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.