, Bruce insisted they do the test. When he talked to Celeste about it on the phone, he quoted a song by the Zac Brown Band. “‘There’s no dollar sign on peace of mind,’” he said. “‘This I’ve come to know.’”

Celeste figures they must play this song on the Neiman Marcus Pandora, because she hasn’t known her parents to like any song recorded after 1985.

The results of the MRI should be back on Monday.

Celeste raises her eyes to Benji’s, his brown to her blue. Brown is a dominant gene. Benji’s DNA, she is sure, is composed of only dominant genes. She’s not sure what to say. Her mother’s cancer is a private matter, and Celeste’s entire relationship with her parents is too intense to explain to most people.

“I don’t know?” Celeste says. She raises her voice at the end so that she sounds more hopeful than maudlin. She doesn’t want Benji feeling sorry for her. This is one reason why Celeste doesn’t like talking about Karen’s illness. Also, she doesn’t want to hear anyone else’s inspiring story about a sister-in-law who went through exactly the same thing and is now running ultramarathons. Celeste doesn’t mean to be ungenerous in her thoughts, but she has come to the chilling conclusion that we are all alone in our bodies. Irrefutably, immutably alone. And hence, no one’s story offers hope. Either Karen will survive the cancer or it will metastasize and she will succumb to it. The only people Celeste can tolerate discussing Karen’s treatment with are Karen’s doctors. Celeste believes in science, in medicine. She has secretly been donating a hundred dollars a week to the Breast Cancer Research Fund. “She’s okay now. For the time being.” Celeste is too superstitious to say her mother has beaten it, and she refuses to call her mother a survivor. Yet.

“Thank you for telling me,” Benji says.

Celeste nods. He understands her, maybe? He senses the agony lurking behind her metered answers? He seems perceptive the way so few men—so few people—are. Celeste picks up a spring roll and dips it into the vinegary sauce. “These are really good.”

“Wait until you taste the pho,” he says. He takes a sip of his beer. “So, tell me about the zoo,” he says, and Celeste relaxes.

Benji insists on taking Celeste home in a taxi, which seems quaint. He asks the driver to wait while he walks Celeste to the door of her apartment building. She feels a huge relief that there will be no quandary about whether to invite Benji up and if she does invite him up about how far to let things go. Merritt believes in sleeping with a guy on the first date, but Celeste feels very much the opposite. She would never, ever.

Ever.

Benji tells her he would like to see her again. The following night, if she’s free, he has tickets to see Hamilton.

Celeste gasps. Everyone in this city wants to see Hamilton.

Benji laughs. “Is that a yes?”

Before she can answer, he’s kissing her. Celeste starts out feeling self-conscious about the taxi driver who is waiting, but then she surrenders. There is nothing in the world that is quite as intoxicating as kissing, Celeste thinks. She lets herself get lost in Benji’s lips, his tongue. He tastes delicious; his mouth is both soft and insistent. His hands are on her face, then her neck, then one hand travels to her hip. Before she can guess what will happen next, he pulls away.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he says. “I’ll call with details in the morning.” With that, he goes down the stairs and by the time Celeste’s head clears, his taxi has pulled away.

They go to see Hamilton. It turns out that Benji’s father is one of the original investors and has house seats, which are first-row center of the first balcony. Benji has seen the musical five times but he doesn’t tell her this until afterward, when they’re sitting at Hudson Malone, dipping jumbo shrimp into cocktail sauce, and Celeste has to admit, she would never have known. He had seemed as enraptured as she was.

Benji says he would like to see her Sunday and Celeste suggests a walk in Central Park. The park is a place she feels comfortable, nearly has a sense of ownership. She runs the reservoir any chance she can get and in the summer lies out on a towel in North Meadow. She loves Poet’s Walk and the Conservatory Pond, but her favorite spot is surely a place Benji hasn’t experienced before. She meets him south of Bethesda Fountain where a group of roller skaters congregates on weekends. There’s a motley crew of characters—Celeste has come to recognize most of the regulars—who skate in an oval around a boom box that plays classic rock songs.

When Benji arrives, they’re skating to “Gimme Three Steps,” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“I didn’t think anyone roller-skated anymore,” Benji says. “This is like something out of 1979.”

