Benjamin Markovits

He felt like somehow Livy had taken him in hand. They ran into others, an American who was spending the year at Wolfson in a small group of Oxford people, and Livy knew everybody and didn’t mind repeating herself. She said, “Why is everyone obsessed with Dennis Galway?” And also, “I’m obsessed with Dennis Galway.”

Her friends, her girlfriends, insisted from the very early stages that he was seeing somebody else. That he had a girl in Texas, an old girlfriend, somebody he had met on tour, whoever, that he kept coming back to. This is what all those airplane trips are about; this is why he keeps having to meet up with the contractors and the architects in person. But Dana shook her head. She genuinely didn’t think that this is what was going on. Part of her wished that he was having an affair—because it would suggest some reasonable ambition or desire on his part, to live a kind of life she could recognize, to make up for whatever was missing in their own relationship, which she could maybe address, in one way or another, after the inevitable upset and recrimination and heartbreak of finding out. Sometimes she even asked him about it, just to provoke a response. “Please,” he said. “You know me better than that.” And she thought she did.