A few days before I moved into the apartment above Tom and Sylvia, I received a birthday card that said “___ is the new 29!” You could write in whatever age the person was turning, but since I was turning 29, my friend thought it would be funny to leave it bank. I wasn’t sad to be 29, but the wild-card nothingness of “___” made me apprehensive.

I’d been living with my boyfriend up until his mother got him a job in DC with their senator. Max was ecstatic at the prospect of running through the corridors of the Capitol after a suntanned Silver Fox. I told him he was at least seven years too old to be lugging around armfuls of dot-matrix printouts. He said that if he got to lug them onto Air Force One, it all will have been worth it. He also questioned why I didn’t want to go with him. He wasn’t hurt that I didn’t love him enough to tag along. He simply didn’t get it since “you don’t really have a career.”

Max’s exit triggered a financial crisis, but I thought the angels were on my side when our landlord agreed to temporarily lower the rent until I found a place I could afford. Max and I had moved into Nick Salibian’s building when we both worked at the Kennedy School. Nick was the son of a famous Armenian baker. He liked us because Max asked him questions about the genocide and I had read a novel by William Saroyan when I was fifteen. Nick seemed under the impression that I, like Max, was politically connected. He had a bunch of kids in Marlborough and was building an empire of self-storage facilities along Route 128. Within two weeks, however, I realized that he thought the rent reduction came with benefits. When I asked, “Were you expecting me to have sex with you in exchange for the rent?” he clutched his chest like Fred Sanford and had to sit down on my wobbly kitchen chair. Then I laughed and said, “There are men like that.” The next day he gave me 30 days to vacate.

I spent all of those days looking for a place, but the only ones affordable were studios at the ends of bus lines. I was ready to go back to the shame of roommates when I saw the listing. The friends I brought to look at the place advised me not to take it. “There’s something off about those two,” said Mack of the live-in landlords. Lucy said they made her think of Boris and Natasha. (No, Boris and Roseanne. No, George Hamilton and Roseanne.) And why was the rent so low? I brought another set of friends who rendered the same verdict. “Are they married or what?” It didn’t require much boldness or stupidity to ignore all advice and take the Davis Square apartment. I was 29 and needed my own place.

First observation: Tom and Sylvia often sat side by side in the dark on an overstuffed Pottery Barn sofa. If you knew nothing about them, you wouldn’t find this strange at all. But the more you knew, the stranger it seemed. I tried to avoid looking into the curtain-less windows when I came up on the porch, but the darkened living room was usually a spectacle of TV glow. When their TV wasn’t on, it was hard to slip by out front without an encounter. Because one or the other was either coming or going, they often caught me to chat, though never EVER together. Each liked to extrapolate on fancy or techy things they’d just bought or had ordered. They were mail-order crazy—Williams-Sonoma, Crate and Barrel, Restoration Hardware, Sharper Image. Tom was always on his way to Lechmere or Radio Shack for some part to connect all his cords. He was always inviting me in to show me “something fabulous.” Their large apartment was crammed with different kinds of stuff—not just different esthetics in terms of decorating, but non sequitur objects where you could not discern life priorities. They had a business together but I had no idea what it was. Tom often referred to “my lovely wife”; I assumed he meant Sylvia, but he never mentioned her by name.

The sounds from below were often mundane TV, but sometimes it was the Stones blaring like a frat house in May. This happened when Sylvia was out. One time when Tom was breathlessly describing his desire to build “a fabulous three-season porch” in property he owned in Franconia, New Hampshire, I could think of no relevant reply, so I asked why he never played Tattoo You.

He looked as if he might cry. “I can’t believe you noticed that.”

“That’s their only album I know from listening to it.”

He made circular motions with his hands as if trying to spit up words he was choking on. “It’s too devastating.”

I nodded as if I understood what he meant.

Then he asked, “Who does it for you?”

“Does what for me?”

“You know . . . the whole New Kids bedroom poster thingy.”

This was a hard one. “Beck?”

He looked horrified. “Seriously? You mean you’re not completely infatuated with Evan Dando?”

I wondered how old he thought I was. “Not really.”

“I call him Evando!”

The woman I presumed to be Tom’s lovely wife seemed to hail from the same consumer solar system, but on the opposite side. Her roving eye was greatly unnerving. Her black hair had starling/oil-spill highlights of navy and olive. I couldn’t place anything about her age, ethnicity, or even race. She often said a few words in Spanish, but she also knew a lot of Yiddish expressions. She liked to talk about the ’97 car she was going to buy and often complained about things you couldn’t get outside of LA.

