Hal had a bad shoulder. Danna had no patience for it. She felt Hal was selective about what the shoulder could take. They could fuck in whatever position, he could carry her bags at the airport, but if Danna wanted to book a duo Pilates session ever, Hal was in agony. He often said it like that: I’m in agony. Hal and Danna were sitting on a restaurant patio, eating cheeses. Hal had the ball game up on his phone. In the morning, they’d leave on a short vacation in celebration of Danna’s birthday; the night before a vacation, they never ate
at home.

Hal was moving his right shoulder in circles: forward, backward, forward. When he did his shoulder exercises his face always became vacant, upsettingly so.

‘Who’s winning?’ Danna asked.

‘Not us,’ said Hal. He rolled his shoulder harder. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’ He made a disgusting noise of relief and rubbed his right shoulder with his left hand.

Hal had no shame about pain. He’d grown up loved. Danna had been loved too, but by parents who were doctors. There’d been no room for pain in Danna’s house; her parents were amputating feet and resecting bowels. The only person who’d ever cared to hear about Danna’s pain was Hal. It was what made her love him right away: how seriously he took everything about her. When Danna had a headache Hal brought out his special headache hat, an ice pack in the shape of a crown. When Danna had strep, Hal shone a flashlight in her mouth to look at her tonsils twice a day and gave her creative descriptions of how they looked. The left one looks like a striped candy. The right one looks like a blobfish.

Hal held his silverware in the European style because his mother had grown up holding it that way. He could flex his butt cheeks independently of one another, on command. He’d published a chapbook straight out of grad school about an empty field and time passing and dedicated it to Danna. Danna had intrusive thoughts sometimes about Hal getting crushed by the train or stabbed by a bum on the train or stabbed by Danna herself in the middle of the night while she sleepwalked, which she’d never done, but which she always feared she might spontaneously start doing. The thoughts made her very sad most of the time. But sometimes when she had them she didn’t feel anything at all, and she wondered what she’d feel if Hal died for real. Sometimes she thought nothing. She wondered if that meant she didn’t love him. She wondered if that meant she shouldn’t marry him. She wondered if anyone should marry anyone. She wondered if she’d have these thoughts if she were marrying someone very rich. She wondered if she’d have these thoughts if she were marrying someone who wasn’t very rich but who wasn’t Hal. Eight years in, Hal felt like another her, somehow. She knew his body better than her own, she loved how silky he was, she could tell by the hitch of his voice exactly what he was thinking and exactly why he was thinking it, she could watch him struggle with a jar and know whether he would be able to get it open, she could tell by the way he headed toward the bathroom whether he was going in to shit or trim his nails, she could tell from how he looked at his phone who he was texting. She could trace his behaviors and failures and strengths to the behaviors and failures and strengths of his parents and of his brothers. She could make the worst and thickest noise when she orgasmed and feel safe in the certainty he’d love it. When he couldn’t penetrate her, which was often, because Danna had a tight pelvic floor, she knew exactly the sorts of phrases to whisper in his ear while he jerked himself off with one hand and cupped his own balls with the other, the order to say them in, which ones to repeat, which one to save for last, which one would make Hal get that sad look in his eyes that meant he was about to bust. She felt liable for him. She had the capacity to hate him. She had the need to manage him, protect him. She and Hal cared for each other. They popped each other’s pimples. They fingered one another’s assholes. They did each other’s dishes. And so, they’d recently decided, they would become engaged to be married at the end of the summer.

Danna’s great dream was to commit double suicide with Hal at sixty-five so that neither of them would ever have to endure the humiliations of old age. Danna’s mother had had a pair of patients who’d done just that about five years ago, walking into a canal together with rocks in their pockets. They were elderly communists and they’d had enough. When Danna imagined herself and Hal as old communists who’d had enough, walking together into death, it felt realer to her than the present. For this reason Danna wondered if maybe what she really wanted was just to die.

Now Danna’s mother was texting. Have fun. I am very happy for you.

Danna blinked at the text. ‘Um,’ she said out loud, ‘why does my mom think we’re getting engaged this weekend?’

Hal didn’t answer her. He had his hand over his mouth: that meant Brandon Marsh was at bat. Danna knew better than to press him. She went on the website of the jeweler who was making her ring and looked at the piece that would be ready for her in nine to twelve weeks: sometime in August. It was a gold band, channel-set with small squares of lapis lazuli. It wasn’t one of a kind. Probably several other girls had it. Danna hoped that in a year she’d still think it was chic. It was what Hal could afford. Danna had never dreamed of an engagement ring; she’d dreamed of being someone’s favorite. The ring proved that she was Hal’s.

‘Because we leave tomorrow? Or because they’re fascists,’ Hal said, after a time. ‘Fascists without a dream in their heart.’ Danna ignored it when Hal deployed these kinds of non sequiturs; they were an affectation he’d shaped for the purpose of getting attention from his father – a radical who hated children, a deadly serious writer of dense, unpopular novels. Hal had had to say things like They’re fascists, fascists without a dream in their heart from the time he was a child, probably, just to get his father’s head out of the London Review of Books. To Danna, understanding the roots of someone’s tics or pains better than they understood them themselves was the purest love could get.

‘Ah,’ said Hal. Marsh was out. Danna handed him a piece of cheese and he ate it without looking at her.

‘It’s just ball,’ they said at the same time; it was what they said when something was wrong.