I looked at her—closely, closely. She resembled royalty, I tell you, she was practically the leader of the free world. Yet she lacked speech. I—on the other hand—standing in that little room, my fingertips still warm from the keyboard—I did not lack it! “But that’s just it!” I began. “I mean, we’re in college. It’s time to get serious! It’s time to get to the bottom of things. The meaning of them. I mean—”

And as I began to expound on this, I thought I saw her looking at me in a way I hadn’t seen a woman look at me in a long time. Probably she wasn’t, or she was just startled by all the words, but I was already examining the ethical implications. And I took a deep breath, a pause, because first I needed to tell her what I thought of things, and I needed to blow her mind. It wasn’t Ferdinand himself that I wanted to dissuade her from, exactly, and not in favor of me, per se, but the idea of Ferdinand, and the idea of me—it was important that I arranged these properly in her mind. Because fun—I turned the word over in my mind. Did she mean sex? Boats? Ice cream? There was right action and wrong action. There was Kierkegaard. There was fun, and then there were those ten minutes before the Grille closed, the music turned off, the lights coming up to reveal the beer spilled on the floor, the plastic cups lying there, and people’s coats had fallen off the little coat ledge in the corner, and you’d be going home alone. And how was I going to explain all this to anyone? To Lauren, for example, poor privileged Lauren for whom no amount of grooming and training would turn her into the person she actually wanted to be? To Lauren, who’d passed out on my bed?