“I can’t even get a BMW SUV!” she exclaimed. When she said “SUV,” the pause between “S” and “U” was monumental; you could go out for a latte.

“Are they on back order?” I asked.

“Are you for real?” she yelled, incredulous. “Girl, they don’t even make them!”

Another time she asked, “What do you know about the Mercedes-Benz M-Class?”

“Not much.”

“It’s the only luxury-class S . . . UV you can get.”

“Does M-Class stand for Money Class?” I asked. “If so, it lacks subtlety.”

She laughed. “I’m Money Class, all the way, honey.”

She was obsessed with the cotton count in sheets; she wanted a package that said “3,000” but wasn’t able to buy it because it, too, didn’t exist. “I have very sensitive skin,” she declared, slowly rubbing together impeccably manicured fingers. Then she almost purred out the word n-i-i-i-ce. It was like watching QVC in slow motion.

Tom was always busy doing something with his hands whenever he stopped me to talk, like the White Rabbit in his waistcoat and pocket watch, whereas Sylvia was immobile and relishing it. I couldn’t help thinking they wanted to enlist me for some part of their strange enterprise. When I first looked at the place and answered Tom’s question of where I worked, Sylvia cried, “Harvard Divinity School? Christ, no one would expect you of anything!”

“Suspect, honey,” said Tom.

I’d been in the admin job at Divinity only a few weeks after leaving my admin job at the Kennedy School. I switched because the world had turned weird. Just a year before, a Gulf War veteran with medals hated the country so much that he blew up 168 people in Oklahoma City. And yet all you heard about on CNN was school uniforms and V-chips. I much preferred the intellectual atmosphere at Divinity. They let you go to daytime lectures to help visiting professors save face when the room was empty. But I could see that this intellectual bubble was lightyears from the real world of domestic terrorists and O.J.’s lucky stabbing hat. I still didn’t know what to do with the blank that was my life. When I told my father I planned to go into politics after college, he gave me a lecture: “Life is not a Lazy Susan where the world rolls around to you. You gotta go after it.” He and my mother both worked in boring office jobs at the medical supplies distributor in my hometown. They thought I was just lazy.

On a crisp Saturday morning a week or so after I moved, the weird world came for me on the porch of Tom and Sylvia’s house. Nick Salibian had pushed the doorbell. When I saw him at the bottom of the stairs I regretted having given him my address.

“You kicked me out,” I said.

He grinned.

“Did you come to personally return my security deposit?”

“Oh, my people will get that out in the mail,” he said, looking around. “I dropped by to deliver a special invitation.”

I shook my head.

“Hear me out,” he said with a laugh. “I got invited to the Clinton election night party in Boston and thought you’d like to go.”

Part of me admired the forthrightness of his sleaze. “I don’t think so.”

“Opportunity of a lifetime,” he said in a creepy singsong.

“I didn’t know you actually played the politics game.”

He said he’d made “sizable” gifts to the campaign but that his wife, Vera, was angry. “She doesn’t get that it’s an investment,” he said. “I had to drag her to Chicago.” Then he abruptly pulled out a mobile phone. “I have to show you my Motorola.”

Just as abruptly, Tom came out of his apartment and gasped as he stood stunned. “My lovely wife and I just got the same phone!”

Immediately the two of them compared screens that showed a couple lines of pocket calculator text. This was something new to me—they were together talking, but each was looking down at his phone as if there was something to see there.

“Nick’s got to go get ready to party with the Democrats,” I said to get rid of him.

“I just gave money to Bill Weld,” said Tom nonchalantly, not looking up from the inert Motorola.

“Me too,” said Nick.

I didn’t want to react, but I couldn’t help myself. “How can you go to the Democratic Convention and support a Republican?”

They both looked up at the other and burst out laughing. Tom’s face was red from the effort. “Massachusetts Miracle, darlin’.”

It was like seeing a timeline of past weird and future weird unite. “Why not vote for Bob Dole then,” I asked—“get a bigger tax break?”

“Clinton’s balancing the budget,” said Nick, “getting the bank in order.”

Tom nodded. “Bob Dole doesn’t know Netscape from his asshole.”

