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— He pretends he can’t help it, she said. I’ve had the same thing happen. I was going by Bergdorf’s one day and saw a green coat in the window that I liked and I went in and bought it. Then a little while later, someplace else, I saw one that was better than the first one, I thought, so I bought th…

None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if…

— I didn’t leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been for more than a year. He said it evenly, almost as if it had happened to someone else. It was my son’s tutor, he explained. I fell in love with her.

— And you began something with her? Morrissey suggested.

— Oh, yes.

There i…

— To the end of privacy and the life of dignity, he said. He was with a dampened woman who had recently found out that her husband had been having an affair with a black woman in Cleveland, an affair that had somehow been going on for seven years. There may even have been a child.

— You can see …

Think think, talk talk, that’s you, stop it! Come on, kid, he said, touching my knee, my thigh, breast, all the outsides of love. So we lay down beside one another to make a child, with the modesty of later-in-life, which has so much history and erotic knowledge but doesn’t always use it.