“Want to do a walk by of his apartment?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

We walk by and look in the third floor window, where the lights are on and you can see nothing but bookcases lining the walls. The building is a small brownstone, as though anyone could live there if they wanted to enough. Downstairs, an ordinary hairdresser in an ordinary building could be any hairdresser on any Friday night. She cuts a woman’s wet hair and another woman sits with a magazine, silent behind the glass. None of them looks very concerned with the fact that there are no stars in the sky above New York City, or that certain things cannot ever be undone. An egg cannot be uncracked, for instance, and although a book can be forgotten, it can never be unread. Likewise, I can never go back to the time before I stood on this street with Franny. We are already here, minute-phantoms on this winter weekend night, looking in dark windows where a movie star is not. Don’t you realize, I want to shout, don’t you realize that there’s a whole world out here that we can never see, not all at once? How can we bear all the things we cannot see?

…I can never go back to the time before I stood on this street with Franny. We are already here, minute-phantoms on this winter weekend night, looking in dark windows where a movie star is not.

“That’s his living room,” Franny says. “Those are his bookcases. That spiral staircase goes to his room.” The lights are off, and I feel one singular feeling. It feels like longing, which pushes me to take her hand, because the room is dark where he begged her to sleep with him, where he asked if he could just talk about it with her, just think about it. There is still so much make believe, so much to imagine. There is that feeling of longing for something far away, so far away.

How ridiculous it strikes me to think of someone kissing Franny, of some man thinking she would sleep with him — he could not really believe this. Scaffolding shields us, and with my fingers wrapped around it, I feel not content, not discontent. We shuffle in the New York cold, in the cold night air, when all of life rushes around us as we look for a sign of breath in that window.

“I feel creepy,” Franny says. “This goes in the vault.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” I say. “But I don’t believe he really exists. It’s okay. I don’t blame you. Sometimes I need to make up an imaginary boy too, someone imposing who uses a leaf as a bookmarks and forgets why he has a pocket full of stones. But I’ve never made up a movie star.”

“He has no idea how to be a person,” she tells me, still looking up to the dark fourth floor, and in the blue night air the snow begins to fall. Somewhere, quite far away, snow falls down and greets the ground with silence as it lands. Looking up at the dark window feels as though someone has just told us a burdening secret, and Franny reaches out her arms, to hold close the brownstone across the street, maybe the street itself, or the entire island of Manhattan, the island that feels like our whole world just now.

“Do you think he can see us?” she asks.

“Not unless he’s looking out his dark window to the street,” I tell her.

“He’s shooting this week anyway, plus I think he’s starting to forget I exist,” she says.

Arm in arm, we walk down the street like a two-headed creature, and duck into the dirty warmth of the city’s subway. On the platform a man plays the pot lids, and I can’t decide whether it makes me want to laugh or cry more.