Audio: Joshua Ferris reads.

When he returned to the bagel place, there was the usual line, but his hope dwindled with every face that wasn’t hers. He went around the block for the dozenth time. After that, he came untethered and wandered south.

Heedless at the corners, he was nearly hit by a cab. He turned right for no reason, and on that block, as he walked, some invisible industrial fan seemed to whir violently, sending up trash. Suddenly, before his eyes, there was an aircraft carrier.

There was motion and transition everywhere, the urgent, churning city, the cry of a siren fading around the block. At the Empire State Building, they tried to get him to take a tour.

He and his wife had married in Cuba (by way of Nicaragua) four years earlier, long before the embargo was lifted. They had thrilled to the risk, the style, of kicking off their days under staid old matrimony in such rebel fashion. There was a priest, and a punto band, and the beach, and the stars, and the northern wind, and everything about that night was emblematic of how they hoped to shape the years. Now they would divorce. Well, so what? Sooner or later, everyone got divorced.

Knowing it was useless—she was gone, gone—he threw his cell phone into a trash can. When he came to his senses and returned for it, he searched and searched, but he had the wrong street corner.

Cyclists yelled at him on the Brooklyn Bridge. He found himself gripping something with fierce resolve. Looking down, he discovered a glossy postcard advertising two-for-one drinks during happy hour at a gentlemen’s club. He tried putting it away, but there was no back pocket. He was wearing his gray linen pajama pants. What did it matter? It was over. Nothing mattered.

He had known better than to marry. He’d seen his parents hurt each other, and leave, and hurt and leave others, the casual lovers, the stepparents. But he gave it a shot anyway, and it ended pretty much as he imagined, with him wandering the streets in tears.

It was no surprise where he wound up. He hoped to find her there. How he loved her—her face, her smile. He took a deep breath and entered the lobby.

“Who is it?” she asked through an ancient intercom.

“It’s Nick,” he said, and there followed the longest pause of his life. He had second thoughts. Was he presentable enough? Could he make the right impression? Another minute went by before she buzzed him in.

The elevator, an old cat hibernating on some upper floor, rattled to life when he called it and roared down to him. The doors opened, and he stepped forward with his head down . . . and a second later stepped back with his head up, as a family of four charged out—the father first, with the stride of a bandleader, then an excitable boy in a Viking hat blasting enemies with a caulk gun, then a German shepherd, then an older brother wearing athletic knee-highs and a soccer jersey as long as a gown, followed at last by Mom, stuck, with her rumpled flannel shirt and sweatpants, in the wrong family in the wrong season, crying out for Bill to be careful with the tomatoes.

“Oh, my God,” she said, and stopped and stared. They had switched places: he was inside the elevator, and she was looking at him from the lobby. “I thought that was you.” She was gawking. She was tongue-tied. “You are just . . . awesome.”

“Thank you,” he said, pressing the button to hurry the door along.

“I mean it—I just love you.”

“Thanks.”

She finally came to her senses, and a hand shot up to her mouth. “Oh, I’m so embarrassed!” she said. The door began to close. She waved. “Bye!”

On his way up, he put the family out of mind and returned to thinking about her—her face, her smile.

He stepped off the elevator, and there she was, on the phone, propping the apartment door open. One strap of her denim overalls hung off her shoulder, and when she saw him she smiled happily. Then he neared, and her happiness faded. She palmed the mouthpiece. “Is something wrong?” she said.

“She’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“My wife,” he said.

She frowned, waved him in, and hurried to get off the phone.

He moved inside, out of the way of the closing door. How many times in the past had he stood like this, on the brink, with the merciless eyes of a child? He took in the Santa Claus welcome mat many months out of season, the wicker basket against the far wall spilling over with sandals and tennis shoes, the lacquered console table on which the house keys and loose change had been tossed . . . and all the many colors, and vibes, and impressions, and the hundred other ways these perfect strangers chose to live. On, astonishingly, six other occasions, when his parents met other people, and fell in love, and married, and ordered the instant integration of two families’ lives, their laundry, and their lore (and, to often disastrous effect, their DNA)—the Morgans, followed by the Dinardos and the Teahans, on his mother’s side; the Winklows, the Andersons, and that insufferable Lee clan, on his father’s—he had stood like this, appraising and rejecting, and wanting nothing more than to return to the bunk bed in his first room, where all the linens and the wall shadows had been under a single, steady proprietorship. For as soon as his parents were married and moved in, and all the painful adjustments were made, they were divorcing again and moving out.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This will just take another minute.”

“Are you alone?” he asked.

She raised a finger and looked away as she wrapped things up with customer service.

A different stranger might have fled, but, as he was easy in unfamiliar surroundings—one of the virtues of his childhood—he made himself at home and casually took in the state of the apartment. It was a mess. There were toys everywhere, puzzle pieces communing with cereal flakes under the table, and a pink knit blanket on the hardwood floor which she presently swooped down on with furious efficiency (pocketing the cell phone at last) and folded as they approached the door leading into the next room.