“I come here all the time,” Celeste says. “I think I like it so much because this is the music my parents listen to.”

“Oh, yeah?” Benji says. “Are they big Skynyrd fans?”

“All classic rock,” Celeste says. “They especially love Meat Loaf.” As Celeste watches the skaters, she thinks about being a little girl sitting in the backseat of their Toyota Corolla while her parents cranked up the volume on their cassette of Bat Out of Hell. They loved all the songs, but their favorite was “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” When the song got to the middle section with Meat Loaf and Mrs. Loud, Karen would sing the woman’s part, and Bruce would sing the man’s part, and at the end of the song they would belt out the lyrics together with so much gusto that Celeste got swept away. Her parents, in those moments, had seemed the most glamorous couple in the world. Celeste fully believed that if they had shared their car-singing with the wider world, they would be famous.

The roller-skating song changes to “Stumblin’ In,” by Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman, and Celeste gets light-headed. It’s eerie; this song is a particular favorite of her parents, and it’s not a song that’s played on the radio anymore. Celeste is stunned. She turns to Benji, overcome. How can she explain that this song so strongly evokes her parents, it’s as if Betty and Mac are standing right there? Benji makes the slightest movement of withdrawal but Celeste can’t possibly leave the skaters until this song is over. She sings along softly under her breath and Benji seems to understand. He stays patiently at her side. The next song is “Late in the Evening,” by Paul Simon, which is also on Bruce and Karen’s comprehensive playlist, but Celeste realizes that enough is enough. She takes Benji’s hand and they stroll toward Bethesda Fountain.

After the park, Celeste and Benji sit at the Penrose and drink beer and watch football. When the game is over, Celeste asks Benji if he wants to grab a pizza and go back to her apartment but Benji says he likes to be in bed early on Sundays so that he’s fresh and ready for the week ahead. Celeste says she understands and a part of her is relieved because it once again delays the question of what she and Benji will do once they’re alone together. But a part of her is disappointed. She really enjoys Benji’s company; he’s easy to be with, he’s funny, he tells stories about growing up in London and his family’s immigration to New York City but he never sounds like he’s bragging even though it’s clear he’s a member of the elite. He listens well too. He encourages Celeste to talk by asking good questions and then giving her lots of time to answer.

But she has probably bored him to death. And freaked him out by wanting to listen to old-people music in the park.

“I do have a question before we leave,” Celeste says.

Benji covers her hand with his hand.

She can’t believe she’s being so bold. It’s none of her business, but if Benji is giving her the brush-off and she might never see him again, she might as well ask this question.

“Shoot,” he says.

“What happened with your girlfriend?” Celeste asks. “And her daughter?”

Benji sighs. “Jules?” he says. “We broke up. I mean, obviously. But it wasn’t your fault. Things had been bad for a long time…”

“How long had you dated?” Celeste asks.

“Just over a year,” Benji says.

Celeste exhales. Not as long as she had feared. “I guess I’m mostly worried about her daughter,” Celeste says. “She seemed so attached to you.”

“She’s a great kid,” Benji says. “But she has a father and two really involved uncles who live only a few blocks away, and when I broke things off with Jules, I told her I would be available if Miranda ever needed me.” He stares at Celeste. “It says a lot that you would ask about Miranda.”

His gaze is so intense that Celeste casts her eyes down to the scarred bar. “What about Jules?” Celeste says. “Did she take it okay?”

“Not at all,” Benji says. “She threw her shoes at me. She screamed. She smashed her phone and that made her cry. She’s in love with her phone.”

“So many people are,” Celeste says.

“That was part of the problem. She couldn’t be present; she was self-absorbed; she wasn’t a kind or thoughtful person. She called herself a stay-at-home mom but she never spent time with Miranda. She went to Pilates class, got her nails done, and met her friends for lunch, where they all engaged in competitive non-eating. The only reason we were even at the zoo that day was that I insisted. Jules was hung over from the night before and all she wanted to do was take a nap and a bubble bath before she met her friends Laney and Casper for dinner at some overrated restaurant where she would order a salad and eat two pieces of lettuce and half a fig. That trip to the zoo put it all in perspective.”

