I suppose that losing Bernard was my own doing, and I think I did it to practice for losing my mother. I spent the month of October loving my mother, and that love took on a purity because all my rage and hatred were taken out on Bernard. I wrote him a cruel letter about abandonment, and I plotted the terrible things I would do to him. I would go into his flat and smash the set of espresso cups his grandmother had left him. I would smash his Chinese vase. I would smash his Chinese vase over his head. I would find the keys to his windows and throw them away so that he couldn’t get to his window boxes. I would mutilate his cat. I would tell him that I had AIDS. I would go in in the middle of the night and smother him with his own pillow. I wrote him a letter carefully designed to make him fall in love with me, hopelessly in love, so that I could reject him brutally. I would cut the sleeves off all his favorite shirts. I would castrate him with a straight razor.

Helen was immeasurably patient with this catalog of fantasies, but said very definitively that the most effective revenge was to be charming and blasé, so that he would regret having allowed the relationship to slide. I am not entirely persuaded that this was more effective than some of these schemes of violence would have been, but it was certainly more sensible; and, as Helen pointed out, it was something I would be unlikely to regret later on. It allowed me to keep some dignity, and was not illegal. For a while that October, Bernard phoned every day, but I did not answer my telephone and let him leave messages on my machine. I called his machine during the day, when I knew he would be out. At first, I told him what was happening, but finally I asked him not to phone me anymore.

Helen and I went to find me an apartment, largely at my mother’s suggestion. “If you’re living here with your father and me when I die,” she said, “you’ll have a hard time moving out. You’ve been living on your own for a long time. With you in this apartment full-time—we’ll end up arguing. Remember what you promised: no fights.” In fact, neither she nor my father wanted me to move out, but I think she knew that there was a great deal in my life that she would not care to see, and that it was easier, better, for me to be at some distance. And I think she knew that the illness that held her prisoner could hold the rest of us, and she did not want—at least for the moment—to trap me inside it, where she and my father were.