Illustration by Jeffrey Decoster

She was in the brig when her husband came home. Below her, neighbors reclined on their stoops, laughing and relieved, shaking off winter with loud cries and sudden starts. Someone unseen scraped a broom over a little courtyard, the rhythmic sound of brownstones in spring.

“In the brig!” Sarah called out and, with her wineglass at a tilt, looked down on the neighborhood. They called their six feet of concrete balcony overlooking the street the brig.

The children’s voices carried in the blue air. Then the breeze came. It cut through the branches of the trees, turning up the silver undersides of the young leaves, and brought goosebumps as it went around her. The breeze, God, the breeze! she thought. You get how many like it? Maybe a dozen in a lifetime . . . and already gone, down the block and picking up speed, or dying out. Either way, dead to her, and leaving in its wake a sense of excitement and mild dread. What if she failed to make the most of what remained of this perfect spring day?

She finished her wine and went inside. Jay was thumbing listlessly through the mail.

“Hey,” he said.

“What do you want to do tonight?” she asked him.

“Oh,” he said, and paused over what looked like a credit-card offer. “I don’t care. What do you want to do?”

“There’s nothing you want to do?”

“I want to do whatever you want to do,” he said.

“So it’s up to me to come up with something?”

He looked at her at last. “You asked me to come home so we could do something.”

“Because I want to do something.”

“I want to do something, too,” he said.

“O.K.,” she said, “so let’s do it.”

“Let’s do it,” he said. Then he said, “What is it you want to do?”

She wanted to have a picnic in Central Park. They bought sandwiches from a place in the neighborhood and took the train into Manhattan. He unfurled a checkered blanket in the breeze and spread it under a tree whose canopy would have spanned the length of their apartment. In the mild wind, the leaves ticked gently back and forth, like second hands on stuck clocks. She wore a shimmery green sundress, with a thin white belt, slipped on quickly in the few minutes she gave them to get ready. His knees looked as pale as moons in last year’s shorts. They ate their sandwiches and drank a little wine, and then they stood and tossed a Frisbee until it was just a white underbelly floating in the darkness. Before leaving, they walked into a little wooded area and with barely a sound brought each other off in two minutes with an urgency that had hibernated all winter, an urgency they both thought might have died in its hole. It was all right now; they could go home. But it was early, and he suggested going to a beer garden where they’d spent last summer drinking with friends. There was a flurry of texts and phone calls, and before too long their friends showed up—Wes and Rachel, Molly with her dog. They drank and talked until closing time. Sarah skipped ahead down the street on their way to the subway and then skipped back to him, leaping into his arms. It stayed warm through the night.

On their way into Manhattan, he told her that they had tickets to a movie that night. It was the 3-D follow-up to the sequel of a superhero blockbuster. He had gone online the day before only to learn that the IMAX showings were already sold out. He couldn’t believe it. How far in advance did this city make movie tickets available for pre-purchase, and how much cunning did it take to get your hands on them? He hadn’t even been able to get tickets to the early show at the regular theatre, which would have been preferable—it had been a long week and he was tired, and, for God’s sake, who thinks they need to plan more than a day in advance to see a movie? It was just a movie, it wasn’t—

She put a hand out to stop him. “Jay,” she said. “I’m sorry, sweets. I can’t see a movie tonight.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too predictable,” she said. “Aren’t you tired of movies? All we’ve done all winter long is go to movies.”

“But I bought the tickets. They’re bought and paid for.”

“We’ll get a refund,” she said. “I can’t see a movie.”

“You’re always telling me you like it when I plan things.”

“It’s a movie,” she said, “not a weekend in Paris. I can’t sit in a movie theatre tonight, Jay. I’ll go bonkers.”

“It doesn’t start until eleven. The night’s practically over by then.”

“Whose night is over?” she said. “Whose particular night?”

He didn’t understand. “What are you getting so excited about?”

Her focus shifted, and she didn’t answer. The train had slowed to a crawl and was now stopped altogether. Why had it stopped? They were sitting dead still in the bowels of the subway while the last hour or two—not even, not two—the last hour and change of daylight and breeze died out on the shoulders of those who had known better than to lock themselves inside the subway at such a delicate moment. Here was the underworld of the city’s infinite offering: snags, delays, bottlenecks, the growing anxiety of never arriving at what was always just out of reach. It was enough to make you stand and scream and kick at the doors. Their ambitions should have been more modest. They could have walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped midway to watch the sun go down.

She stood.

“Sarah?” he said.

The train started to move—not enough to jolt her, but enough to get her sitting again. She didn’t answer or look at him.

She left the table and started toward the ladies’ room of the beer garden. She walked under a sagging banner of car-lot flags weathered to white, past a bin of broken tiki torches. A thick coat of dust darkened a stack of plastic chairs growing more cockeyed as they ascended a stucco wall. Open only a week or two after the long winter and already the place looked defiled by a summer of rough use.

In the brig a few hours earlier, she had come to believe that, in all the years she had lived in the city, this was the most temperate and gentle day it had ever conferred. Distant church bells had rung out. The blue of the sky had affected her deeply. A single cloud had drifted by like a glacier in a calm sea. Looking down, she had paid close attention to the tree nearest the brig, picking out a discrete branch. It ended in a cluster of dark nubs, ancient knuckles sheltering life. Now, breaking through, surfacing blindly to the heat and light, pale buds had begun to flower. Even here, in rusted grates, down blocks of asphalt, spring had returned. Then the breeze touched her flesh. A tingling ran down her spine to her soul, and her eyes welled with tears. Did she have a soul? In moments like this, absolutely. The breeze! She spent the day at her desk, all the light of day spent while she kept her head down, and the snack pack convinced her it was O.K.—the snack pack and the energy drink, the time stolen to buy shoes online. Then this reminder, this windfall. As thrilling and irretrievable as a first kiss. This was her one and only life! It would require something of her to be equal to this day, she had thought at that moment in the brig, and now, looking at herself in the mirror of the ladies’ room, scrutinizing her eyes, her veined and clouded eyes, she was afraid that she had made a series of poor choices and failed.