My friend and I saw each other as hopeless writers, misunderstood prophets, critics of our cultural moment who rejected obvious and reductive politics. We never indulged the ordinary pursuits because we yearned to write masterpieces, timeless works infused with nihilistic joy and dissenting imaginations. We believed in our vision and our aesthetic, so when Stephen Malkmus crooned, “wait to hear my words and they’re diamond-sharp / I could open it up,” in the song “In the Mouth a Desert,” we swore those lyrics spoke to us directly, spiritually, as though Pavement embodied a celestial mode of offbeat artistic creation.

At the same time we remained detached from our lofty ambitions, skeptical of our dreams. We knew what we were, after all, which was graduate students scammed into university contracts with subpar health insurance. We lived off measly stipends and soggy pizza left over from department meetings. We taught undergrads we pitied in composition classes we hated, and we had an excessive tally of opinions that chafed our superiors. For example: We preferred grammar to metaphors. We considered Frank Ocean a better poet than Robert Hass—or Bob, as our famous professor called him—though we devoured his work, too. Like Malkmus, we thought of the sublime, of beauty, as muddled. “Heaven is a truck / it got stuck.”

We were each “an island of such great complexity,” as Malkmus sings in “Shady Lane / J vs. S,” except we took seriously its cautionary tale: “You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation / of the sequel to your life.”

I wrote stories. My friend was a poet. We were full of giddy potential, love for idiotic jokes, fuzzy notions begging to be clarified into true art, until one of us peered into the foreseeable future, or maybe the next gray day, and decided living wasn’t worth the trouble.

Unh unh unh, he wagged his finger at Julie as if they were in a sitcom. And maybe they were. After all, what was someone like her doing with him, listening in rapt attention to a middle-aged man with flaking skin on his forehead and cheeks, knowing that in fifteen minutes they would head to the bedroom, and she would have to suck his cock in that carefully calculated, enthusiastic way, bringing him to the edge several times until she ran out of to-do lists to compose in her head and had to entertain herself by sexually objectifying his despicability, which was actually easy for her; heterosexuality was inherently sickening and Julie had always dealt with the lack of power in her life by eroticizing it. If all orgasms were an act of conquer and surrender, and all life was subject to humiliation and disgust and violence, well then she might as well get off on it.

This was all a lead-up to trying to get Julie to agree to spend time with John for free. If famous Hollywood actresses were paying to see him and willing to do just about anything to fuck him, then clearly he was a sought-after man. Only the most superficial dum-dum of dum-dums focused on the glut of his gut that hung over his belt like a fanny pack, and the receding hairline, and his sunken eyes and sloping forehead and yellowing brittle nails and overall repulsive personality! Couldn’t Julie see? He was a dreamboat on the q.t.! Only a fool would decline a “free” dinner at a Michelin three-star restaurant with him.

He looked up at her with the reverence of a pilgrim. He especially liked being mothered by young girls. Bouncy flesh made him feel alive and their desire to take care of him made him feel capable of love. Capable of being loved or of loving someone? Julie wondered, even though, deep down, she didn’t trust herself to know the difference. Merv was turned on by the kind of love that Julie found immoral outside of a transaction because it was only unconditional in one direction—from a woman to a man. (That’s all marriage, Erin said when Julie started ranting about Merv’s lack of reciprocity. That’s like, being straight. That’s me with Steve. Except Steve loves me more than I love him. You should get someone like Steve—stable, dependable, and knows how to make you squirt!) Like all johns, on some level, it bothered Merv that he had to pay for it. Why didn’t Julie offer herself freely to him? After all, he was handsome, interesting, a Hollywood insider received with the cachet of an outsider. He had won several Oscars and still went to punk shows. In his twenties, he made movies she had loved as a teen. On their second meeting, she revealed to him that she only owned three VHS tapes growing up—one of them was Batman Returns, the other was on a list of “100 Worst Movies of All Time,” and the third was his second film, a philosophically complex art house–mainstream crossover film that blurred fiction and documentary in a recursive exploration of loneliness. She told him it set her imagination aflame, and he seemed genuinely pleased.

I must have gotten it from Blockbuster? Or maybe the library had a clearing-out sale? She honestly couldn’t remember, but she did remember the afternoon when she came home from school and watched the movie, finished it, and immediately rewound to the beginning and watched again. From that point on, she watched it every day. It was always something new to her. There was always a new question. It had sparked in her a desire to make something that could make someone feel the way she felt every time she watched Merv’s movie—connected to the world and all of its mysteries. It was right then and there that she decided she wanted to be . . . an artist. What kind? She didn’t know. All she knew was she wanted to create, not just watch. She wanted to make things, not just be in them. She wanted to plumb the mysteries of the world and share what she didn’t yet know with other people who loved questions that led to more questions.

