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t was New Year’s Eve, and the train to New York was crowded. Paul had been late meeting them at the station, and now he and
Jeremy had rushed off to look for seats. Iris couldn’t help but feel animated, as if she’d drunk a glass of wine. She wondered
what the two men thought of each other. The train began to move, and she stepped quickly down the aisle. It was a feeling
of anticipation, really. She sensed it in the other passengers, even though they tried not to show it, keeping their faces
straight. But every time they glanced at their watches, they would be counting down the hours. Like Iris, they would be thinking
of the night ahead and who they would be seeing once they got off the train.

The automatic doors of the compartment slid back, and Iris was treading on rattling metal, feeling the cold wind. Through
a crack, she could see the ground hurtling beneath her feet. She felt light-headed, aware of the piece of metal on which she
stood, her body separate from the rush of earth below. Then she stepped into the next car, as if entering a dark red womb,and
the doors slid shut behind her, sealing off the train’s roar. Bare symmetrical trees floated by along the windows.

“Iris!” Jeremy called out. He had found seats facing each other. Iris sat down beside him, even though it occurred to her
that Paul might be annoyed. But she didn’t want Jeremy to think that she and Paul were one of those couples whose bodies were
fused together. As if they shared a leg or an organ and couldn’t breathe or take a step without the other person.

The doors parted, cold air blowing in. “All tickets please!” the conductor shouted.

“When will we get there?” Paul asked as he came by.

The conductor did not look up, punching frenetic holes into their tickets. “We’re like the atmosphere,” he muttered. “Before
you know it, we dissipate.” None of them said anything, and the conductor glanced up, eyeing them for the first time. “We’ll
be there in two hours.” He slid their tickets into the slots above their heads and walked on.

Paul gave a half laugh. He leaned over, his elbows on his knees as he studied the floor. He puffed one cheek out, then the
other, tapping his fingertips together. He had a narrow face and deep blue eyes, and Iris had mistaken him for a teenager
when he first came into the bookstore where she worked. She liked to look at him when he was most oblivious to her, when he
was reading a book, or in the mornings when he was still asleep and there was a sweetness in the warm spaces of his skin.
They had been together for five months now.

She took his present out of her bag and quickly placed it on his lap. “Happy birthday!” she exclaimed.

Paul reached over and put his arm around her neck. Iris had to bend forward out of her seat for a kiss. She smiled, though
she felt a little awkward with Jeremy watching.

“I was born two hours before midnight,” Paul explained to Jeremy. He stuck a thumb into a crevice of the paper, and the wrapping
split open easily. “My doctor was at a party when he got the call and arrived at the hospital in a tuxedo. He wasn’t very
pleased to see me.”

“Do you like it?” Iris asked.

It was an oval black lacquer box that she had found at an antique store on Pine Street. “It’s hand-painted from Russia,” she
told him. On the lid was a night scene of three horses, all different colors—red, white, and brown—gaily pulling a sled. There
was a driver holding a gold whip in the air, and two lovers seated in the back of the troika. They were passing through the
snow, but the way the ground was painted with its swirls of blue, it seemed to Iris that they were racing magically across
the sea. Tiny gold stars shone in the blue-black sky.

“It’s very nice,” Paul said, lifting the lid to look at the bright red interior. He then picked up the book that she had added
at the very last minute.

“Herbert Marcuse,” Paul said.

“I’m afraid that was my idea,” Jeremy said.

“It’s about Freud,” Iris said hopefully. She didn’t mention that it was a critique of Freud. It had been kind of a joke. She
had told Jeremy that Paul was a Freudian, and Jeremy had said, “Maybe we can change that.”

“Fantastic,” Paul said, but the way he said it slowly, almost ironically, made her feel that she had made a mistake. He turned
to Jeremy. “You’re going to graduate school for sociology, right?”

“I am,” Jeremy replied.

“Where?”

“In California.”

“Like it there?”

Jeremy paused. “I do.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I didn’t expect to ever live in California.”

“I thought you wanted to study philosophy,” Iris said.

“Too impractical,” Jeremy said. “It doesn’t have any real-world applications. You end up feeling isolated.”