A week or so later, I came up the stairs to find Tom in front of my apartment door, jangling a huge ring of keys, looking for the right one. This was another reason I was always seeing him or Sylvia. My second-floor apartment should have been a two-bedroom, but there was a large room with its own locked entrance that they used for storage. They had the back enclosed porch as well, accessing it from outside stairs. That was where they put all their empty boxes with Styrofoam. Occasionally guys with a truck came to clear out the boxes.

“Tammy Tell Me True,” he said with a coy smirk. “Is Nick Salibian your Sugar Daddy?”

This was insulting, but you didn’t punch back at the landlord. “If he was, would I be living here?”

“Ouch!”

I didn’t know what there was to say about the storage mogul. “Nick Salibian is giving the party a bad name.”

“Nick Salibian sees himself as Douglas Fairbanks.”

“He looks like Cher’s father in Moonstruck.”

Excitement flashed across his face. “Come downstairs with me for a minute. I need your opinion.”

I didn’t want to go, but he was like a magnet when inspired. What he had to show me was an enormous marble bust of someone ancient. “What do you think? Is it a keeper?”

I had to reach out to feel the smooth, blank surface of the left cornea. “Is it Aristotle or Sophocles?”

“It’s Homer, you philistine.”

I looked around. “Where would you put it?”

“Not here for God’s sake. In Franconia.”

His busy hands pulled a Trainspotting soundtrack out of a Tower Records bag. “This is the second one. Did you see this movie? Fabulous.”

I was having a hard time envisioning Tom liking that movie. And the bust of Homer was throwing me for a loop. Was it hallowed out and filled with heroin?

“You look confused, sweetheart.”

“I’ve been wondering something for a while,” I said with some trepidation.

“Yay-ess?” he replied, eyelids aflutter.

“In regard to music I mean. You don’t seem the kind of person who’d be into the Stones. My brother-in-law loves them and he’s a cop in Ohio.”

He grinned coyly. “Does he wear a leather jacket on his motorcycle?”

“Nah, no motorcycle. He slows down the cruiser when he sees a Black person walking.”

“Pass,” he said, inspecting the other jewel cases he removed from the yellow bag. “Too many of those jackboots in Boston.”

“He’s only a decade or so older than me but says things like ‘It just shows to go ya.’ He seems too old to have young children.”

“All right already!” he cried, rolling his eyes to indicate ick. “As for myself and my relationship with Mick and the boys, you should know that you are feasting your eyes on a bona fide iconoclast. Allow me to explain my philosophy of life. Everything for me, no regrets. Next question.”

I made a face. “That’s not going to make you Miss Congeniality.”

“The trouble with people is that they don’t want to work. Nobody wants to work! There’s just so much to do and nothing gets done.”

I didn’t want to tell him that he sounded like my brother-in-law. I also didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t want to work in any of the jobs I knew about.

Nick Salibian certainly didn’t want to work. For weeks and then months later he continued calling on the Motorola. His messages on my machine were bludgeoned by static; he sounded like a cop reporting from a ten-car pileup on the Southeast Expressway. He probably did nothing all day but drive around before and after his three-martini lunch. Such was the life of a storage impresario. I never picked up and never called him back, so he had no choice but to show up on Tom and Sylvia’s porch. I’d find out from them all the times he’d stopped by.

When he caught me at home on Saturday mornings, there was really nothing to say.

“That Sylvia is a charmer,” he told me in a hushed tone. “A little heavy, but a charmer.”

That was a good one. “She’s got a signed photograph of Nancy Reagan,” I told him.

He laughed. “We all have baggage.”

“She said she voted for Reagan the second time because she knew he was going to take down the wall. I said to her, ‘Really? Are you sure it wasn’t because he said women on welfare were driving pink Cadillac convertibles?’ ”

He laughed. “You need to grow out of that eighties mentality. Get away from the Divinity School. It’s not the real world, the way it is now.”

His smug certainty brought back the memory of that day in August when Bill Clinton signed away welfare. I’d gone to a noontime lecture called “The Lion and the Lamb” about evangelicals and Catholics in America. I mostly went to stare at a PhD student I liked. I once saw him in the Commons with tomato sauce smeared across his chin and ran to get a restroom hand towel to scratch against the stubble. I thought he’d appreciate and remember my preserving his dignity, but he barely noticed. I supposed that happened when you read Sanskrit and had a funny way of talking. It took me days to figure out that his ail-eh-gree was a literary term. But even with him as a diversion, I remembered worrying that the kind of evangelical who’d be a visiting lecturer at the Divinity School was not the kind speaking to thousands every Sunday morning.