“I just wondered,” Celeste says. “I wasn’t trying to steal you away or break you up.”

Benji laughs and slaps money on the bar. “Let me walk you home,” he says.

He kisses Celeste good-bye outside her apartment building and the kissing becomes so heated that Celeste wants to ask him to come upstairs. But he pulls away and says, “Thanks for a great weekend. I’ll talk to you later.”

Celeste watches him take the steps two at a time, wave, then disappear down the dark street.

When she gets upstairs, she sends Merritt a text: I blew it.

How? is Merritt’s response. What happened?

Celeste sends a series of question marks. A few seconds later, her phone rings. It’s Merritt, but Celeste declines the call because suddenly she is too sad to speak. She should have canceled the date on Friday, she thinks. Because what she has learned over the course of this weekend is that she is lonely and life is nicer when there’s someone to talk to. To kiss. To bump knees and hold hands with. Celeste was pretty sure from the start that she was an alien species, but it’s disheartening to have it proved true.

He’ll talk to her later. Yeah, right.

On Monday, as she is in her office reviewing the following summer’s special programming—they’re getting a gray-shanked douc langur from Vietnam, which makes Celeste think of Madame Vo’s with Benji across the table—there’s a knock on her door. It’s a quarter after two and Celeste suspects it’s Blair from the World of Reptiles saying she has to go home because she has a migraine setting in and can Celeste please cover her three o’clock snake talk, which also makes Celeste think about Benji.

“Come in,” Celeste says halfheartedly.

It’s Bethany, her assistant, holding a vase of long-stemmed pink roses.

“These are for you,” Bethany says.

The next day, Celeste’s father calls to say that Karen’s MRI came back fine.

“Really?” Celeste says. It’s not beyond her parents to lie to her about this.

“Really,” he says. “Betty is as fit as a fiddle.”

On Thursday night, Benji takes Celeste to a movie at the Paris Theater. The movie is French with subtitles. Celeste falls asleep as soon as it starts and wakes up at the end credits, nestled in Benji’s arm.

On Friday, Benji takes Celeste to dinner at Le Bernardin, which is nine courses of seafood. About half the courses press at Celeste’s boundaries. Sea urchin custard? Kampachi sashimi? She imagines telling her parents that Benji spent nine hundred dollars on a dinner that included sea urchin, kampachi, and sea cucumber, which is not a vegetable but an animal. There is wine with every course and Celeste gets tipsy. That night, she invites him upstairs.

She is nervous. Before Benji, there have been only two other men, one of whom was the TA in her Mechanisms of Animal Behavior class in college.

The next day, Merritt texts: So???????

Celeste deletes the text.

Merritt texts again: Come on, Celeste. How was our Benji in the sack?

Fine, Celeste texts back.

That bad? Merritt says.

Good, Celeste says. Which is true. Benji was very considerate, very aware of Celeste’s desires—what felt good, what she liked. Maybe he was too aware. But that hardly seems like something to complain about.

Uh-oh, Merritt says.

There are dinners in SoHo, the Village, and the Meatpacking District. There is takeout Indian food and sushi and Vietnamese, now a favorite, that they eat at Celeste’s apartment while watching The Americans. There is brunch at Saxon and Parole, where Benji introduces Celeste to the phenomenon of the bloody mary bar. She loads her glass up with a little of everything: celery, carrots, peppers, house-made pickles and pickled onions, bacon, fresh herbs, beef jerky, olives, and spirals of lemon and lime. Then, when her glass is accessorized like an eighty-year-old woman who is wearing every piece of jewelry she owns, she snaps a photo and sends it to Merritt, who responds ten seconds later: Are you at Saxon and Parole?

There’s a reading at the Ninety-Second Street Y by a writer named Wonder Calloway, who reads a story about a woman Celeste’s age who treks to the base camp of Everest with a man she loves but who does not love her in return. The man suffers from altitude sickness and has to turn back. The woman has to decide whether to stop or keep going. Celeste is moved by the story and by the whole idea that literature can be relevant to her life and her feelings. She never felt that way when reading anything in high school. At the end of the reading, Benji buys Celeste a copy of Wonder Calloway’s short stories and Wonder autographs it. She smiles at Celeste and asks her name, then writes To Celeste in the book. Celeste is thrilled but also a little chagrined. The experiences Benji is showing her, while extraordinary, are messing with her head. She knows she is fine just as she is—she has a college education and a good job—but each date shows her all the ways she has yet to grow.

