By the time the guy and I had moved into the rowhouse in Windsor Terrace, I was operating on a kind of autopilot emotionally. Forward motion with no deep exploration as to why there was an echoey emptiness inside of me. To be honest, I don’t think I actually took notice of that emptiness except to assign it to a general malaise that maybe had to do with work. The guy was clearly agitating around his own unhappy stasis in life, which was why it made sense to both of us to move. Real estate as distraction. Just like the staging of the Prospect Heights apartment, moving into a new place offered the faux new beginning we both must have thought would work to bring us satisfaction.

We sold the P.Heights place with a good profit (them’s were the glory days) and put an offer on an attached rowhouse in a part of Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, that was both solidly old-school (the people on our right had three generations living in their three-story house, the patriarch being a fireman; the 50-year-old man across the street had been raised and still lived in the house with his mother) and newbies (to our left a couple from the Upper West Side had done a complete gut renovation making their interior look like an original Craftsman style with a Tiffany transom thrown in). Our place was also three stories but had been divided up to include a rental upstairs, and we inherited the man who’d lived there for the past five years. He was an excellent tenant who traveled a lot and whose very adorable tabby I fed when he was gone. We inhabited the main floor, had a patio out back, and a full basement with a washer and dryer. I’d never had a washer and dryer on the premises and had been completely obsessed with the front-loading machines when we’d gone to the open house.

Looking back, I feel like I was working hard to bury any semblance of who I’d been in the music industry or as a writer. I had no interest in listening to music, writing stories fiction or non, reaching out to past work friends. I had let the guy’s life cover me: his family and friends. I still saw some dear friends who lived in the city, one of whom who had moved back from across the country, but mostly I focused on home-based stuff. Teaching the writing workshops was slowly driving me bananas, what with mapping out subway and bus routes all over the five boroughs, and I’d gotten it in my head that I wanted to go to graduate school for a degree in English Literature, then maybe. I’d get a job as a full-time teacher at a private school. That was the thought process as I filled out student loan forms and looked over the classes at CUNY’s Brooklyn campus. I mean, of course I wanted to sit in a classroom and discuss the early twentieth-century works of Edith Wharton and Henry James, the symbolism of Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption as it pertained to Lily Bart in The House of Mirth; or the importance of Catherine’s red sleeves in Washington Square. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales taught in the old English? Sign me up!

And sign up I did, living off student loans (unadvisable) and feeling during those moments in class or while writing papers that I was living my best life, intellectually stimulated with a place to put all my attention. The guy was also at a turning point. Unhappy at his job and deciding that he wanted to write a novel. We were very clearly in our own worlds, looking for ways to be happy while coexisting as pals. I didn’t really question why I would suddenly begin weeping on the walk home from the grocery store. I would research and write my papers during the day and be asleep around the time he’d slip down to his desk in the basement, where he’d be at his computer for most of the night. Some months later, he put a stack of papers on the dining room table and asked if I’d give his first draft a read. I was thrilled to.

The book opened with a couple. who lived in a rowhouse in Windsor Terrace going for a run in Prospect Park, two blocks away. This was familiar territory since that’s what the guy and I did many times a week. By the end of the first chapter, the wife had been snatched off the running path and thrown into the back of a van. The husband, frantic, had called the police. Two detectives are assigned to the case, one of whom is closeted and struggling with whether to tell his partner he’s gay. In the meantime, the husband goes on a series of night excursions into more and more dodgy, sexually depraved situations as he tries to grapple with his fear and loathing. The wife is never heard from again.

The style was noir-ish detective novel, and as I read it, I wrote things in the margins like, Too Many Semicolons and Maybe Another Adjective Here. Basic copy editing things. Not once did it enter my mind that he might be trying to tell me something. He took my suggestions and went back into the basement to work on his second draft. I went to the CUNY library to finish my final paper on Haussmann’s transformation of Paris and its effects on the poetry of Baudelaire. Also around that time I went to see Brokeback Mountain on my own and somewhere in the middle of the film, when Michelle Williams’ character sees her husband passionately kissing his buddy, I thought, Oh, shit, I’m in that kind of marriage. I might have made an out-loud sound when I thought that, but I just as quickly slammed the door on where that thought would take me. Because it would take me places into the future that would require change and work and a lot of messy stuff I just didn’t feel willing to deal with.

And yet, deal with it I would.

Next week: How a conversation on our way to a friend’s wedding began the unspooling of my marriage, just when I’d settled into the house and learned how to ignore the large body of water known as de-nial that was running through the middle of it.