The tutor’s name was Maeve McLanahan. She was twenty-nine—quite a bit older than Marco at the time. She’d written a book about a matriarchal Amazon tribe she’d studied for her doctorate, which had found a wide general audience owing to its graphic details of sexual customs in the primeval rain forest. From Marco’s description she was a tumultuous character, easily moved to raucous laughter, though also easily angered, with a fondness for drinking brandy during tutorials, which she conducted wearing jeans and sweaters and an old sea captain’s hat.

“She wasn’t what I thought of as my type, which was pretty conventionally feminine at that time,” Marco said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to think about a teacher in that way. That wasn’t a fantasy of mine. She was the one who initiated things.”

“She seduced you?”

He paused a moment.

“I’d say more like helped herself to me. There was nothing slow or simmering about it. She basically ordered me back to her flat one afternoon, told me she fancied me, and took me up to bed.”

He paused again, as if to let some implication sink in, and this time I felt that slight controlling pressure exerting itself against me, along with a corresponding stirring of my own defenses.

“Not that I wasn’t into it,” he continued. “I was just a bit surprised. I’d never been with a woman that frank about what she wanted. It was confusing at first because what she wanted turned out to be the opposite of what you might expect, or at least there was something deeply paradoxical about it. She wanted to be totally in control and yet at the same time she wanted the sensation of being taken by force.”

Again I felt a sharpened attentiveness bristling inside me.

“I’d never encountered that before, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. But she was a very determined teacher. She’d get furious if I overstepped some invisible mark, or equally if I understepped it. But when I got it right, the results were ­spectacular. I’ve never had sex like that with anyone, before or since. It was delirious.”

“For her, too?”

“I think so. She used to call me her Nijinsky.”

“After the horse?”

“No! The Russian dancer. I reminded her of some ballet he was in. Something about a faun.”

“Afternoon of a Faun?”

“Yeah. What is that?”

“It’s a poem by Mallarmé. It was made into a ballet with Nijinsky. I think Debussy wrote the music. I sometimes have it on my syllabus, actually—the poem.”

“What’s it about?”