In the morning there was a funny e-mail from him. He’d looked up an article I’d written about Raymond Carver. He said he thought I was cool. I groaned, as if in pain. He knew how to get under my skin: looking me up, calling me cool. He was reading me as easily as I’d read him. Or maybe anybody and everybody would like these things; maybe I just wanted to be seen, to be read, to be pulled, to be kissed by someone new. Maybe the short-story writer was simply who was there; maybe anybody would’ve done.