She remembers her happy love affair in New York.

His raining tongue laps under her eyelids herds of woolly mammoth, bison, leaping reindeer, a tusked wild boar. Her head fills till it’s so heavy it rolls away by itself.

How would you define our relation? he asks. Technically we are lovers, she says after a while.

And nontechnically? (She cannot think of the term that would cover everything.)