In the years they’d lived in New York, their East Side apartment had become a supper club for their less settled acquaintances, a sort of model unit for those thinking of buying into the neighborhood of matrimony. For the recently conjoined, it was a safe haven in a city that murdered marriages, and the unpaired found relief here from the strenuous formlessness of single life.

Jay McInerney defines coupling in Manhattan with only a few words. Get Brightness Falls On Amazon.