Nick Salibian was probably right that I needed to get out of there. It was the Ides of March when I told myself I had to find a grownup job by June. I was working on my résumé in the kitchen when a raccoon fight broke out on the back porch. I didn’t have a light switch so I couldn’t tell how many were involved. I heard the TV downstairs so I called. When it went to voicemail, I decided to try Sylvia’s Motorola, mostly because she complained that not enough people were trying to reach her at all hours of the day. She was just downstairs, but there was so much static she might have been on Mars. “There’s a raccoon fight on the porch,” I said. “Can’t you hear it?”

“We’re watching The X Files,” she said.

“They’re messing with your Styrofoam,” I said, “and they have big teeth.”

She just hung up.

Afraid that one of the raccoons would get killed, I went down to get my landlords’ attention. I stared at their blue faces through the huge front windows, but my presence failed to register, like those sad angels in Wings of Desire. These side-by-side strangers in the dark seemed to be in a trance, except each kept glancing at the identical phones in their right hands, anticipating that call to reconfirm VIP status. Was this the on-ramp to Al Gore’s Information Superhighway, I wondered—these packrats of unboxed tech mesmerized by evil aliens? Meanwhile, the native-borns upstairs were ripping each other apart over a Bertucci’s crust.

I went back up and was on hold with Animal Control when I got an annoying bleep from Nick Salibian. “I just happen to be in your neighborhood,” he said, shocked that I’d answered.

“Really? Then why not come over and stop raccoons from killing each other?”

I thought that would surely keep him away, but in a few minutes he stood on the porch using his Motorola to call one of his security guys for advice. By the time he was talking, the raccoons had taken their fight outside. This was when I first noticed the guy parked across the street watching the house. Who was he looking for? Certainly not me, an employee of the Divinity School. Now I really started wondering what Tom and Sylvia were up to.

After the blossoming of spring and my continued failure to find a grownup job, Tom fell headlong into a Tour de France obsession. He’d talk about “that ravishing Eagle from Herning who won last year, Bjarne the Dane.” He didn’t seem to care about Biggie Smalls being dead. Instead, he showed me three fancy new bikes with titanium parts and various cycling outfits.

One Saturday morning Nick arrived while Tom was suited up and putting two bikes on the roof of the brand-new Outback out front.

“Leaves nothing to the imagination,” Nick whispered, observing Tom’s physique.

“Alright kiddos,” shouted Tom, rubbing his hands together. “Off for a road race.” He turned to show us that his shirt said Marcello’s Bistro. “I’ve been telling Nick. StoreSmart needs to sponsor a team. Corporate branding is everything.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could be like the Tour de France guys,” I said, “and change what we’re doing it all for just by changing our shirt?”

“You can,” said Tom. “You just don’t do it.”

As we watched him drive off, Nick sang “Ground Control to Major Tom,” and I wondered why this premature Douglas Fairbanks was still coming here after all this time. He knew there was zero chance I would fuck him. And I couldn’t imagine that goading me over politics or talking to Sylvia about the massive need for storage were that important to him.

“Clinton apologized to the Tuskegee survivors,” he said idly. “Your Divinity people must’ve loved that.”

There was no way to respond except by lobbing back another random fact. “I didn’t vote for Clinton in the ’92 primary.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I voted for Tom Harkin.”

“You’re hopeless!’ he cried. “Someone’s gotta round up all the union lefties. Round ’em up, take ’em up the mountain, leave ’em to die.”

“Bill Bradley said we need to fix our roof while the sun’s shining, not pay double on the mortgage.”

He laughed. “Bill Bradley’s wanted at the turkey farm.”

“He said American politics is broken.”

He laughed so hard he rubbed tears from his eyes. “Don’t look for other people’s troubles, you hear me? What you do is you focus on your own little patch of sunshine, like Major Tom.”

The very last time I saw Major Tom was on Friday the 13th, when I got home from work. As I came up the front steps he appeared in “ta-da!” mode on the porch. “Well?”

He was in another cycling ensemble. “You look stunning,” I said.

He called me inside so he could show me the performance features of the shorts and shoes. Given his ham-hock thighs, the shorts part wasn’t pretty. He said he was heading off to Montpelier by bus—“to meet up with Arthur and then hit the swimming holes.” He added, “You wouldn’t understand. It’s a Thomas Eakins thing.”

