By 1978, our marriage was so open it no longer included me. We broke up in November. Was my reason Ed’s reason? Neither of us wanted to relinquish the bedroom, so Ed made a pallet on the floor. There we were, sharing our unconscious hours yet too angry to speak or touch, except once—as if we had just made the jolting discovery of the other’s body. Ed whispered in a rush of caresses, “It’s a body to fuck and suck.” Then we lay together, drifting into bitter thoughts, the connection becoming arbitrary that overwhelmed us minutes before. I moved out for a few months to give Ed time to organize his departure and stayed with my friend Denise. It rained constantly. Somehow rain leaked down the electrical cord, over the bare light bulb, and trickled to the floor of my cold horrid room.

Ed seemed to take for granted that we had not loved each other passionately. In the park in 1979, he told me that Skip, my replacement, was the first person he ever loved. Ed was moved to tears by his own feelings. To my expression, he replied, “You loved me that way?” I was not sure I did. With Skip, Ed began to laugh with his hand in front of his mouth like a Japanese woman. His life then was as harsh as any obsession with any jerk, and now Skip is dead and Ed is destroyed and here I am growing angry next to his corpse because he is leaving me yet again.

Ed’s cock does not look so different from the one he wore when we were together. In 1974 or so, we hitchhiked to Cortes Island in Canada. We slept in an old turkey shed one night. I went inside myself and inside Ed’s tender flesh, I sank my face into it, held him with joyful reverence, the fresh and musty scents—here’s luxury, here’s surfeit. There was straw on the floor, dead weeds poked through the cracks, and old calendars and newspapers from the Depression were pasted to the gray barn-wood planks. The mountain in the window had the same weak texture as the grain in the wood. Ed went into a trance. He luxuriated on his back, occasionally cooing, while my hand grew numb and my arm grew sore performing their seemingly hopeless task. Ed was going through a period of not wanting to come when we had sex in the morning. He liked to be held in my mouth for as long as possible. All my inner necessity drained into boredom and exasperation. I wanted to cry to heaven at the injustice, to lift my tired hands and face to the highest court: Where is my union contract, my forty-hour week, my coffee break? My tongue moved slightly or just pressed. It was like praying. He did not want to go beyond his self-control. After he finally came—an orgasm I knew almost as well as my own—and the jolts of pleasure subsided, he asked, round-eyed, “Are there still turkeys here?”

We ate in silence in the glass-walled café right on the ocean and I felt estranged from Ed, bored by him, moved by him. I thought understanding did not exist between Ed and me, but now I wonder what understanding means. By now I mean this minute. Did it mean safety, like an insurance policy that covered the unreality in me? I was looking for intensity, wonder—but as places to arrive, not points of departure. I was a dead end to myself, banished from the present, and I wanted to find in Ed something to latch on to that was outside my egotism and fear, my threadbare relation to the world—a leap through Ed into lyric time. There were many things to wish for so the world felt huge. The beach was as boring as a hallway in an office complex. I walked behind Ed at my slower pace, testing and questioning my tenderness for his body and life.

I was absolutely serious about ballet but only for a short time when I was in high school. I fell in love with ballet when I saw still photographs of dancers in Look magazine, and I decided to take classes. I loved the purity of it, the simplicity: these are the steps, this is how you do them. And I loved the discipline. The students were so young, just kids, and they would work and work and work without knowing whether they were ever going to make it. I can get very bitchy when I have grad students who seem completely relaxed about their writing, this thing they supposedly care about and hope to make a career of. I say, I’ve known twelve-year-olds who put more into a ballet class than you’ve put into this story.

As Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm and many others have suggested, what writers do when they write about other people is often unconscionable. People normally don’t want you to write about them, and if you decide you’re going to do it anyway, the important thing is not to lie about it, to yourself or anyone else. At one point I was planning to write about a relationship I’d had with someone many years before. This person had been my shrink, and we ended up together. But I found out that he’d since married and had children. Knowing this changed my mind. I couldn’t be sure how what I wrote might affect his family, and that was important to me. As Elizabeth Bishop said to Lowell after she read drafts of the poems in which he included quotes from Hardwick’s letters to him, “Art just isn’t worth that much.”