“You want to be connected to the world,” Iris said, smiling at him. She had not seen Jeremy in two years. He had arrived at
her doorstep in Philadelphia the previous night, flushed from the cold. Maybe it was the color in his cheeks, the fact that
he had come from outside yet looked so warm in his thick wool sweater, but she thought there was a glow about him that she
hadn’t seen before. He was different from the way he’d been in high school, when he wore braces and talked slowly, sometimes
with a mild stutter. In college, he grew out his hair, wore flannel shirts, and strode around in combat boots with slightly
hunched shoulders. He had short hair now, a finely clipped beard, and there was something in the way that he held himself
that made him seem more at ease with his own body.

“Has Laura told you?” she said. “She’s absolutely in love.”

“I’ve heard,” Jeremy replied.

“They met in Chicago.” She didn’t say anything more, and Paul began to prod Jeremy about Marcuse. Iris thought about Laura
as she watched the landscape stream past her window. If she narrowed her eyes, it almost seemed to turn to water. The trees
and bracken were the color of dead, wet leaves. They passed the backyards of people’s homes, and Iris glimpsed a line of crows
sitting on an electric wire, a rusted car without its tires, an orange bicycle left in the snow. She thought about Laura and
Erik waiting for them at the station and wondered what kind of man Laura would have fallen in love with, if he would be anything
like Paul. Iris had always liked the idea of her and Laura being similar, secretly pleased whenever anyone remarked on their
resemblance. Strangers sometimes came up to them, asking if they were sisters. But Laura didn’t think they looked at all alike.
“People are always confusing one Asian for another,” she said.

Over the phone, Laura had told Iris that ever since meeting Erik and moving to New York City she no longer felt as if she
were in a state of limbo. Iris wondered about that. The last time she saw Laura was April. They had walked around Laura’s
neighborhood in Chicago, they had eaten German pancakes sprinkled with lemon juice and powdered sugar, they had gone to the
Art Institute to look at photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron. Iris had liked the work, and Laura had found it cloying, and
this reaction struck Iris as peculiar, as Laura had always been the idealistic, fanciful one. It was surprisingly cold that
day, and after the museum, both of them had felt listless. They wandered around the streets in Lincoln Park, looking inside
closed antique stores, at chandeliers and striped settees, mannequins in slightly shabby furs or discolored lace dresses.
At one point, Iris stopped and pressed her face against a window, fascinated by a still life with exquisite anatomical flowers.
The moribund perfection of the painting disturbed her, especially when she realized that the fly sitting on the tablecloth
wasn’t real. When she looked up, she saw Laura gazing at the empty street, a blankness in her expression which made Iris want
to touch her arm, say something to bring her back, yet she felt exactly as if she were watching Laura behind a pane of glass,
and she couldn’t speak.

By the time they arrived at Penn Station, Iris was trying to picture how Laura would look when she saw her, but the image
that kept appearing in her mind was Laura in her college days when she dyed her hair red and wore translucent, flowery skirts.

Then through the rush of the crowd to find Laura waiting for them in a trim blue coat, black boots, and stockings. She wore
a sliver of a barrette in her dark bobbed hair, her hands covered with fur-lined mittens. She and Iris smiled at each other
tentatively, and Iris reached out to touch the black fur along Laura’s wrist. “Fake,” Laura pronounced, pulling off the mitten.
“I’m married,” she said, holding her hand out to Iris. Everyone looked at the plain silver band on her finger.

“You’re kidding,” Iris said. “You must be insane!” There was a pause during which she felt everyone looking at her, and she
became confused, a sharpness in her voice which she hadn’t intended. “Oh, but I mean it in a good way,” she said quickly,
reaching out to hug Laura. “Congratulations!”

Erik stood silently watching. He had the look of an insomniac, with his slack, unshaven face and drooping hazel eyes. The
beige coat he wore was both too short and too wide, probably purchased without fuss at a thrift store. Iris thought his smile,
when he did smile, seemed more like a smirk. She didn’t think they would have much to say to each other.

She wondered if Jeremy suffered any pang of heart at the news. He had never said anything to Iris, but she knew he was secretly
in love with Laura. She watched him now as he pressed Laura’s hand, his eyes a deep liquid brown. “I’m happy for you,” he
said, such kindness in his voice that Iris had to believe it was true.

