YOU AND YOUR boyfriend are talking about your dream jobs. You say that you want to be extremely wealthy, and he asks what job you want to do in order to become extremely wealthy. You hadn’t thought about it that way before. You pick at the piping on the cushion of your secondhand couch from the ’70s. It was your dead grandmother’s couch, and it looks like a dead grandmother’s couch. Your boyfriend asks you again about the job, the actual job, because you went to state college and got mediocre grades, and right now your actual, non-dream job involves selling golf balls, and your boyfriend points out that he doesn’t really see a clear path to wealth for you now, and then he asks, what would you do differently? The question floats between you like something deadly, a poisonous insect maybe. You are both very quiet as you’ve realized what he actually said. One of you has to change the subject now, before it’s too late. If a silence like that continues on for too long, it becomes impossible to get rid of.