AT THE FLAT, WE LEFT THE WINDOWS OPEN. AS THE LIGHT FADED, his looks took on a generic, mutable quality. Stripped of his tracksuit in the semidarkness, he could have been any one of my teenage boyfriends. I had definitely reverted to type with him, though it was a type so old, I’d almost forgotten it was mine. And the sex had a teenage flavor too, in that it was clumsy and disorganized, and I couldn’t articulate what was wrong, or how to fix it. Twenty years since I’d dumped my virginity at the edge of a field, with all the ceremony of someone fly-tipping an old fridge, and my sexual responses were still a mystery to me.

I couldn’t say what I wanted, because what I wanted resided deep down, in a place under language, a register that lost everything in translation. Words failed me here as they’d never failed me before, so I resorted to a cryptic system of shrugs and peeved silences, which he tried to decode, and could not. Away from him, I turned into a furtive, inveterate masturbator, an obsessed and needy correspondent. When we were together, I found myself scheming, trying to get out of having sex. Except there was no getting out of it. Sex was part of the compact we struck, the day he left, when he called to debrief me and said in a quavering voice: “You better love me, after all of this.” And I did love him, so took some pleasure in his, in watching his white beauty in the mirrored wardrobe, and itemizing what later, I’d try to recall. Sweat-stiffened hair. Double-textured skin. Narrow gap between his teeth, visible as his mouth fell open.