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all-weather chairs so it’s perfectly safe for them to stay out there all winter. I really like those chairs, the way they sit so close together, looking out at the backs of all the other brownstones. Sometimes I imagine them as a happy couple, sitting so close on the balcony, happy together through the coldest of winters. Today they just seem smug.
    I walk away from them, through the archway, into the sleeping area. It’s cold; it always is at first, when the heat’s been off all day while I’m gone, but I don’t turn the heat on. I strip down to my underwear (I have a pretty big thing about clothes that have been outside in the city being inside the bed). I push the pillows that are just for show, but not ever used (two white European squares and actually two others), into the space between the bed and the wall. I pull back the quilt and the sheet, and I scoot inside and underneath as quickly as I can. I hate the cold. I hate being cold, have less of a threshold for it than I think I should, but I’ve always quite liked being under the covers in bed in a slightly-colder-than-you’ d-ideally-want-it apartment. This is the only thing I like about winter.
    Eventually I get warm, almost but not quite hot; this inevitably happens if you wait long enough. I pull the covers down from over my head, to chest level, freeing my arms. As I smooth the sheet around me like a strapless dress, it occurs to me what this might look like if anyone were watching. Sometimes when I’m bored, I like to imagine someone’s watching me. I do this also when I like someone new. I’ll say to myself, Okay starting right now, he’s watching, and then I try to imagine what he must see. If someone were watching me right now, let’s say, Elliot, for example, I might look very much like an actress on TV or in a PG-rated movie who has just had a much more entertaining afternoon than I, in reality, have had.
    I jump out of bed, reach behind the dresser and turn the heat on. A girl has to think about the future, and my future, as unappealing as it seems, does entail getting out of bed. Just not right now. Back in bed, I resituate my sheet, prop myself up on two of the three remaining pillows and reach over to the night table for the remote.
    I want to see my commercial. If I can’t see the pugs today, at the very least, I would like to see my commercial. It’s been on a lot lately. I wonder if it’s been on so much lately because of some cosmic coincidence; because some force somewhere knew the speech was coming and knew that it might help things if I started seeing the commercial more and more often. Or maybe they’d just increased their marketing budget.
    I saw it the other night, I think, right in the middle of Law & Order. My DVR is set to record Law & Order! I click over to list and there it is, right at the top: Law & Order. I hit select and play, and think, as I often do, that DVR, the cable company’s much easier-to-install version of TiVo (mostly I guess because someone comes and does it for you) is just fantastic. I listen to the first duh-duh of Law & Order. It is so similar in tone to the music from Jaws; I’m surprised I’ve never noticed this before. I hit fast forward until I see the first frame of my commercial. I hit play and turn the volume up a bit. I sit up a little straighter on my pillow.
    There is the little sad egg on the TV screen. There is a rain cloud over his head, just like there always is. I watch the sad egg sigh as he propels himself forward across the screen. A voice-over comes on and soothingly explains, “You may feel sad.” The sad egg: he hears this, he nods.
    “You may feel panicky,” the voice-over tells him. “You may feel isolated, overwhelmed, embarrassed in groups.” And the sad egg, he sighs again.
    Then the voice-over tells the sad egg all about Zoloft; he tells it that Zoloft can help. The rain cloud disappears. I lean back, a bit more relaxed into my pillow. I watch as sunshine spreads out