She reads the short stories on her commute to work and by the end of the week, she’s finished and she asks Benji for another book. He gives her The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. She loves it so much she reads it any chance she can get. She reads Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult and The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. Benji gives her a list of books he’s loved and together they go to Shakespeare and Company.

There’s a new Burmese place on Broome Street that Benji wants to try and Celeste says, “Burmese?” She didn’t even realize Burmese food warranted its own restaurant, but she should know by now that Benji seeks out far-flung cuisines—East African, Peruvian, Basque. He compares it to Celeste’s love of exotic animals. She can talk all day about the Nubian ibex and he can talk about momos.

The Burmese restaurant has only ten seats, all of them taken, so they get their order to go and Benji says, “Since we’re close, we might as well go to my place.”

“You live nearby?” Celeste asks. Benji has referred to his apartment only as being downtown—but everyone lives downtown compared to Celeste. She has wondered why she has never been invited to Benji’s apartment. After she finished reading Jane Eyre, she joked that Benji must be hiding a crazy wife in his apartment. He bristled at this. “It’s nothing special,” he said. “You won’t like it.”

If it’s yours, I’ll like it, Celeste thought, but she hadn’t wanted to push. He obviously had his reasons.

Now, Benji leads Celeste into a high-rise luxury building in Tribeca, right next to Stuyvesant High School, and after greeting the doorman and the man behind the front desk, they get into the elevator and Benji presses the button that says 61B.

The sixty-first floor, Celeste thinks. Her building is a six-floor walk-up and she lives on the fifth floor in the rear.

Celeste’s ears pop on the way up and Benji is uncharacteristically quiet. The elevator fills with the scent of the Burmese food, but Celeste’s appetite is quelled by a sudden case of nerves.

The elevator doors open and Celeste steps into an apartment. She’s confused for a second.

“So, wait,” she says. She turns around. Yes. The elevator has opened up right into Benji’s apartment.

Benji takes Celeste’s hand. She is fixated on the elevator. An elevator into his apartment. Did she know places like this existed? Yes, she has seen it in the movies. If she lived here, she might be tempted to press the elevator button just so she could experience its arrival solely for her, even when she didn’t have to go anywhere.

The apartment has been professionally decorated and it’s immaculately clean. There are black leather sofas, deep royal-blue club chairs, a colorful kaleidoscope of a rug, an enormous flat-screen TV, and, on either side of the TV, shelving that is crisscrossed on the diagonal, which is one of the coolest things Celeste has ever seen. She didn’t even know diagonal bookshelves existed, but now all she wants in the world, other than an elevator that opens up into her apartment, are diagonal bookshelves and books to put on them.

There’s a gourmet kitchen, which is sleek and gleaming except for a wide, rough-hewn wooden bowl filled with fruit: pineapple, mangoes, papayas, limes, kiwis. The fruit in that bowl probably costs as much as everything in Celeste’s apartment. She feels a sudden hot shame about the futon she uses as a bed, covered with a quilt her mother bought from an Amish market in Lancaster, and about her Ikea side tables and the lamps she took from her parents’ house, the bases of which are mason jars filled with beans. She cringes when she thinks of the vintage zoo posters that she had framed at great expense (they had been ninety dollars apiece and she had blanched) and the rainbow candles her mother made out of melted crayons.

Benji says something about showing her around and she mutely follows him into the bedroom, where there is a floor-to-ceiling window that looks out on uptown. All of Manhattan is rolled out before them, colorful and twinkling—and one of those lights, just one dim bulb a hundred-plus blocks up and to the east, is in Celeste’s apartment window.

She presses her hands against the window, then removes them; she doesn’t want to leave prints.

“You hate it,” Benji says.

“How could you possibly think that?” she asks. “It… it… defies my humble vocabulary.”

