The world is full of good-looking men, but no others have wedged their way into my soul as Nick did. How to explain him, when my desire has been formed so often by the difficulty of articulating it? He represented my opposite in many ways, though we had in common our gender and abiding curiosity and a certain measure of intelligence. Having found in Bernard and others a dilute version of myself, or an ideal I had but half-achieved, I now sought what I did not have, as, perhaps, men have often sought women. I found in Nick the ease of physical connection, a complete contentment in the fact of being a sexual being, an ability to reach out to the bodily fact of another. If Bernard had been an experiment in domesticity, then Nick, I suppose, was an experiment in physicality. Nick lived for now, and did not tremble at the uncertainty of the future. I have supposed that the pain that came when Nick and I parted is not incommensurate with the pleasure our love might have brought; but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I found Nick because I needed to suffer, and knew that he would be a recipe for disaster. Perhaps his name was just another name for me to give to loss, and my grief for him just another excuse for loneliness. Perhaps the real potential for real joy would have terrified me, sent me running from the room like a crazy cat. At a certain rational level, I saw at once that Nick could not step out of himself enough to be with me, and that it was foolish and self-indulgent to imagine or hope otherwise. Perhaps it is only my own self-indulgence that keeps me from saying that dreams are always dreams, that a dream realized is in the end a dream forsaken, and that my dream of Nick was as cinematic and irrelevant as the ringing of bells at eventide. He never even heard me play the piano.

I try and try to remember what we actually did with each other and what we said: whereas the man with the skier’s tan and I had had nothing to say to each other, and had done little but eat and drink and learn each other’s bodies, Nick and I not only made love, but also talked through the days and nights, went places, saw things, made friends. In the month that we were together, I did not sleep at all. My mother, to whom I mentioned Nick only in passing, and who carefully showed neither disapprobation nor interest in meeting him, started to ask whether I was all right, because I had grown at once so manic and so worn from the very fact of him. I told her that I had never been better, and in some sense it was true: Nick almost crowded her out of my mind. Nick went with the architecture of my new apartment. He was part of the new life I was going to have in New York. My relationship to Bernard had been like a mineral crystal formed over years and based on obscure formulas so strange that only a few dedicated scientists could chart them; but my relationship to Nick was like an explosion, in which there is no logic of any kind at all. My concerts that month—I had two, both in Boston—were almost mad; I played fast, with technique I had never had before, but my interpretations, I knew, were eccentric to the point of brutality.