“Are you wearing that on the bus?” I asked.

He snapped a fancy new cycling towel at me. “Fresh!”

“I must be jealous of your shorts.”

He looked dreamily into the wall mirror. “I need to get me some Lederhosen.”

I laughed. “Are you a Nazi, Tom?”

Now he looked aghast. “How can you say that when my lovely wife’s maiden name is Rosencrantz?”

I wanted to ask him if he was sure it wasn’t Guildenstern, but I had learned to evade facts and reality in exchange for my cheap rent. It was a strange game that I had stretched out for nearly a year. I realized right then that not knowing the truth about Tom and Sylvia was my attempt to stay 29 forever. I also couldn’t help noticing the Trainspotting CD in the same place I remembered from months back. “Did you even break the seal?”

“No. You want it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Although it’s all been said before.”

“By who?”

“In the sweet old country where I come from, nobody ever works, yeah nothing gets done. We hang fire.”

“What did I tell you, child? Nothing from Tattoo You.”

“I was in ninth grade when that album was everywhere. I didn’t even know what hang fire meant. I thought it was like hanging wallpaper.”

“That was the album when my heart got broken in seventeen places.”

“Everyone in my class was playing it even though those guys were as old as our parents. We were sure we’d all die in a nuclear winter. We never thought things would last—that there’d be a fifteen years later.”

He laughed. “It’s finally Morning in America, baby.”

“When I saw the video on MTV, I kind of had a crush on Mick. He was doing these spastic, rubbery moves, like a sea monkey. I remember he kissed a picture of the album cover. I was watching at my friend’s house and getting all tingly even though he was old—and then I got sad thinking that I might never get to be his age in that video. Or that at some point, I’d grow older than him in the video.”

And then the strangest thing happened: Tom was moved. I couldn’t believe anything I said could hit a nerve. He rushed off to another room where I could hear him rooting through shelves. He returned with a VHS cassette that he shoved in the Sony. This was so not the music of my current life, but I didn’t mind, especially since “Hang Fire” is short. Tom danced around the apartment with thuds. “Do I remind you of Tom Cruise in his tighty-whities?” It was cringe-worthy given the padded shorts, but I laughed out loud because he was so happy . . . and I got to see Mick stealing that kiss again.

“You can have this,” he said breathlessly as he ejected the cassette. “These things are obsolete. I’ve got a DVD player in Franconia—eleven hundred bucks. Now I can watch Twister and Batman over and over. Big fucking whoop.”

Oddly, all the laughing had made me introspective. “After glasnost,” I said, staring out the massive front windows, “we were supposed to feel happy that all the bad stuff was gone. But it feels to me like we’re just hanging fire until it starts up again.”

“Stop!” he cried, wiping his face with his cycling towel. “You sound like Janet Reno.”

“Doesn’t it though? It feels like the bad stuff is still out there, but it’s hidden by all the clunky Microsoft boxes filled with more junk to plug in. Our national flag should be overlaid with an image of a surge protector. I don’t know why, but I feel that my whole working life has been hanging fire.”

“You’re just poor and boring, honey. It’s un-American what you are.”

In the midst of my vacant staring, I noticed the car parked across the street. “Who’s that guy out there watching the house? I see him all the time.”

He rushed to the window. “What the fuck!” He stood there anxiously staring. “How long has he been watching?”

“Today?”

“How many days, weeks?”

“I guess it’s been months,” I said. “I first noticed him on the raccoon night.”

“Fuck!”

“I was thinking of calling the police.”

“No!” he shouted, pacing. “You know what? Change of plans.”

He was in clutch White Rabbit mode. He busied himself assembling papers and a Fedex envelope, rushing between several rooms. “I’m going to give you a package to mail, OK? You have to go to Fedex and send it for me.”

“Fedex is expensive,” I said. “Can I get it off my rent?”

He laughed. “It’s time to settle with Arthur.”

I was confused. Settle with Arthur or settle for Arthur? And who was Arthur?

“Don’t tell Sylvia. OK?”

I nodded.

He grabbed me by the shoulders to face him: “Whatever you do, don’t tell Sylvia you saw me today. You understand? You do not tell her.”

I just stared at him.

“I need you to nod along with me,” he said like a hypnotist. “She’s not an intellectual like us.”

With that I nodded. I was afraid but also flattered that he considered me an intellectual in the same way he considered himself one.