Julie could endure being treated like a stupid child, but what she couldn’t tolerate was when these men got it into their heads that they were actually lovable. If she couldn’t bring herself to love extraordinary men who actually contributed to cultural history, who turned their creepy sexual obsessions with women into art, then what made these losers think she could love them? They who contributed nothing and were part of a power structure that benefited the rich and stole from the people—the goddamn people!—by which she meant her parents and the families she grew up with, not these men who paid for every aspect of their personality, who couldn’t get off unless there was an element of coercion. Julie loathed the class of rich, untalented men who felt entitled to purchase anything at all, including human connection, but what could she do? She couldn’t open jars on her own. She looked like someone who made a certain kind of man feel strong and capable, which wasn’t much of a feat: you just had to be skinny in that way that didn’t look like it came from deprivation or too much time at the gym and have big doe eyes and long lashes, a tiny but full rosebud mouth, rosy cheeks, and soft skin—that was it! It was nothing that couldn’t be bought or passed down genetically (and all things passed down “genetically” had to do with intergenerational consolidation and hoarding of power, money, and resources anyway). The more difficult thing was when a woman successfully adjusted her personality over time to remain interesting and intriguing and nonthreatening without ever revealing needs of her own.

The third time they met, she let him fuck her without a condom. Just pull out and don’t come inside me, okay? He came on her stomach and then told her all the things he couldn’t express the year before at a two-day ayahuasca ceremony in a hippie port town in the Olympic Peninsula. There had been so many middle-aged white people there, sobbing and speaking earnestly to an oily, lizardlike creature they had seen emerging out of their outstretched arms, but Merv couldn’t conjure up any kind of creature and could only sit there in an unnaturally stiff position, frozen with paranoia that maybe someone in the group recognized him and pitied him, for he was alone and hadn’t come with a partner or even a friend. Afterward, he decided to reconcile with his estranged ex-wife. They never got formally remarried, but they had a non-legally-binding commitment ceremony off the Amalfi Coast, and one month into being a changed man, he went back to his old standby, the online marketplace for “high-end escorts and modern-day courtesans.” He instantly went into a euphoric high followed by a flattening numbness—how many juicy tits and round bums could a guy see in a row? It all became as tasteless to him as caviar, literal caviar, he revealed to Julie. He yearned to taste something for the first time, to return to that childlike state of being guilelessly open to the world, before we armored ourselves against disappointment and danger. He wanted, essentially, to feel again.

Merv wasn’t afraid of Julie ruining him. He had gotten to his current level of notoriety without ever being stalked, without being dragged into any kind of public dispute. The worst thing that had ever been written about him, as far as Julie could tell, was a blog post on his love life: “Hopelessly Romantic or Hopelessly Grim?” It was badly written and crammed full of clickbaity sentences about Merv’s divorce and the steady stream of beautiful but unusual women he dated since her. It made him seem boyish and harmless, and the comments underneath the story were filled with young women thirsting not just after him but after what he represented—a kind of elusive cool that was easy to worship and project onto. Julie thought of herself as different from those women, but at her core she believed what they believed. If she could only walk into a place with Merv, be known as his, all her problems would go away. Other people’s envy was the only salve against inner turmoil. It was. It had to be.

All men, Julie realized, blamed their problems on their mothers, and all mothers have been traumatized by men and their money—lack or surplus, it didn’t matter. Everything came down to resources and domination. Sex was just one way men could hurt others. Julie understood the physical repercussions of unwanted P or F or M on or in V or A or M. She had experienced it many times—the tearing and the scarring afterward—but what really troubled her were the nonphysical repercussions, aka everything else. Whatever that was, it had the power to transform a person’s entire personality; it was robust enough to outlive generations and be passed down so many times that it became foundational, ancient. It was virtually undefeated. The amount of love that would have to be repeatedly applied against it . . . impossible. And who exactly was going to apply it? It was too much—all the women who had been primed by their traumatized mothers to be further traumatized, who had been traumatized by their mothers who had been traumatized, and so on and so on and so on. No one could go back to the source and undo all the pain. Everyone just felt bad for themselves and occasionally for the people in their lives who were directly related to why they felt bad for themselves, which was not the same thing as caring about other people.

Stick. Your. Tongue. Into. My. Dirty. Asshole. You. Slut.

She tried to remember if she had brought her little bottle of mouthwash. The three-hour taxi ride back to Brooklyn would not be a pleasant one without it.

Oh. Baby. I. Need. Your. Nasty. Little. Tongue.

Where did this belief come from, Julie wondered, that she had to please everyone, that she had to do what she was told, that she was so powerful that to deny someone what they wanted from her was to kill them? Literally, an act of murder.

He was on the verge of coming. He didn’t like coming too fast, it made him feel cheated. She paused to look up at him and the atrophied muscles of his face seemed to quiver without movement. I’m his last experience of joy, she thought.

I know you’ve been thinking about this for months.

I’m. A. Lucky. Man.

Finally, they were on the same page.