That first night had the dangerous thrill of anonymity clinging to it. Much later, I learned that he and I knew many people in common—that we might, indeed, have met at a drinks party—but I was glad not to find that out during our week together. Did he kill Bernard for me, finally, once and for all? I never got to know him, and I never knew whether those nights carried for him such a burden of significance as they did for me. We never argued and never made up. I never asked anything of him but that he lie beside me and burn with desire, and he never asked more of me than that I look deep and straight into his dark blue eyes. But I felt with him what I had never known with Bernard: during that week I felt no desire at all for anyone else. I felt no anger. Bernard and I used to lie tossing separately and then drifting into sound and ordinary sleep. This man and I would hold one another all night, and when I was sure he was asleep he would suddenly stroke my hair or touch my leg or grasp me to him; and all night long we would linger uncertainly between sleep and wakefulness. Whereas in good photos Bernard can look like a model, this body had the more generous curves of too much pleasure. I would cling to that greater weight, as though bulk were an anchor to happiness. Sometimes, when he had curled around me, I would find that I was becoming unbearably cramped, or desperately hot, and I would take a steely pleasure in lying motionless for hours, until the cramping or heat had become the most hellish of tortures; it was the joy of knowing that through such wild efforts he was sleeping undisturbed behind me. Sometimes, I would find myself longing to climb out of that bed and stretch, or go to the bathroom; but I would restrain myself all night for the pleasure of remaining in unbroken contact with that noble body and those fond hands. Lying among my restraints in this way, I would feel my own happiness, the first happiness I had felt in almost a year, and I would cup my hands around it so that it would not be blown away. I knew I could hold that happiness for only a week, but in that week, I made up for months of indescribable agony. With the same restraint that kept me locked in a semi-fetal curl all night, I kept myself all day from talking about my depression or my mother; and when, one night, toward the end, I spoke about my mother, it was a Paris story I told, about the bar at the Ritz Hotel. When he had to go to Geneva, we held each other in an unrelenting embrace. No one discussed driving to the airport. We made no plans to speak on the phone. We didn’t even get each other’s full names. We said goodbye in his bed, on those pure linen sheets, rumpled with our desire, and then I let him go, and felt that I had something to hold on to for whatever was to come.