“Here,” he said, “take your Trainspotting, take your Mick, take this package, and don’t you dare tell Sylvia.”

He picked up two weekend bags and dashed past me. I walked onto the porch and watched from on high as he gunned the Outback down the driveway, his bust of Homer wobbling on its side in the hatch. It was a bittersweet moment that I myself had caused. I didn’t know why I had to do it that day at that hour—breach the fourth wall. I stood there for a while to see if the guy across the street took off after the Subaru. But he didn’t move. He just sat there slumped. For some reason, I heard in my head Tie . . . aye-aye-ime, is on my side, yes it is. What a strange song to come to mind, direct from the ancient world of mono—what they now called “analog”—a time when time could be stretched to four full notes for one short word. Nowadays, everything about time was different: the past was a problem that got corrected by the future. The present barely registered.

That Friday the 13th had a bad vibe even before Tom’s departure. A jury had recommended the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh, which was not surprising, but this would be the first federal death penalty since 1963. A popular professor had agreed to lead an impromptu discussion on capital punishment, hate and divisiveness, and the meaning of justice. I got to the student lounge early, but it was really only seven people listening to the old guy in sagging chinos. Russian communism was over, the Chinese were making me Payless shoes, copper rolled freely across the Mexican border—nothing more to fix.

On the porch, I didn’t know what to do. Tom and I had just talked about seeing an Alain Delon movie at the Brattle, but the package contained something that felt funny. I finally decided to call the police about the slumped guy out front, saying he’d been watching my apartment for months. By the time the cruiser arrived, the guy had fallen asleep. It turned out that he had an expired registration and enough unpaid speeding tickets to have his license confiscated. They put cuffs on him because the dispatcher said he was delinquent on child support in Rhode Island—something no cop should be announcing to random people on the street. As I debated what the ACLU would say about this, one of the cops handed me a card with the precinct’s number.

That night, Sylvia rang my bell and waited at the bottom of the stairs that she didn’t want to climb. “Have you seen Tom?” She had one leg propped up on the second step.

I told her no.

“He was supposed to be going by bus, but he took his car.”

I laughed. “But you’ve got your Mercedes Money Class.”

“I needed the Outback here this weekend.”

“I just got home a while ago,” I said.

“You sure about that?”

I nodded slowly.

“You sure you haven’t seen Tom?”

I shook my head just as slowly.

“Real sure?”

Her piercing stare with that one eye made me too nervous to sleep. The next morning I went to the police station in Teele Square to show them the Fedex package and tell them about Tom and Sylvia. Once I got there, I felt ridiculous and thought they’d send me home. But they kept the package after taking it out back to scan. I couldn’t believe I was betraying Tom this easily, but I knew from movies that things start to get violent the minute a wedge is driven between the principals. An inspector came out to tell me that the guy they’d cuffed the day before, Harris Sims, wasn’t charged with anything because he’s a private investigator. “Working for a Mrs. Vera Salibian of Marlborough. You know that lady?”

“I know her husband,” I said before laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“She must think I’m having an affair with him because he’s been stalking me, showing up at my apartment.”

“You want to file a complaint?”

“Not really.”

When I got home, Sylvia and her Money Class Mercedes had disappeared. That evening I got a call from an irate Nick. “Why did you call the police on me?”

That was a good one. “I hope you didn’t give Tom and Sylvia any money,” I said, “because they’re doing some kind of fraud or money laundering or drug smuggling. I think the police are after them.”

A week or so later, I came home to find cops taking boxes of paper out from downstairs. And then over the weeks it was different people taking out other stuff. One night I came home to another raccoon situation right on the front porch—not a rumble but more like a name-calling event. I got about two months of free rent by the time BankBoston sent a letter saying I had to vacate in 30 days.

I had the entire house to myself over those weeks, but I was anxious and lonely. I missed Tom and was even missing Max. The Divinity guy—Mr. Ail-eh-gree—was a bust. Though I still hadn’t found a grownup job, I got a new crush on one of the guys making sandwiches at Darwin’s. As if to confirm that he was way too young, he asked if I wanted to hang out on his porch. I was proud of myself for noticing this red flag, for understanding that what I needed was to hook up with something serious and not another sequential mistake in the dwindling days of my hang-fire twenties. But then I thought of Tom and Sylvia sitting in the eerie glow of the X Files with their Motorolas.

“Can we hang out,” I asked the sandwich-maker, “but only not on your porch?” §