“My parents pay for it,” Benji says. “They offered it to me and I couldn’t say no. I mean, I guess I could have said no, but you’d have to be crazy to turn a place like this down.”

Part of Celeste agrees, of course, but another part of her stands in righteous opposition. She thinks of Rocky, who rents a studio apartment in Queens; he rides the N/R train into the city at five o’clock each morning to run the bodega. At night, he takes classes at Queens College. He’s studying to be a teacher. There’s nobility in that, Celeste sees, a nobility and an ethic that’s missing when one lives in an apartment that could easily cost seven or eight thousand dollars a month, paid for by one’s parents.

“This building has a gym,” Benji says. “And it has a pool. You can use the pool this summer. You can kiss North Meadow good-bye.”

I don’t want to kiss North Meadow good-bye! Celeste thinks stubbornly. But she knows she’s being silly.

“We should appreciate this place while we can,” Benji says. “My parents are threatening to buy me a brownstone uptown.”

A brownstone uptown, Celeste thinks sardonically. Of course; the next logical step.

“East Seventy-Eighth Street,” she murmurs in spite of herself. When she first moved to Manhattan, before she met Merritt, she used to spend her weekends wandering the Upper East Side, looking in windows, admiring leaded-glass transoms and iron fretwork. The block between Park and Lexington on Seventy-Eighth Street had been her very favorite. She used to gaze at the fronts of the homes and wonder just what lucky people lived there.

People like Benji.

“I’ll tell them to look only on East Seventy-Eighth Street,” Benji says. “Now let’s eat.”

Celeste spends all week feeling uneasy about Benji’s privilege. She can’t exactly claim to be blindsided, she knew it existed, but now that the extent of his wealth and advantage has been fully revealed, her view of him is tinged, ever so slightly, with distaste.

But then Benji informs her that on the last Sunday of every month, he volunteers at a homeless shelter in the basement of his parents’ church on the Upper East Side. He asks Celeste if she would like to come. It entails serving the guests a hot supper, then making up the cots and staying overnight. Benji would be in a room with the men and Celeste with the women.

“It’s not everyone’s cup of tea,” he says.

“I’ll do it,” Celeste says.

At Benji’s suggestion, Celeste dresses casually, in sweatpants and a T-shirt. She helps chop vegetables for soup, and during the meal, she pours coffee. All of the guests want sugar in their coffee, lots of sugar; the pockets of Celeste’s pants bulge with packets. One of the male guests starts calling her Sugar Girl. Benji hears him and says, “Hey there, Malcolm, slow your roll. She’s my Sugar Girl.” This makes everyone laugh. Benji has an easy rapport with the guests and knows many of them by name—Malcolm, Slick, Henrietta, Anya, Linus. Celeste tries to be respectful, to pretend she’s working at a restaurant for paying guests, but she can’t help wondering what circumstances life threw at these people that they ended up here. With one stroke of bad luck, she supposes, it could be her. Or her parents.

After dinner, Celeste makes up fourteen cots with sheets and blankets. She doles out one flat pillow per guest. Benji had told her that the guests go to bed early—even though TV is allowed until ten—because being homeless is cold and exhausting. Most of the women lie down right away. Celeste has brought her toiletries in a plastic bag and she goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. It’s kind of like living in the college dorms, but she suspects Benji is right: this isn’t for everyone. Celeste can’t imagine Merritt here in a million years and his ex-girlfriend Jules even less so. She feels proud of herself for being a good person, then decides that the pride means she’s not so good after all.

She kisses Benji chastely in the hallway between the men’s dorm and the women’s dorm.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asks.

“Yes, of course,” she says.

“I wish I could be with you,” he says. He kisses her again.

Celeste crawls onto her cot. The sheets smell like industrial-strength bleach, and the pillow is no more effective than a cocktail napkin. She stuffs her winter coat under her head.

She falls asleep listening to the other women snore. She misses her mother.

Merritt sends a text in the middle of the following week: How’s everything with the boyfriend?

Boyfriend. The term gives Celeste pause—but there’s no denying it. Celeste and Benji like each other. They’re a couple, doing couple things. They’re boyfriend and girlfriend. They’re happy.

And then Celeste meets Shooter.