It doesn’t hurt that Jill’s more confident now. She looks good. Better than Kevin does. Better than she did. She comes from a family that appears to look older when young and younger when old. She’s finally growing into her features and her personality. Kevin, on the other hand, was a normal cute guy when she met him and he was thirty-five. He dressed in a suit for work and jeans for home, he drove a yellow roadster, and he moved his body well. Now he’s got a paunch. His knees are shot so he walks with a rolling stiffness. The candy-apple red Corvette is embarrassing in any neighborhood. He has spent so many years in the suburbs that he doesn’t even notice how poorly his perennial weekend shorts fit. He must have forgotten that it’s just wrong to wear socks with sandals.

And Jill weighs less. She’s always been a shape-changer, and her last project removed 20% of the body she’d been carrying around. Couple that with the effects of increased regular activity, and she’s wearing a smaller size than she ever wore (or even imagined). It used to be she always watched what she ate, and Kevin could be careless. The situation is now so reversed he actually urges food on her.

But also she feels weightless, without the elephant. As natural as it has always felt to spend time with him, as easy as the laughs have sometimes been, as hearty the affection, they’ve had the shadow of Anita with them. Jill has usually decided not to let Anita know if Jill had any plans to see him, because Anita wanted it that way. She asked for silence, so Jill hasn’t told her about whatever was said. As often as Anita and Jill spoke, it was odd – avoiding a subject like that. And it was awkward for Jill, watching Anita avoid too. Because the fact is, Anita was never open with Jill about sex, after 1978. They’d try to talk about Kevin, to settle the subject, and Anita would quickly maintain that Jill had no right, ever, to an ex of hers. Jill would remind her that she had given Jill permission – had in fact pushed the flirtation – and Anita simply denied that. “You just should have stopped,” she’d say. And “I’m not going to discuss it any more.” And so the elephant grew between them, and grew until it recently became their whole world.

Except the elephant no longer visits when Jill is with Kevin. She is old with him but she feels lovely and carefree.

She isn’t surprised that Kevin is boring. Even in the beginning, when he regaled her with stories about his philandering exploits and partying triumphs, she remembers marveling most at the idea that he’d already told these exact same stories a hundred times, to a hundred lovers, in a hundred dusks. It was always dusk because he was always married and they weren’t, and he didn’t travel. So all of his trysts were from when he could leave work to when he had to be home. Except with Jill. She was his only married lover. They had to make it work at lunch. He’d pick her up in that Porsche and they’d buzz over to her friend Karen’s apartment, where somehow they’d manage to do it twice, and shower too, and talk like maniacs, and still get back to work by mid-afternoon, ready with excuses like addicts (“just let me get away with it this one more time”). He had a steel-trap memory and no hesitancy to reminisce, and Jill remembers thinking that he must find it tiresome, hearing himself narrate the same old tales.

Maybe not. Maybe Jill is just projecting. She hates boredom more than just about anything – even when she bores herself. But now she’s spending time with Kevin again, and what’s more familiar to her than the sex is the impatient boredom she can feel swelling in her, when he lengthens a recollection, even one about them, or drags out some banal question, like “Gee: what do you think we should say when our kids ask us if we used drugs?”

So they’re having sweet free times, but he’s boring. They’re finally both single and they can associate openly. Anita has hung Jill for the horse so Jill might as well ride it. They can meet with easy minds and spend time together without having to call someone and tell a lie. They smile honestly when they see each other and they like to be together. But then Kevin gets intense and starts nagging Jill with “Isn’t this great? Aren’t we having a good time?” Or he retells a story she’s heard too often. And Jill finds herself checking her watch and calculating how soon she can be back at her place, alone.

But she is doing that with Anita, too. She loves her, she loves seeing her, her heart warms at the sight of Anita’s face. And after an hour of conversation she realizes she’s bored; she’s distracted by thoughts about how to get free.

Part of Jill’s boredom may be anger. These are friends who opted for the paths of least resistance, while she was early thwarted and rewarded and so stubborn about blazing trails. Jill remembers noting mistakes her parents made, and knowing that she could have stayed angry with them for a long time, but opting instead to forgive them; they meant well. Anita went a different way: she stayed angry and hid herself. Jill kept blaring who she was at her intimidated parents and while they don’t know all about her, they know much more than they could have. Anita always advocated playing a part. Act the good daughter but then do what you want. And so in his way did Kevin. Ever the apprentice: that’s what he was taught.

Now Anita has friends and relatives and a social life but she also has nervous ailments and profound insecurity. She feels that if she really shows herself, her loved ones will leave her. Or Kevin – he acts the gregarious sport but alone is angry and agoraphobic. His biggest complaint now is about the lack of intimacy and spiritualism in his life. He reads Joseph Campbell and craves a sum-more-powerful-than-its-parts relationship. More than anything else, that goal establishes his incompatibility with Jill.

Because she doesn’t want that relationship. And she doesn’t want to act like whom she isn’t. That makes as much sense to her as cheating at solitaire, or wearing falsies around a guy she hopes to bed. She started blaring her separate identity when she was a child, and she’s still blaring it. See me. Hear me. Touch me. Feel me. This above all: know me.