He wasn’t as young as he looked, but he was younger than he thought he was. Thirty-one is young, I said. He winced like I was just being polite. He felt like a fuckup, like he should have done more by now. He’d wasted time on stupid shit. He was working overtime these days; he needed to save up twenty thousand dollars, a “nest egg,” and that would take years and years. I nodded, getting it. There was nothing on my person that revealed I’d just been paid twenty thousand dollars for one sentence about hand jobs.

[...] I lived there for six years. It’s where I became myself—or at least a self that would last me a very long time. I never permitted any lovers to move in. I needed to eat messily while reading, to sometimes not get dressed all day. To work in bed. To wake up in the middle of the night with the edge of something brand-new and reel it in until dawn, then take a mentholated bath like a champ after a big fight. Then sleep and sleep and sleep, unmolested [...]

Harris never really wants to hear more than the minimum. Which is okay. There would be a time, after this time of formality, when we would gush to each other. And obviously right now I would only be adding more “lies.” Lies in quotes because people always use the word so righteously, as if the truth is a naturally occurring diamond. But fine, call it lying. Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires. I knew many women (like my own dear Jordi) who simply couldn’t handle the feeling lying gave them—it wasn’t their bag.

I had never really decorated, not with actual money. Harris already owned our house before I met him so I just moved in, which took all of twenty minutes. His dishes and furniture and bedding were of a higher caliber than mine so I gave my few things to Goodwill, installed my books and clothes, and hung my purple toiletries bag from a hook in the bathroom. When friends came over I would immediately take them aside and explain that almost nothing in this house was mine, this wasn’t even my style. It was actually more sophisticated than my style; there was an enormous square, black wooden table with eight matching chairs around it. Where would you even buy such a thing? In time I just let people believe it was all mine (“ours,” whatever). And some of it is: our spoons, for example. We kept losing spoons until finally there were only three in rotation. I can solve this, I thought. I can single-handedly make this problem go away. And I did. Top-of-the-line spoons, too—ten of them. Sometimes when we are in the middle of an especially bad argument I think: I’ll just take my spoons and leave.

But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues—their many and sharp tongues—and give this new girl a chance.

“Sorry.” We walked in silence, watching overly large crows land on a fence. “I guess any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolvable ache,” I said, giving in to knowing more than him. “It’s a problem that you can’t fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will commit your whole life to trying. Every second that you have is somehow for it.” You could also apparently lose your calling and wind up wandering around with a guy who worked at Hertz.

But to be clear, I had not, at any age, desired a specific male body in the way I did now. While all my boyfriends and crushes had been reasonably good-looking, my attraction hovered up near their face, where they kept their talent and power. Lusting for the whole length of a person, head to toe, was what body-rooted fuckers did, Jordi, and men. Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. I suddenly understood all of classical art. The endless carved nudes, Venus in her shell, David. And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding why, thinking of sexy as one of many styles, not realizing it was the only style. You should always be emerging from a shell if possible. Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth. I lay in the center of the bed, unblinking.

“Hey,” they said. The young woman in the couple had hair down to her butt and wore a bra that was somehow a shirt. She looked me up and down not understanding that my outfit was sexy, too. We all went inside. Were we going to spend the whole night with this couple? I wanted to cry. The girl tossed her hair over her shoulder and mimed holding an invisible pool cue.

“Gonna clobber him,” she said, and the couple headed down a hallway to the right. Wonderful people, loved them. [...]

“You recognized me,” I said tightly.

“Well, sure. I saw you talking to that guy at the gas station and thought I was going to have a heart attack. Then we had the thing when I cleaned your windshield.”

“But you couldn’t see me, the glare—”

“What are you talking about? We were looking right at each other.”

I felt like I was moving in slow motion, underwater.

“So when you came into that restaurant, Fontana’s—”

“I knew you’d be there. Because you’d asked the gas station guy where to eat.”

Not just a fan, a stalker.

“You really seemed like you didn’t remember seeing me,” I said evenly. “That was a good performance.”

“But I thought we both knew. We had had the crazy moment through the windshield, and now we were playing a kind of game. You asked me so many questions. And I kind of spilled the beans when I said I worked at Hertz.”

I didn’t see how that was spilling the beans.

“Oh my god,” he said, covering his mouth, “you’re so . . . You think everyone’s job is to clean your windshield.”

I shook my head. “No—you were cleaning another car, too.”

“A Hertz car. You do understand that I don’t work at a gas station?”

I turned red. There was a little vagueness around car-related jobs.

“Then I saw your car parked at the motel. And I knew. This thing was on.”

“On?”

“Or did I read you all wrong?”

If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling.

“Why did you come back?” he said. “Why are you here?” He waited, his sharp, dark eyes on mine. “You came back for me. You’re here for me.”

“Why would I do that? That’s crazy. That would be crazy.”

He smiled a little, sympathetically. “Yep. But that’s what people do.”

We sat in silence. I wondered if I was misunderstanding. He reached across the table and touched the back of his hand to the back of mine, ever so gently. There weren’t very many ways to take that. Just one, really. [...]