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“Ed,” Yusuf cries, “you look so sexy!” Ed looks up without bothering to act surprised. Won’t he resent this obvious lie when he sees himself in the mirror? He tips forward without changing his expression and the tears flow. Yusuf says with complete conviction, as though he hadn’t said it before: “E…

Yusuf gives me a little push toward the bed. We’ve been together for a year, but he is still in a hurry—it makes me laugh with excitement. He wants to be continually acknowledged, even waking me at night. Yusuf is a Moroccan muscle-builder postdoc in early modern at UC Berkeley. I don’t know what I…

“I can see where he’s coming from,” my father said. “Your mother has a thing about her. That woman casts a spell. The first time I saw her I thought my heart was going to stop. The truth is, it took me a long time to be relaxed around her. Maybe I never was. It’s hard to explain. I wanted her to be…

“I met my counselor, Riccardo,” David said. “Sometimes Richard. His mother was Italian. And this fucking guy. This fucking guy was beautiful. He was a maniac. Total drunk. Total drug addict. But that was the world he came from: drunk, drugged, full of maniacs. He told me a story where he and his br…

The last person David chatted with was my mother. It was strange for me. It was only recently, since my father left, that I had gotten into the habit of truly seeing her. What I mean is that for the first time in my life I was able to remember what my mother looked like when she wasn’t around. Befo…