People often ask me how I could have lived all those years as I did, so precariously. Meaning putting all my hopes in a literary career, never having a job to fall back on, and not having a family. If writing didn’t work out, what kind of life would I have? I sometimes think about how my father had a gambling problem—thankfully it was not out of control, but it was real—and I wonder whether I inherited that. Because it really was a big gamble I was taking, and I suppose losing would have been terrible. Some people might call it optimism, but I’ve never been an optimistic person. I just refused to give up because I really, really wanted to write. One thing about gamblers is that they do not need to have confidence in order to keep going. They get off on thinking, I’m going to win this. And denial was also a part of it. As that shrink I was with used to say, denial is very useful. Without denial, you’d never be able to keep your head down and do the work.

There is some poet—it might have been Lowell—who said about his writing, “I want to break your heart.” There’s an arrogance in that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone! But I do have faith that, anytime I’m sharing a moment of true feeling, it will be recognizable to the reader. What interested me most about the male mentor character in The Friend—far more than, say, the moral question of whether a professor should have an affair with a grad student—was what happens to the identity and self-esteem of such a person when he loses the power to seduce younger women, and when no one is interested in reading his work anymore. All of that contributes to that character’s not wanting to live. It’s much like the case of the very beautiful woman in What Are You Going Through whose identity is so wrapped up in what she looks like that her life is completely transformed when she becomes, merely by aging, not ugly but simply ordinary-looking.

I’m interested in what loss does to people. As you go through life, you lose so much, one thing after another. Some things are taken away from you, other things you’re forced to give up. And you lose loved ones. Parents, friends, animal companions. I’ve gotten a huge amount of mail from readers about the losses they’ve experienced.

INTERVIEWER

What do you need in order to write?

NUNEZ

Just the time and the quiet. I write on my laptop at my desk, or really anywhere in the apartment but the bed. I get up at six or seven, and I work until I’m tired—on a good day that’s for four or five hours, and they go by surprisingly fast. I used to have the bad habit of saying, Oh, I couldn’t write this morning because of this or that, so I guess I won’t be writing today. Now I know that even if I can get in just one hour at whatever time of day it’s a good thing, because those hours add up. What’s important is to try to write at least a little each day, because then you’re living with the work, and even when you step away from it, it’s still part of what’s going on in your head.

INTERVIEWER

Does living alone help?

NUNEZ

Definitely. This is a hard thing to say, but it’s absolutely true—when I think of the men I’ve been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing. Even when they were supportive, it didn’t matter—too much of my energy went into the relationship, the problems, the difficulties of trying to make things work. And not all of them were supportive—sometimes there was deliberate sabotage.

BERLIN

We stay in the apartment of a Croatian couple, husband and wife, both in love with our friend M.,
a professional flautist, long-fingered and heron-legged. They’ve gone to Zagreb to witness a mother’s death.
For the duration, my husband and I walk their mutt, Streetboy, in Tempelhof Field.
My husband hates Streetboy. Streetboy retaliates. Streetboy pees on our pillows. I forgive Streetboy
without hesitation. I pity Streetboy like I pity anyone entrusted to my care. If I were virtuous,
Streetboy’s bladder would have lasted the five flights and three blocks to Tempelhof.
My husband reminisces about when he lived here a decade ago. One winter dark
so insistently that on the first day of real spring sun, he wept.
Yet he maintains he was happy. He keeps describing happiness as Streetboy lunges for a bicycle
and almost dies, which wouldn’t have been my fault, truly, however much it felt like it.
All my husband’s happiness lives in the past. And this, the afterlife?
Paradise is a club in Mitte where I’ve never danced.
The couple returns. They pay us in drugs for our trouble. It turns out it was the husband’s mother.
It turns out Streetboy’s name is Stribor.
How apt! I think. When a shared hallucination of a name is a good description of marriage.
But it means surprisingly little to set word to action. If you even manage it.
Like: Once, in Manhattan, we slid dollar-store rings onto each ­other’s fingers
as the officiant barked, Look at each other! Don’t you know what you’re doing? Okay, now say it.