This is one tiny slice of what the pandemic has taken, a bet, a glance, working from intuition, spontaneous laughter with a stranger, feeling close to someone I’ll never see again. I miss the chance to navigate other people and places in the old world, one that was less controlled and contained.

I read that one doubled-masked on BART, the train bearing me back to the city. It was a bright, gold day, late summer, and from the windows of the train the view of the white container cranes standing at attention beside the glistening bay—a view I have always loved—remained unchanged, it seemed to me.

I first read The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard in college in a fiction workshop taught by Anita Shreve, who once, with the best of intentions, lectured our class on the “banality” of the subjects we chose to write about, and who, when her most recent novel was selected by the Oprah book club shortly after our class ended, never, to my knowledge, returned to the classroom again.