Our liaison lasted only a week. He told me that he was soon to go to Geneva; I knew that by the time he returned I would be in New York. I was never able to ask him whether he made it a habit to pick up young men on the busy streets, and he never asked me whether I was in the habit of behaving in this way; it would have spoiled that week to inquire too closely into the other weeks like it that might or might not have gone before. Once or twice our conversation drifted toward politics, and I was stunned at how little we agreed on, but I didn’t mind it. He was, I was later to learn, a man of considerable influence in his country; perhaps I should have tried to steer him toward my notion of enlightenment, but to do so was then beyond my means. I was happy to speak instead of the weather, or about skiing, or to tell anecdotes of my childhood, or to hear from him about his childhood, which seemed to have unfolded in a land full of garden courtyards and fountains splashing under a crescent moon and the distant sound of children singing. I admired the Renaissance pictures on the walls, the eighteenth-­century furniture, the flowers that someone came and changed every day. He had a piano, and I played for him, sometimes before love, sometimes after; he had a sensualist’s enthusiasm for music, as though it were another physical stimulus. Our nights together held pleasures I had never dreamed before, and though my skin and body emerged damaged by the extravagances of desire, I was lost in such rapture that these ravages were only souvenirs, marks to remind me, between our meetings, of the pleasures that had gone before and the pleasures that would follow.