They spent the afternoon walking around Chinatown and Greenwich Village, going in and out of cafes to keep warm. They ate
sushi in a darkly lit restaurant composed of slippery black surfaces where Japanese anime was projected on the wall. It was
hallucinatory, Iris thought, watching the radioactive glare of characters as they jumped twenty feet into the air, their mouths
opening in perfect circles, though no sound came out. She felt the incongruity of two worlds— the lurid, colorful vision flashing
on the walls, and the dark, shining surface of the present moment, of reality, as she watched Laura’s nimble fingers fold
and refold a napkin until it was the shape of a crane perched along the glossy table.

Iris was struck by Laura’s calm. She seemed to take things in moderation, her face open yet peaceful, her entire being as
still and clear as a drop of glass. Is that what love did? Iris wondered. Laura had undergone some kind of transfiguration,
and there was nothing Iris could do but pretend to be happy for her.

New York was always slightly unnerving to Iris. People looking at you, and you looking back. There seemed to be no end to
dissatisfaction and desire. It was easy to look and to want to be someone else, to look and to feel that there was something
you lacked. She had this feeling now as people stared at her, shapeless in her winter coat, making her way through a bar in
SoHo after Laura. The bodies she pressed against were encased in black, as sleek and beautiful as cockroaches, with martinis
dangling from their fingers. Erik had spotted a low table from which people were getting up to leave. He stood beside the
sofa, silent and inscrutable, his coat neatly draped over his arm.

The waitress came by to get their orders. Jeremy asked for a Coke.

“You don’t want to drink tonight?” Iris asked him. She noticed a woman with slick, coiled hair at the table next to theirs
holding a martini glass filled with black liquid. “I want to try what she’s having,” she said to the waitress.

“Baha’is don’t drink,” Jeremy told her.

“Oh, right,” she said. “Why is it again they don’t drink?”

“It clouds the mind. We think you should always be in control of your actions.”

“What do Baha’is think about sex?” Paul asked. He was sitting beside Erik, across from them, leaning over the table to hear.

“They don’t believe in premarital sex,” Jeremy said.

“So you’re celibate?”

“Well, no.”

“So you have sex, but you don’t drink,” Paul said. “How do you decide to do one thing and not the other?”

Iris stared at Paul. “He’s an atheist,” she said to Jeremy. “He likes to pick apart people’s religions.” She didn’t mention
that he liked to pick apart people as well. This pleasure of his could be exhausting to Iris, like finding a loose thread
and pulling just to see it unravel.

The waitress came back with their drinks. Iris lifted her conical glass, trying to catch the murky light. The black liquid
reminded her of ink, and she wondered if it would stain her lips. She took a tentative sip.

“How is it?” Laura asked her.

“Worse than I expected,” she said. They smiled at each other. They weren’t used to seeing each other with men around. She
wondered what Laura thought about Paul. It made her nervous and also excited whenever she caught Laura or Jeremy staring at
him. When they watched him, it was as though they were studying her as well, turning her over in their hands to catch a gleam
in a surface they hadn’t seen reflected before. She supposed she did the same thing to Laura whenever she studied Erik, but
Laura never cared what people thought.

“So tell me more,” Iris said. “How did it happen so quickly?”

Laura shrugged. “It just seemed like the right time. We both wanted it, that’s all.”

“And did you tell anyone?”

“Our parents. Erik’s mother drove down from Connecticut to be our witness.”

Iris wanted to ask Laura why she hadn’t been told as well, but she sensed that she was being conventional, trying to impart
significance to an event that had nothing to do with her. She touched Laura’s arm. “I want to give you something.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But I want to,” she said, feeling more excited by her idea. She slipped one earring off and then the other, amethysts surrounded
by tiny silver pearls. “Do you remember? I bought these from that man in New Orleans.” She looked at them again before pressing
the pair into Laura’s hand.

Laura was silent as she studied the small gems in her palm. Her face was impassive, her lips slightly pursed. When she tilted
her head to put them on, it seemed as if she were making a concession to Iris, for courtesy’s sake. She looked at Paul and
gave him a knowing smile. “It’s ten-seventeen,” she announced.